On Wed, 2008-01-16 at 20:29 +0100, Florian Philipp wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> I'm currently trying to set up a personal video recorder in form of a
> headless server using mencoder and freevo.
> 
> What I would like to do is watching the movie while mencoder is realtime
> encoding it to x264/vorbis in a Matroska container.
> I already tried it using sshfs. Unfortunately, the file is only read up
> to the point where it ended when playing it started.
> I don't know if NFS would behave better.
> 
> Well, what I thought about was doing it like this:
> 
> #!/bin/bash
> mencoder [...] -o - | tee video.mkv | stream-app
> 
> So far it should work and vlc would be the natural choice for the
> streaming app. However, vlc seems unable to read from a pipe so I need
> something else.
> 
> Can anyone give me a tip? maybe I missed an option in vlc or can someone
> propose an app that can be used instead?
> 
> By the way: It's a 100MBit ethernet network without any switches or
> hubs. The machines are right next to each other.
> I hope it will be a 400 or even 500MBit net soon, but that's another
> topic ...
>  

I just want to give an update in case someone plans something like
this: 

NFS does not have the problem sshfs had - problem solved.

However, you can't navigate through files that mencoder did not yet
finish muxing. To be able to do so, you must tell mplayer to create a
new idx with -forceidx (just -idx might work as well and shouldn't harm
files that already contain an index but I haven't tested it yet).