Good news for all the people that ever wanted to watch live-tv/DVD/etc.. on your N800: GMyth-Streamer.

At first it was an add-on for MythTV that would enable you to watch live-tv from MythTV on the device. But then, it started to grow and we had so many ideas that, right now, it can be more than just a simply add-on for MythTV, it can be a media streaming solution.

Using it you are able to stream any kind of video from your computer through the Internet or cabled/wireless network at home to your N800 or another computer.

During my tests I streamed video content from a file/DVD disc on my computer using GMyth-Streamer and Mplayer+test application on N800. Mplayer used about 26% of N800’s CPU and CPU usage on my notebook depended on the video (sometimes got 50% of the CPU – Core 2 Duo @ 2.33 GHz). To test I streamed mpeg4 videos (mpeg2 720×576 -> mpeg4 320×240) and mpeg1 videos (DVD – one episode of Prison Break and the entire “Butterfly Effect” movie – mpeg2 -> mpeg1 400×240).

GMyth-Streamer was entirely written in python and supports plugins (MEDIA plugins to handle the transcode/stream of the video and COMM plugins to handle what I call “control socket” – where you send commands to GMyth-Streamer). Right now we have fully working Mencoder media plugin (Gstreamer plugin almost there) and a VLC media plugin under development. Regarding comm plugins we have a TCP plugin (simple tcp connection) and also a XMLRPC plugin (both 100% working).

The ones of you who have already played a little bit with Mencoder knows about it’s potential and understand that we are able to encode video directly from the tv tuner and also do some nice stuff like using video/audio filters supported by Mencoder (some of them: remove logo from video, put logo on video, put subtitles, crop , flip, mirror, rotate, noise, denoise).

It’ s important to say that IMHO Mencoder+Mplayer is a better solution than gstreamer because it could encode/play any kind of videos (as well stream them) and gstreamer had problems depending on the muxer+codec you used. For example, gstreamer could not play AVI files without index for seeking and Mplayer could handle it.

Somebody can say that VLC already does all this stuff but we had more success using GMyth-Streamer to stream video to N800 than with VLC. Also notice that it’s very easy to implement your own plugin for GMyth-Streamer and it’s still easy to integrate it with MythTV/Freevo and another solutions (transcoding videos for Tivo, Slingbox ? 😉 ).

Here you can see a little demo about what I said. I put a DVD inside my notebook and through my wireless connection I streamed it to N800 and at the same time I played it on the TV (notebook’s dvi out). The TV and the device were not synchronized because they didn’t start at the same time (and it was not the idea). But audio+video on the device and on the TV were 100% synchronized.