[mythtv-users] Taking MythTV on the road; neither SlingBox nor transcoding is ideal

[Yeechang Lee]

Ben Dash <ben_dash at yahoo.com> says:
> I guess you missed my huge post about how I set up
> MythStreamTV yesterday.

Embarrassingly, I did; remember seeing the subject line, but as with
seemingly half of MythTVland, confused mythstreamtv with mythstream.

I followed your directions (adapting along the way to my ATrpms-based
setup) and got as far as the HTML command page with the mms and http
links for the selected recording. Unfortunately, I ran into a couple
of issue that have stumped me for the time being:

* mythstreamtv/mythstreamtv.sh doesn't like spaces in recordings'
  filenames, and I long ago set up mythrename.pl to automatically
  rename all my recordings to human-readable format. When I try to run
  the mythstreamtv.sh command line manully, no amount of using quotes
  (both single and double) or backslashes in front of spaces helps;
  vlc thinks each chunk of the recording filename is a separate file.
* When I try running mythstreamtv.sh manually as mentioned earlier
  with a no-space filename, I get inconsistent results from vlc. Quite
  often, I get memory corruption (!) error messages. Although I
  haven't lately run memtest86, since my MythTV frontend/backend has
  otherwise proven itself to be pretty rock solid hardwarewise, I
  presume that the issue is that I need to manually compile ffmpeg
  and/or vlc as opposed to relying on the ATrpms packages of same.

That said, I've had some success in running vlc from the GUI to
provide the streaming and using vlc on my MacBook to play said
streaming, so there's a fair chance that even if I can't get
mythstreamtv to work I can replicate its services manually.

Given that the mythstreamtv-vlc combination proves that transcoding
down to a bandwidth-friendly bitrate and resolution in real time is
realistic, I hope (would be surprised if not so) that MythTV will
sooner or later integrate mythstreamtv-like fuctionality into the core
source code. In an ideal world, mythfrontend would be able to request
mythbackend to send a video feed customized with a user-specified
bitrate and resolution, as opposed to mythfrontend doing all the work
in terms of scaling the raw video down (or up).

-- 
Yeechang Lee <ylee at pobox.com> | +1 650 776 7763 | San Francisco CA US