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matbor
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After reading a little bit around on the forums/google and playing with the build on other hardware, I have came to the following conclusion,
that XBMC ios PVR build on the current APTV2 hardware won't be able to play mpeg2 HD live streams?
Am i correct in saying this, or have i missed something.
Matt.
PS. pls move this post if i have posted it in the wrong thread...
4x ATV2's (v4.3) XBMC Frodo12.2. Raspberry Pi running MYSQL 5.5.31-0+wheezy1. NAS is a Drobo FS
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I didn't realize the slingbox does that, it looks nice but $300 is a lot just to get live tv onto the apple tv.
VLC/ffmpeg can do live transcoding. I was playing around with using cvlc to do it last night with some success (streaming to another VLC, haven't connected it with xbmc yet). I was able to live transcode the video to h264 but ran into some audio codec issues I haven't sorted out yet.
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I've been on this quest lately myself.
I'd be interested in hearing from folks who are happy with the Slingbox. It's my understanding that it takes component in as well, so you'd need a TiVo HD or cable company box, or satellite receiver for that.
Lately I've been experimenting with WMC7, and just last night I placed an order for an HDHomeRun Prime (should be delivered tomorrow). I played around with RemotePotato, which is an iPhone/iPad app which lets you control WMC7 (e.g., look at the guide and set up a recording), as well as playback the .wtv recordings. It does that via a server app that runs on your desktop and transcodes the video. It's a very comprehensive app and I hope the developer continues work on it (there was no free version, so I paid $6.99 for it), but in it's current state it's got way too many flaws:
1) Can't play live TV.
2) Bugs, including not seeing the contents in my "Recorded TV" folder at one point.
3) Transcoding PQ is arguably acceptable on my iPhone, but it's piss-poor once you blow it up to a larger screen (like a TV).
My most recent experiments involve using MC-TVConverter which will keep watch over the "Recorded TV" folder and, once a show has completed recording, convert it using Handbrake to an MP4 file. This allows for very high quality conversions. I've been using the Handbrake "AppleTV 2" profile, which downscales it to a 720p file which still looks excellent, and can be played on a stock iPhone 4, iPad, or Apple TV2.
Issues:
1) The app currently waits for the .wtv recording to "finish" before it will begin any conversion. The developer is open to relaxing this restriction, but keep in mind that in order for this to work well, you would need to tweak the Handbrake conversion profile so that it doesn't perform the conversion faster than realtime.
2) XBMC refuses to play a "conversion-still-in-progress" .mp4 file. So you'd need that to finish as well. I'd be interested in hearing from some of the experts here as to whether there's a way to do that.
So, with these limitations, if you're recording a 30 minute show, you've got to wait for the show to finish, then wait probably another 20 minutes or more (depending on how powerful a desktop CPU you have) for it to convert the file to MP4.
Ideally, Microsoft or TiVo would let you choose MP4 as the default filetype to record the shows in right off the bat, but I'm not holding out any hope for that. So, for now, I'm thinking of using the WMC7 desktop and XBox 360 extenders for rooms that need live TV, and hopefully Apple TV 2's for the rooms that can get by with pre-recorded content (which they'll get using the MC-TVConverter approach mentioned above).
Note: If you have a TiVo HD, there's an app called kmttg which should provide similar functionality, but you'll have the added time-consuming step of needing to first copy the shows off of the TiVo and onto the desktop PC, and the TiVo HD does not have a gigabit ethernet port, so that step could take a while, all by itself. The TiVo Premiere has a gigabit port, but it's my understanding that the Premier may have a stricter DRM method, but hopefully that only comes into play with copy-once/copy-never flagged content, which I suspect that MC-TVConverter couldn't handle, either.
or if the pvr software would just downscale it.
Hauppauge makes boxes that encode h264 on the fly but they only have component in. I need them to pair up an H264 encoder and an ATSC receiver!!
