[mythtv-users] HLS Without Transcoding?

[Chris Pinkham]

* On Thu May 17, 2012 at 09:04:06AM +0100, Jack wrote:
> Ahh, OK as this appeared to be the simplest way of implementing it and
> the use-case (to me) was obvious, I had wrongly assumed that it would
> have more or less been the first thing implemented. Chris is clearly
> targeting a different class of device to me and I have an aversion to
> fruit ;)

The fruit is just the easiest thing to test with.  I've been testing
the HLS code with several non-fruit clients.  A couple nights ago,
I was playing back a video from MythTV on my Roku over HLS.  I started
with a modified copy of MythRokuPlayer and a set of hand-crafted .qsp
files served up by mythbackend's internal webserver, but have now
partially completed a set of .qsp files that serve up the XML necessary
to watch MythTV recordings and videos on the Roku via HLS.

The Roku can play .mp4 directly as well as HLS spec .ts files with h264
video  and AAC audio.  I'd have to look into it, but there could be
a benefit in converting a .mp4 or other file to a segmented .ts to
serve it up via the HLS code.  That functionality would be a bit more
complex than most of the other thigns on my HLS TODO list though due
to having to handle getting the uncompressed video and audio and dealing
with writing them out.  Currently the 'player' code used in mythtranscode
is the same code used by the normal player in MythTV, so it is designed
to hand out uncompressed video and audio (well, compressed audio is
supported for the ancient lossless nuv -> nuv mode).

> > On the other hand the audience for such a feature is probably pretty small so as usual in open source we await your patch ;)
> Compared to the tablet market, currently yes. Though as more and more
> TVs become 'smart' and people upgrade, I would suggest the potential
> audience is much larger. I may just go and get my hands dirty - been a
> long time since I did anything non-trivial in C :)

As TV's become smarter, shouldn't they be able to handle the input file
directly rather than having to convert into HLS segmented .ts? :)

--
Chris