[mythtv-users] Wireless networking. Is is fast enough to with a remote frontend?

[Doug Scoular]

Hi,   
    This might be kinda off-topic since the solution doesn't
    involve mythtv...

Bill Munson wrote:
 > Does anyone have any experience with running a remote frontend on a 
wireless
 > network?

    I've had pretty good results using vlc (http://videolan.org) to
    stream over my crappy 802.11b wireless network. While
    802.11b is rated at 11Mbps I only ever seem to manage
    a sustained rate of about 1.5Mbps. vlc is available for
    many platforms including windoze and Linux.

    I use the following command on any box with content to
    start streaming:

vlc /mnt/store/8004_20041023193300_20041023202500.nuv \
   --sout=#transcode{vcodec=mp4v,vb=1024,scale=1,acodec=mpga, \
   ab=128,channels=1}:duplicate{dst=std{access=rtp, \
   mux=ts,url=192.168.200.4:1234}}

    Where 192.168.200.4 is the IP address of the target machine
    you are going to be viewing the content on. (you may have
    to strip out the ' \' above as I just put them in to stop my mail
    client wrapping). The first argument is the content you want
    to stream... vlc understands just about any format, I've streamed
    mpeg-2, mpeg-4 etc without any problems.

    On the client machine you merely launch vlc and tell it to
    open a network stream on port 1234 (it's default), you don't
    need to give an IP address. The content should just start
    playing (assuming the server is playing too).

    What the above is actually doing is re-encoding and transcoding
    your video and audio. Video will be sent at around 1024Kbps
    using an mpeg-4 codec. Audio will be sent as a single channel
    of 128Kbps mpeg audio (if you want stereo replace the
    channels=1 with channels=2). Note that your CPU must
    be grunty enough to handle this in real-time (mines a 2.4GHz
    PIV). Newer versions of VLC have a wizard to help you
    set up streams too.

    The only annoyance with this is that the VLC gui on the
    content server lets you stop, start, pause, rewind and
    fastforward the stream whereas the VLC gui on the
    client doesn't let you do much other than stop or adjust
    the volume. You can solve this by using X windows to
    export the VLC gui on the content server to the client.

    In a perfect world mythbackend would use the videolan
    library to stream to mythfrontends at user-specified
    bitrates using user-specified codecs... I don't see
    this happening though... sigh... oh! and uPnP or zerconf
    would be a way of dynamically locating streamable
    content across all machines... just dreaming.

    Cheers,

    Doug