Prison Break: Freedom for your videos

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.

9 thoughts on “Prison Break: Freedom for your videos

  1. Robert

    Very nice, keep up the good work 😀
    It’s such a shame that the video support on the n800 is so bad, I’m really looking forward to gmyth!! If one day it would be possible to watch my mythtv recordings or dvds on it without manually reencoding the files…god this would be “killer” 😀

    Reply
  2. Bernard

    REALLY Cool,

    Is gmyth already available ?
    are there any detailed (= simple) how to guides to get this working?

    Reply
  3. Omar

    Hi morpheuz.

    So in order to use it on the 770 do we just have to download the python script? I can not figure out how to install it 🙁

    Reply
  4. morpheuz

    Hi Omar,

    This python script must run on your desktop machine. It’s like a “server”. Right now we are rewriting the “core” to support more than one client and also some other features.

    After running this on your desktop, you have to use another python script (the client) that will connect to the server and start mplayer to play your videos. We are also working on a client app. This “client script” serves as a proof of concept.

    All this python scripts are in our svn under the directory gmyth-stream. The client script is inside gmyth-stream/test. It’s not “that” good but works.

    Please, stay in touch because very soon we’ll have more news about this and will also provide deb packages and other stuff to make this easier.
    Thanks for your interest and best regards

    Reply
  5. Omar

    Ok, I’ll stay tuned, anyway I think that when it’ll be working, lots of users on ITT will talk of it and I browse over ITT forums every day 🙂

    Bye, and thanks for your efforts so far

    Reply
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