[mythtv-users] MythTV Transcode Proxy

[Chase Douglas]

On Feb 16, 2009, at 5:08 PM, Eric Sharkey wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 15, 2009 at 12:18 PM, Chase Douglas
> <chasedouglas.lists at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Finally, and this is
>> most interesting to me, the frontend can request the stream to be  
>> transcoded
>> on the fly to a format of the frontend's choosing.
>
> I've been thinking about something like this for a while now with
> respect to the mvpmc project (http://mvpmc.sourceforge.net).  They
> support on-the-fly transcoding through vlc, but it doesn't really work
> very well for mythtv recordings.

In fact, I have been also been using libcmyth from the mvpmc project  
for my iPhone frontend. Shortly, I'll put my changes up on my git repo  
so others may be able to use them.

> It would also be really nice in a house with some HD and some SD
> frontends in different rooms to be able to transcode an HD recording
> into SD for playback on a low-end frontend system.
>
> Ideally, I'd think this would be something that could be integrated
> into the backend/frontend protocol itself, rather than being a
> separate piece.

There are a few reasons why I did not add this to mythbackend (it is  
actually integrated into the protocol, there's no way around that):

1. Time taken in integrating into mythtv (I don't know my way around  
it personally), time taken to get it merged into trunk, and time taken  
to wait for trunk to become the next stable release.
2. Mythtv is really good for a secure network. Exposing any part of it  
to an insecure network may be better suited to an external "piggy  
back" solution. This is just like tunneling unsecure programs over ssh.
3. When you have multiple slave backends, the master backend would  
then need to start streaming slave backend recordings on their behalf.  
This is possible of course, but doesn't seem the most elegant in the  
mythtv ecosystem.
4. Mythtv incorporates a certain revision of ffmpeg libraries at any  
given time for all transcoding. Some users may want to transcode using  
vlc, ffmpeg binaries, or mencoder instead due to codec/format support  
or other issues.

However, mythfrontend could be modified to support the proxy. I don't  
really have an interest in doing it if people aren't interested/won't  
merge into trunk though.