[mythtv-users] What's the place-shifting state-of-the-art?

[Andre Newman]

On 24 Jun 2015, at 15:01, Josh Rosenberg <mythtv at desh.info> wrote:

> Hi, all! I've recently gotten more interested in place-shifting,
> ideally with on-the-fly transcoding to accommodate typical home
> internet bandwidth in the US, and I'm wondering what you might be
> using. My use case would mainly to be to watch sports from my phone or
> from my work computer. (For anything that's not sports, it's easy
> enough to plan ahead and transcode and download the video file before
> I'm ready to watch.) I've considered the following things:
> 
> * MythWeb ASX streaming (but it doesn't transcode and doesn't seem to
> be able to play my files previously transcoded to MP4/H.264)
> 
> * MythTV Android client (but I can't seem to get HLS working right;
> even if I do get it working, I think it's hard to seek with HLS and
> therefore it will never be great for currently-recording programs like
> sports; and it's Android only)
> 
> * Using Kodi as a frontend and streaming from there using a setup like
> the one described at
> https://thepcspy.com/read/remote-streaming-access-xbmc-kodi/ (but I
> haven't been able to get it to work so far; needing a whole Kodi
> installation seems like overkill; and I'm not sure this can do
> realtime transcoding)
> 
> * Firing up VLC on my backend as a transcoder and streaming server
> when I want it (but it's inelegant, requiring issuing a command line
> command remotely; and it might also not be great at seeking)
> 
> * Wiring up a Slingbox to an additional MythTV frontend (but that's
> expensive; it's probably hard to navigate MythTV menus through the
> Slingbox interface; Slingbox has become horrible adware recently; and
> really this whole option is just pretty silly...but I know it would
> work)
> 
> Any thoughts? What have you been using that's working for you? Any tips?

I’ve recently started using media browser now called emby for this sort of thing, I’ve had it installed for years but it only recently started working on Ubuntu without crashing every five minutes! It does all the stuff you describe with a web client or custom clients (IOS is missing for the moment) now it’s resolved it’s stability problems it works rather well for what it is.

It does require mono so that’s something you might not want to get into, some mono kernel interaction issue was the reason for the crashiness, now fixed with an Ubuntu kernel update a mono update and an emby update!

It has a plugin system for live tv and recordings but no MythTV plugin; yet. I guess it could be pointed at a mythlink directory, must try that.

Andre