[mythtv] Live transcode while recording

Rob Smith kormoc at gmail.com
Mon Dec 1 22:18:56 UTC 2008


On Mon, Dec 1, 2008 at 11:24 AM, Chase Douglas
<chasedouglas.lists at gmail.com> wrote:
> Now, you can always transcode your recordings to h264 that the iPhone
> can play back, and the iPhone frontend could play those back using the
> hw decoder, but you'll forgo niceties like commercial skipping. I
> imagine that the frontend will detect if it can play the recording
> using the built-in player and do so, and otherwise fall back to sw
> decoding with commercial skipping. In essence, you are deciding at
> transcode time how you want the iPhone to play back the recording.

The real point is h264/mpeg4 isn't a real stream-able format. To most
end-users, streaming just means playing the video from somewhere
without downloading the entire video first. Pre-transcoding achieves
this. To the end-user, it doesn't matter if it's pre-recorded or not,
as long as it's 'instant on' when they want to view it remotely, and
the only formats the iphone can play back natively can't do this.

It's actually not always located at the end of the file, it can be at
the start (with utilities like qt-faststart), but it requires the full
video before it can be generated.

Personally, live-tv is worthless to me, so I don't mind being limited
to pre-recorded shows, especially on a remote device. Streaming
directly from mythweb, especially with the new interface is much nicer
imho then attempting a full front end.


More information about the mythtv-dev mailing list