[mythtv-users] mythtv streaming for android

Andy Wettstein ajw1980 at gmail.com
Wed Jan 5 16:18:29 UTC 2011


Hello,

I was looking at streaming mythtv recordings and other movies to an
android device (samsung galaxy s) and found some software for android
called VLC stream and convert that appears to work pretty well:
http://traveldevel.com/vlc-stream-convert

I don't think I've seen it mentioned on the list before. It allows
realtime transcoding of content via VLC to an android device. 

It seemed to work fine for me using WIFI on the local network. For
video, RTSP must be used, so that may make streaming over the internet a
little troublesome (probably VPN is the best bet).

VLC must have the http interface enabled and access must be allowed to
the hosts you need. There is documentation about that on the
traveldevel.com site.
VLC must also be compiled with x264 support. Some distributions leave 
that disabled due to IP issues. To check you can run this:

$ vlc -l|grep 264
VLC media player 1.1.5 The Luggage (revision exported)
  packetizer_h264        H.264 video packetizer
  h264                   H264 video demuxer
  x264                   H.264/MPEG4 AVC encoder (x264)

The last line for the x264 encoder must be present.

I'll attach the script I'm using to start vlc. It is basically the same
as shown on the traveldevel.com site, but with bash quoting and
configured to use a locally compiled version of vlc. The encoding
options for vlc are all in that script.

I didn't look into it too much, but when I started with cvlc I couldn't
browse any files on the android device, so if you want to run vlc
without a graphical interface there might be some options that need
adjusting.

After installing and opening the app on android it should scan your
network and find your VLC server. After that make sure to set your
playback to RTSP. It probably is also necessary to adjust the playback
size for full screen playback in Settings -> Display Sizes.

You should be able to browse for your recordings and movies. I'm not
sure how it decides where to start browsing from so you just have to
look around. You'll probably want to use mythlink.pl to link your 
recordings to sensible names. I use this:
mythlink.pl --link /var/lib/mythtv/Recordings --format '%T/%T%-%S'

I tested with both recordings and some videos and it seemed to work
fine. Seeking backward seemed to work, but not forward.

I think that covers the basics.

Andy

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