webStreamer - an integrated Web streaming solution

[gEd]

That's a great game plan sgilani. So, "a simple stream button from manage recordings AND videos tabs" and a config page to set up bitrates, transcoding options and choice of players etc.

This will be soo cool!

[djtaylor]

David as for your setup, I'm not surprised you're having trouble if you've got three tuners going while you're trying to stream.. you're asking quite a bit out of that PC

Well yes and no, it's DVB-T so there's no encoding going on during capture, just background saving of the MPG broadcast stream, it's the comskip, videoredo and mencoder transcode that kill it even though they're all running at low priority

What was frustrating is that when it was quiet, I tried the streamer again and still no joy. Looking at the debug window in VLC, it kept giving messages which to me indicated it was failing to buffer yet I even tried manually running VLC on the server with everything at the smallest setting and nothing worked. It's not a bandwidth issue as i'm presently downloading the avi @ 45KBytes/s so you'd think i'd get a stream going at MPV4 @ 64 and MP4A @ 16!

I'll have to investigate that more but clearly that's not your issue. I look forward to the onward development of this solution.

David.

[mzup]

I just tried to download this and it says the zip file is corrupt. Any reason why?

[jksmurf]

Yup. Blame Microsoft. For some reason, some folks using IE (me included) simply cannot download the file and NOT have it say corrupt on opening. (A search on corrupt zip will confirm this).

Suggest you try firefox or some other download manager which intercepts the file (eg Getright or Freshdown (http://www.freshdevices.com/freshdown.html) (free for personal use) or this one http://www.freedownloadmanager.org/ ...

k.

[sgilani]

wow I didn't know about the IE issue.. sounds nasty. I'll try to put a version on the web as well in case the attachment doesn't work for folks.

David, keep me posted on what you find about your setup.. just curious, what are your system specs? Weird things can happen.. for instance, I had the quartz.dll problem like a lot of people, but for me when I used the fix, it totally killed system performance and DirectShow started acting strangely (channel changes took 15 seconds).. so you just never know. Hopefully we can find a fix that'll work out.

[jksmurf]

wow I didn't know about the IE issue.. sounds nasty.

Couple examples..

http://forums.nextpvr.com/showthread.php...t+download
http://forums.nextpvr.com/showthread.php...t+download

k.

[djtaylor]

wow I didn't know about the IE issue.. sounds nasty. I'll try to put a version on the web as well in case the attachment doesn't work for folks.

I find that some of the files here claim to be .zip but when upzipped using the MS folder thing, end up with a content with no extension, add .rar to the now unzipped file and then they unrar fine. Don't know if that's the same problem?

David, keep me posted on what you find about your setup.. just curious, what are your system specs? Weird things can happen.. for instance, I had

Spec is fine for the job in hand, Athlon XP 2600+ with a gig of RAM and 0.75TB of disk space although i'm getting a little short

I was clearly having a brain fart last night as this morning I solved a completely different problem that was bothering me last night to do with ftp but for an IT guy, I wasn't on form. On the forum elsewhere I mentioned that I was away from home... Well, numpty here totally wasn't factoring in the traffic to run RDP protocol to manage my PVR while experimenting with streaming! Dope.

Like I have said though, I would like to see granular settings for video/audio bitrates though as the 512 jump is too high for my connection to be reliable but I can do better than 256 but you've got this in hand I know so no biggie.

David.

[normanr]

If you can get that to work, you're a smidgeon away from streaming live TV, all you'd have to do is start the recording on the chosen channel and stream the file in the same way.

The idea is good, but there's nothing in the GB-PVR API that currently allows this

[jksmurf]

I find that some of the files here claim to be .zip but when unzipped using the MS folder thing, end up with a content with no extension, add .rar to the now unzipped file and then they unrar fine. Don't know if that's the same problem?

[EDIT]

Hmm, they ALL download as a .zip file (with that extension), they just won't open (with MS's built in zip-opener) ... (I get the "The compressed (zipped) Folder is invalid or corrupted" message), even if I change the extension of the downloaded file to .rar

BUT ... IF I download the zip file, THEN open the downloaded .zip file with a program like WinRAR (http://www.rarlab.com/download.htm (Trial)) and then RENAME the extracted file to a ZIP file, I can THEN use MS's built in zip-opener and see all the correct files in THAT zip file (like a two-step process) .... Wierd.

(I tried a couple of other free progs, SimplyZIP didn't work like WinRAR, nor did FreeZIP, but Win-GZ works exactly like WinRAR, i.e. a 2-step process (you need to give the file WinGZ extracts a .zip extension, then open that again). The freeware 7-Zip ALSO works, but extracts a rather nondescript file called "Content", which you then need to rename to a .zip extension and extract the ACTUAL files. Hopefully this will help someone.
k.

[djtaylor]

The idea is good, but there's nothing in the GB-PVR API that currently allows this

Well, almost, what's the difference between say having a cut down web list of what is effectively on now, then just choosing to watch one of the "what's on now" programmes, which then initiates the recording, web streamer then picks up the recording and streams it. The only bit that is being added here is the immediate record followed by stream.

If you in fact remove the title of the programme as this is irrelevant if all you wanted to do was say launch a stream of BBC 1 then it's the same as the above but with the programme info not displayed. So you could just display big buttons to WATCH NOW and the channel list. The name of the actual show at the time would be irrelevant to the user in this context.

David.