[mythtv-users] MythWeb: ASX stream or direct download (over ADSL)?

[James Miller]

Again my post will refer to a new MythTV (0.27.20140303, Gentoo) 
installation. I want to ask about scenarios for viewing recorded content 
on that installation from remote locations--remote meaning outside my 
private LAN. Think scenarios where I am traveling and staying in a motel 
in a different city, for example. My internet connection at home is 
through a cable modem, while at motels in this country (US) the standard 
connection seems to be ADSL. Of course MythWeb is installed and is 
accessible from outside the LAN.

So I've fiddled a bit with MythWeb's ASX streaming in the past but have 
not had much success--I don't recall details at the moment. Maybe it was 
an issue of getting the right application to handle an ASX stream? In any 
case, I'm trying it out again on this new installation.

I can say that, on my private LAN, it's working acceptably. I don't notice 
any lagging or jitters so far when streaming recordings. I've tried 
testing it from outside my LAN but am having trouble with that--I think 
owing to the fact that I've enabled, in Apache, authentication for non-LAN 
connections. My attempts seem to be failing owing to the fact that 
starting the stream requires re-entry of log-in credentials, and somehow 
the browser I'm using is not handling that. Before putting additional 
efforts into getting that working, though, I'd like to ask here what is 
the experience of others who have tried to do this ASX streaming under 
scenarios such as I'm describing? Has it worked acceptably? And, btw, does 
this facility involve some sort of on-the-fly re-encoding?

Finally, I'll mention that, in the past, I would run a re-encoding job on 
such programs as I might want to view from outside my LAN, and I would 
then simply download the recordings (using the "direct download" link in 
MythWeb) from the remote location and view them on my laptop. To make this 
option manageable, I would seriously downgrade the video quality such that 
the resulting file was about 1/10th the size of the original recording. I 
could download a file of that size in something like 15 minutes or so, 
even over the slowest of motel broadband connections. The video quality 
bordered on intolerable, but the sound was acceptable. In any case, if 
doing the direct download might be the preferable option to trying to do 
an ASX stream for this sort of scenario, I'd like to ask for tips on 
re-encoding the file to a similar size, but with slightly better video 
quality. I should mention in closing that downloading recordings from a 
remote connection seems to work fine on this system.

Input will be appreciated.