Slashdot Mirror

You can stream from your computer.

But will it stream x264 and/or xvid from the computer? That's the big question for me. The original AppleTV didn't, only Quicktime and MP4 IIRC.

Transcoding is your friend. Streaming transcoding is your close friend.

Disclaimer: I've never tried either program, I just did a quick google search. Or maybe TVersity or Orb will support the AppleTV.

If you're not afraid of the commandline, you might give transcode a try. Although the full program will transcode your material into lower-grade re-encoded crap, the separate helper utilities will do exactly what you (well, what I) want.

tccat -i /dev/dvd : produces an unencrypted stream matching the data on the DVD (on stdout)
tcdemux -A [ids] : "filters" the stream so that only the given stream IDs will be in the output file (0x80=first audio stream, 0xE0=file video stream)
tcextract : extracts the contents of (multiple) streams (similar to tcdemux, but without the PS headers)

To go further, you can use tcscan do determine which stream IDs are present and what content they have, and with the utilities subtitle2pgm and pgm2txt you can convert VOB-based subtitles into .srt-based subtitles.

Transcode Wiki

transocde uses separate processes for everything.

Disclaimer: I've never worked with video-out hardware in any sort of broadcasting environment.

In playing around with various video sources, I've come across a couple of very good, high quality pieces of software that are able to transcode video from almost any source. If you do not need client-side playback and just want to pipe re-coded a/v streams to a tv-out device, consider using transcode:

http://www.transcoding.org/cgi-bin/transcode

I've never heard of SDI, but transcode's documentation states that it supports yuv4mpeg output. Transcode is really an excellent piece of software and should fill your need quite nicely.

You might also consider mplayer, as it explicitly supports yuv4mpeg output as well. You can use mencoder (a part of mplayer) to transcode video in the same way that you would use transcode.

http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/news.html

As for the automatic scheduling of content to be played.. cron would do the job if your needs are simple. If, however, you need to insert content in the middle of a video during playback (read: a commercial) it will probably be insufficient. I'd suggest preprocessing the video for the next day each night. You'd need a list of timestamps where it is reasonable to stop playback of video content and then split out each video, writing yuv output to a (large) storage device.

You'd then be left with a day's worth of preprocessed video in yuv format that can be fed directly to your digital broadcast hardware in real-time. I'd imagine then that you could just feed the video directly into your output device using something like 'cat `cat video-sources.list` > /dev/video-out'.

http://javimoya.com/blog/youtube_en.php

The web URL may be misleading by being written as "youtube_en.php", but you can change the source bias to any of perhaps 30 different proprietary media accessories, including YouTube and GoogleVideo. The media format to download is nothing more than what the author pre-programmed to detect what is available on that website. Most Google Videos I download are available in WMV, MPEG4, and FLV. It seems some I've downloaded only let me use the default FLV. From what I've downloaded on YouTube, I have yet to find a format other than FLV for some reason.

Of'course, once the file is complete it can be converted to a more needful format than FLV by using Transcode with a good front-end or perhaps MediaCoder.

Anyone have anything better?

Don't underestimate the power of the command line. Aside from allowing powerful (and not terribly difficult) scripting, and allowing one to run an application over a stupid ssh session, and allowing one to run a GUI-free server, it also lets people develop backends completely separate from the server itself. See transcode (http://www.transcoding.org/) for an example.

I don't see how forking is a problem. You don't seriously expect the ubergeek to run the same distro as her grandfather, do you? I *do* agree that things like filesystem stability are major selling points. However, I don't think that Seth Nickell would be hacking filesystem drivers if he weren't enabling stunning X effects.

--grendel drago

Of course, converting a PAL .avi into an NTSC .mpg in (S)VCD format took time as well as some playing around with transcode. I'd have paid a buck or two per episode to be able to just download an iso I could burn directly to disk.