[mythtv-users] Way out idea on watching same thing in multiplerooms

[Tortise]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Greg Oliver" <oliver.greg at gmail.com>
To: "Discussion about mythtv" <mythtv-users at mythtv.org>
Sent: Tuesday, January 05, 2010 2:26 PM
Subject: Re: [mythtv-users] Way out idea on watching same thing in multiplerooms


>Without broadcast quality hardware, there will be no synchronization..
 Period..  And even then, certain architectures must be met..  You
cannot have motherboard-x, videocard-y, nic-z and expect to accomplish
*exactly* synchronized video...  Everyone is kicking a dead horse
trying to prove how smart we are..  He simply wanted to know the best
way to watch the same stuff across frontends..  Multicast is the
obviously best and only answer to accomplish it for free.  It may not
be to atomic clock precision, but it will have to work...  I would
assume a script could easily be written to listen for IGMP events, and
play them with an external player that supports multicast..  I am not
too sure if there is something in the database that would require
updating prior, such as the IGMP group to join, etc, but it is not far
fetched and would not really require mythtv to be patched for
multicast support..


Thanks Greg, I for one appreciate your reading of it all.

I've just played a DVD multicast using the DVD player setting as

vlc file://%d 
:sout=#transcode{vcodec=h264,vb=800,scale=1,acodec=mp4a,ab=128,channels=2,samplerate=44100}:duplicate{dst=std{access=udp,mux=ts,dst=239.0.0.0:1234},dst=display} 
vlc://quit

The  vlc://quit doesn't seem to work - it seems to time out when stopping playback.

The DVD plays in a VLC window on the mythtv FE Server.  I imagine an additional switch will make it full screen.

Using a VLC client on different machine (I used XP in this case) plays the same DVD (with a small acceptable start buffering 
difference) from udp://239.0.0.0:1234.

Each new client is each going to have much the same start buffering pause, so each client will be pretty close in sync with other 
clients, however the server does not have this buffering delay so will always be a little ahead.  For me that is quite acceptable 
(I'd prefer to see discussion how to move it forwards rather than why there is a small sync issue and that is a reason to not 
progress multicasting further....)

I would test "Watch Videos" also, if I could figure out how to get a source file in to the directory to play.(!)  (I copied a .mpg 
and .ts file in however the GUI stills says there are no files...  Hmmm)

Its a shame I cannot do the same with recordings (or even "Live" TV).

Still another positive step in the desired direction suggesting the concept works - and given this is relatively generic 
functionality it may not be far off progressing further.