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

[dennis]

On 05/08/2015 03:08 PM, James Miller wrote:
> 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.
> _______________________________________________

Hi,   I have pretty good luck using asx streaming from mythweb to my 
phone over 3g/4g (vlc app).     I do encode every new recording as h264 
using ffmpeg on a nightly basis via cron.   Typically, I resize all HD 
video to 1280x720 @ 29.97p frame rate using ffmpeg.   The command I use 
is dynamically generated based on quite a few different factors,  but in 
general looks like this for most of the HD broadcast in my area:

     ffmpeg -i '1071_20150507020000.ts'  -r 29.97 -acodec ac3 -ar 48000 
-ab 160k -s 1280x720 -f mp4 -vcodec libx264 -crf 24 -threads 8  
-movflags faststart -x264opts scenecut=50 -g 100 -preset slow 
"/data/mythtv/recordings/1071_20150507020000.mp4

This typically gives me file sizes of 600-700MB for an hour of tv with 
good quality, and a bit rate that also streams nicely over 3g/4g.   When 
played on the frontend with a 65" TV,  I can notice a "slight" decrease 
in quality over the original.   No one in my family even notices it is 
compressed.

I am not using any authentication in Apache.

Hope this helps!

Dennis