Friday, 5 October 2007

Hmmm, networking multimedia

After working around (read: that's not a proper fix) some stupidness in MythTV's frontend, my DVB-T experience just got a lot better, as I can finally watch the stuff I record. That includes recording all the Match Of The Day shows (just in case), as well as the kinky Secret Diary Of A Callgirl.

After switching the Mac Mini to wired, the network is fast enough for the MythTV sources in GStreamer to stream to Totem, as well as streaming via UPNP to the PS3. The UPNP framework in MythTV doesn't export a lot of the things it could, such as a thumbnail, the length of the movie, etc.

Just like chpe, I've been getting increasingly frustrated at the Web going to Flash Video for streaming, instead of sticking to the embedded movie player. I guess that targetting one platform (Flash) as opposed to the big three (WMP, Real and Quicktime), is a boon for Web developers. And that's how EA pushes the online replays from FIFA.

And to the PS3 again, with Frank's help, I've fixed up Rhythmbox' UPNP source.

So, on the TODO list:
  • Better UPNP in Rhythmbox
  • Finishing MythTV support in Totem
  • More work on the browser plugin
Feel free to help, or send me stuff from my wishlist. It's just like writing code.
at

4 comments:

  1. Anonymous6 October 2007 at 02:33

    Perhaps you have already heard of it, but there's a project called mediatomb (http://mediatomb.cc/) It only does UPNP based media serving/streaming, but works quite lovely, and has active support of the playstation 3. And if your bothered to build it from source it has transcoding support so you can also watch non- mpeg/h.264 video stuff. And the source has some big hints that Youtube video playback will be coming soon.

    It transformed my PS3 from a "thing i play games on" To a "thing i play games on and also watch anime on and occasionally even music".

    Although since you apparently have MythTV stuff set-up you might not be needing your PS3 for that.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Bastien Nocera6 October 2007 at 13:45

    The on-the-fly transcoding in MediaTomb is very interesting, especially as the PS3 can't handle a common format like Ogg Vorbis, and DivX files from the net are only a container format and an audio codec away from being proper MPEG-4 files.

    FYI, I can't find references to transcoding on the website though, only under the planned features.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Stoffe6 October 2007 at 15:54

    While I do agree with you on the flash/embedded issue in principle, and flash movies are generally of poorer quality, at least flash movies always works if you have the non-free plugin, and the players support seeking and looping - with totem and friends it is still very much hit-and-miss and I can't remember a single time I could get a bar to seek or backtrack the movie, it's just streaming linearly.

    I do understand why (at least mostly ;-)) and I do wish to one day run a completely free desktop. But right now, it's very convenient and it actually works!

    ReplyDelete
  4. Anonymous8 October 2007 at 00:48

    @hadess, while it isn't in the current stable version, if you pull the svn one it's already in. Transcoding is basically implemented by calling user-defined commands/scripts. So the real work is being done by whatever program you want.

    I built it from source myself, and it works pretty well, although re-coding of stuff to mpeg tends to hurt the quality of the stuff, but i haven't tried changing many options. Used this guide for if your interested: http://www.deadlock.dhs.org/jin/mt-tr-howto.txt

    ReplyDelete