[gentoo-user] Video Network Stream from Pipe

[gentoo-user] Video Network Stream from Pipe

[Florian Philipp]

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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 ...
 

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Re: [gentoo-user] Video Network Stream from Pipe

[Neil Bothwick]

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On Wed, 16 Jan 2008 20:29:35 +0100, Florian Philipp wrote:

> #!/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.

What about using a fifo, can vlc handle that?

mkfifo mystream
mencoder [...] -o - | tee video.mkv >mystream &
streamapp mystream


-- 
Neil Bothwick

Quark! Quark! Beware the quantum duck!

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Re: [gentoo-user] Video Network Stream from Pipe

[Florian Philipp]

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On Wed, 2008-01-16 at 20:43 +0000, Neil Bothwick wrote:
> On Wed, 16 Jan 2008 20:29:35 +0100, Florian Philipp wrote:
> 
> > #!/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.
> 
> What about using a fifo, can vlc handle that?
> 
> mkfifo mystream
> mencoder [...] -o - | tee video.mkv >mystream &
> streamapp mystream
> 
> 

Thanks but that was one of my first thoughts. I've tried "cat
[Matroska-file] > test.fifo & vlc test.fifo". VLC thought it was a DVD
and could not read it. I also tried telling vlc to use the mkv demuxer
with "--demux mkv" but then I've got:
"[00000254] mkv demuxer error: Not a Matroska file : DocType =  
[00000254] mkv demuxer error: cannot find KaxSegment
[00000247] main input error: no suitable demux module for
`/mkv://TYFS.mkv'"

I don't think streaming would fare any better if the streaming server
can't recognize the format, am I right?

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Re: [gentoo-user] Video Network Stream from Pipe

[Florian Philipp]

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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).

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