[mythtv-users] Wireless networking. Is is fast enough to with
a remote frontend?
Doug Scoular
dscoular at cisco.com
Wed Nov 10 02:49:57 UTC 2004
Hi,
This might be kinda off-topic since the solution doesn't
involve mythtv...
Bill Munson wrote:
> Does anyone have any experience with running a remote frontend on a
wireless
> network?
I've had pretty good results using vlc (http://videolan.org) to
stream over my crappy 802.11b wireless network. While
802.11b is rated at 11Mbps I only ever seem to manage
a sustained rate of about 1.5Mbps. vlc is available for
many platforms including windoze and Linux.
I use the following command on any box with content to
start streaming:
vlc /mnt/store/8004_20041023193300_20041023202500.nuv \
--sout=#transcode{vcodec=mp4v,vb=1024,scale=1,acodec=mpga, \
ab=128,channels=1}:duplicate{dst=std{access=rtp, \
mux=ts,url=192.168.200.4:1234}}
Where 192.168.200.4 is the IP address of the target machine
you are going to be viewing the content on. (you may have
to strip out the ' \' above as I just put them in to stop my mail
client wrapping). The first argument is the content you want
to stream... vlc understands just about any format, I've streamed
mpeg-2, mpeg-4 etc without any problems.
On the client machine you merely launch vlc and tell it to
open a network stream on port 1234 (it's default), you don't
need to give an IP address. The content should just start
playing (assuming the server is playing too).
What the above is actually doing is re-encoding and transcoding
your video and audio. Video will be sent at around 1024Kbps
using an mpeg-4 codec. Audio will be sent as a single channel
of 128Kbps mpeg audio (if you want stereo replace the
channels=1 with channels=2). Note that your CPU must
be grunty enough to handle this in real-time (mines a 2.4GHz
PIV). Newer versions of VLC have a wizard to help you
set up streams too.
The only annoyance with this is that the VLC gui on the
content server lets you stop, start, pause, rewind and
fastforward the stream whereas the VLC gui on the
client doesn't let you do much other than stop or adjust
the volume. You can solve this by using X windows to
export the VLC gui on the content server to the client.
In a perfect world mythbackend would use the videolan
library to stream to mythfrontends at user-specified
bitrates using user-specified codecs... I don't see
this happening though... sigh... oh! and uPnP or zerconf
would be a way of dynamically locating streamable
content across all machines... just dreaming.
Cheers,
Doug
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