Hello VDR community
IPTV plugin developers are proud to present a new release of the plugin. This plugin is our attempt to transform VDR into a full-blown IPTV receiver.
This version features numerous small bug fixes and enhancements and one major new feature: Support for external streaming applications. In short this means that reception capabilities are not limited only to MPEG1/2 TS. Instead you can do all sorts of wild and crazy things with IPTV limited only by external application support and transcoding performance.
For example we have successfully used VLC media player to receive and feed mp3 internet radio stream to the IPTV plugin. VDR will then receive this data and handle it as any other radio channel. Also reception of various video formats such as Windows media mms streams is working with VLC and IPTV plugin.
Head to the plugin homepage for instructions and downloads:
http://www.saunalahti.fi/~rahrenbe/vdr/iptv/
Hi,
thanks for this great new plugin! i tryed VLC to transcode on the fly some windows media streams which i want to use with your iptv plugin. it seems to work with some issues: transcoding takes about 15% of my cpu power per stream. i would like to watch 5 different streams, this would take all my cpu power which is not very handy. i tryed using the VoD feature of vlc, but there are two problems: 1. vlc uses for VoD the rtsp protocol, where iptv has currently no support for. 2. vlc does not allow transcoding a windows media stream with VoD (only with mpeg2 streams, but thats not very interesting).
Do you have any idea how to watch several streams with your plugin without transcoding all the time? i only need the transcode when i watch one of the stream channels, so VoD would be very usefull..
-- Jan Segers
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Segers,Jan J.K.T. wrote:
Hi,
thanks for this great new plugin! i tryed VLC to transcode on the fly some windows media streams which i want to use with your iptv plugin. it seems to work with some issues: transcoding takes about 15% of my cpu power per stream. i would like to watch 5 different streams, this would take all my cpu power which is not very handy. i tryed using the VoD feature of vlc, but there are two problems:
- vlc uses for VoD the rtsp protocol, where iptv has currently no
support for.
- vlc does not allow transcoding a windows media stream with VoD
(only with mpeg2 streams, but thats not very interesting).
Do you have any idea how to watch several streams with your plugin without transcoding all the time? i only need the transcode when i watch one of the stream channels, so VoD would be very usefull..
Hi.
Iptv plugin uses VLC to transcode only the stream being currently received so there really should not be any CPU power wasted on transcoding inactive streams.
In other words a simple "video on demand" system should already be in place. At least I can add multiple streams to the channel list and only the active one is being transcoded. Have you experienced different behavior?
Of course if recording then VDR will keep the stream opened and iptv plugin has to launch another instance of VLC to keep receiving two streams at the same time.
BTW. we've actually been looking into adding support for receiving rtsp streams and while it is more laborous than other protocols I think implementing it would be entirely possible. Testing is a bit hard since I'm not aware of suitable mpeg2 rtsp -stream providers. Are there any publicly available?
Antti Seppälä schrieb:
BTW. we've actually been looking into adding support for receiving rtsp streams and while it is more laborous than other protocols I think implementing it would be entirely possible.
I have an experimental version of my streamplayer plugin that allows to use RTSP streaming, based on the liblivemedia library. Though this is not fully working yet due to mysterious stream throughput issues, I think that the decision to use liblivemedia as protocol layer is a good way to go. Basically, you provide the URL, pick the wanted sub-streams, and liblivemedia delivers video and audio as separate data streams. If you're interested, I can share my work-in-progress source code. (well, not much progress lately...)
Testing is a bit hard since I'm not aware of suitable mpeg2 rtsp -stream providers. Are there any publicly available?
The vlc player with its integrated vlm server (aka. telnet interface) is a good starting point, as it provides RTSP VoD sources with the ability of play/pause and seek. I'm not sure, but I think vlm can also stream live streams. And even on-the-fly transcoding works.
Cheers,
Udo
On Sunday 28 October 2007, Udo Richter wrote:
I have an experimental version of my streamplayer plugin that allows to use RTSP streaming, based on the liblivemedia library. Though this is not fully working yet due to mysterious stream throughput issues, I think that the decision to use liblivemedia as protocol layer is a good way to go.
FWIW, not that I really know about either or about the reasoning, but there seems to be some kind of movement towards using libnemesi instead of liblivemedia (I assume this is the live555 thingy) in projects such as mplayer and ffmpeg recently. http://live.polito.it/
The vlc player with its integrated vlm server (aka. telnet interface) is a good starting point, as it provides RTSP VoD sources with the ability of play/pause and seek. I'm not sure, but I think vlm can also stream live streams. And even on-the-fly transcoding works.
i have played a bit with VLM these days. VoD works with different types of media, but transcode will only work if your input stream is mpeg2.
-- Jan Segers
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Udo Richter wrote:
I think that the decision to use liblivemedia as protocol layer is a good way to go. Basically, you provide the URL, pick the wanted sub-streams, and liblivemedia delivers video and audio as separate data streams. If you're interested, I can share my work-in-progress source code. (well, not much progress lately...)
Yes, we are interested in looking at how streamplayer would handle rtsp. Using external libraries could be a very clean way to go for iptv plugin as well.
Testing is a bit hard since I'm not aware of suitable mpeg2 rtsp -stream providers. Are there any publicly available?
The vlc player with its integrated vlm server (aka. telnet interface) is a good starting point, as it provides RTSP VoD sources with the ability of play/pause and seek. I'm not sure, but I think vlm can also stream live streams. And even on-the-fly transcoding works.
Thanks for the advice. I'll see if I can get vlc to provide rtsp streams to help in plugin development and testing.
Antti Seppälä kirjoitti:
Segers,Jan J.K.T. wrote:
Hi,
thanks for this great new plugin! i tryed VLC to transcode on the fly some windows media streams which i want to use with your iptv plugin. it seems to work with some issues: transcoding takes about 15% of my cpu power per stream. i would like to watch 5 different streams, this would take all my cpu power which is not very handy. i tryed using the VoD feature of vlc, but there are two problems:
- vlc uses for VoD the rtsp protocol, where iptv has currently no
support for.
- vlc does not allow transcoding a windows media stream with VoD
(only with mpeg2 streams, but thats not very interesting).
Do you have any idea how to watch several streams with your plugin without transcoding all the time? i only need the transcode when i watch one of the stream channels, so VoD would be very usefull..
Hi.
Iptv plugin uses VLC to transcode only the stream being currently received so there really should not be any CPU power wasted on transcoding inactive streams.
In other words a simple "video on demand" system should already be in place. At least I can add multiple streams to the channel list and only the active one is being transcoded. Have you experienced different behavior?
Of course if recording then VDR will keep the stream opened and iptv plugin has to launch another instance of VLC to keep receiving two streams at the same time.
BTW. we've actually been looking into adding support for receiving rtsp streams and while it is more laborous than other protocols I think implementing it would be entirely possible. Testing is a bit hard since I'm not aware of suitable mpeg2 rtsp -stream providers. Are there any publicly available?
Live555 Media Server @ www.live555.com is one and working, support ps and ts streams.
Iptv plugin uses VLC to transcode only the stream being currently received so there really should not be any CPU power wasted on transcoding inactive streams.
well, then i misunderstood the whole thing. i thought that the user has to make the stream ready and iptv will use it. at least thats how i understand your explaination on your website. so iptv opens vlc to transcode the stream as soon as i tune to the stream channel and stops with transcoding as soon as i leave the stream channel?
In other words a simple "video on demand" system should already be in place. At least I can add multiple streams to the channel list and only the active one is being transcoded. Have you experienced different behavior?
to be honest, i did not make that many tests. i just tryed to prepare my vdr for this new streaming possibility. maybe i should focus on reading your new README ;)
anyway, i dont need rtsp support if multiple windows media streams will work on demand. i hope i got it right.
Segers,Jan J.K.T. wrote:
so iptv opens vlc to transcode the stream as soon as i tune to the stream channel and stops with transcoding as soon as i leave the stream channel?
Yes that's the intended behavior.
to be honest, i did not make that many tests. i just tryed to prepare my vdr for this new streaming possibility. maybe i should focus on reading your new README ;)
anyway, i dont need rtsp support if multiple windows media streams will work on demand. i hope i got it right.
Please have a look at the example iptvstream.sh script provided with iptv plugin. This script can be used as a good starting point when adding vlc transcoded channels.
We'll also try to clarify the README to avoid further misunderstandings. =)
Please have a look at the example iptvstream.sh script provided with iptv plugin. This script can be used as a good starting point when adding vlc transcoded channels.
ahhh, i did not see that sample file... thanks for that hint!
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Antti Seppälä -
Esa Pekkarinen -
Segers,Jan J.K.T. -
Udo Richter -
Ville Skyttä