[Ancillius]

Hello Community,

i am a student from germany and i am a little bit puzzled ATM. I just got a new Pi (Rev.2) from Britain and installed Openelec with xbmc.
As Fallbacks Raspbian and RaspBMC are also available in Multi-Boot.
After installing and configuring i have access to my network smb shares, the internet of course and live-TV PVR-Plugin for VU+ to my Enigma2 (VU+Duo).
Since I bought a MPG2 license SD-TV also runs fine (HD-TV is a bit stuttering sometimes, when EPG is loaded or similar things happen... so i tend to SD, because I dont want to disable those feats yet).

This is the story so far. But now comes the difficult part...

I got VDSL 50 with 50mbit down and 10up. Sadly this is not enough to stream Live-TV directly from VU+ to "the Internet".
As far I can solve that very unpleasently by streaming the MPEG2 Stream from the VU+ to another PC, compressing it there (VLC) and sending it to my mobile phone (e.g.). This has many disadvantages, is difficult and the pc has to keep running all the time.

Now the idea is, to use the little Pi for this job. Is there a way? I have seen ffmpeg as plugin for XMBC in the OpenElec repos. So compressing should be possible?

Could you please guide me in some direction, or even tell me that it is possible/impossible to achieve my goals?

Thanks in advance,
Anci

[.:B:.]

There's no way the Pi is powerful enough for this. The GPU is powerful enough to do 1080p decoding, but that's it, as you noticed yourself when it comes to interface responsiveness. The CPU itself is very weak compared to budget x86 models even.

Don't forget this is a sub 50 € piece of hardware.

[Ancillius]

Thats sad. I was quite pleased by the power that little one supplied. In facto i do not have any feeling on how much power is needed to reencode mpg2 to mpeg4 or similar.
In my server case a display output would not be needed. But i take your post the way that reencoding the stream alone would be to much for my new little friend?

[.:B:.]

You can always give it a shot of course. I never tried, the XBMC UI was pretty snappy on my Pi, but you can feel the CPU has no headroom. Even running updates (had Debian on it for a bit as well) took ages.

[popcornmix]

There's no way the Pi is powerful enough for this. The GPU is powerful enough to do 1080p decoding, but that's it, as you noticed yourself when it comes to interface responsiveness. The CPU itself is very weak compared to budget x86 models even.

While the CPU is weak, transcoding can be mostly handled by GPU which can encode H.264 efficiently.
In theory it could be possible using something like:
http://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewto...70&t=25022

ffmpeg wouldn't make use of the GPU and would be far too slow.

However there is lot of work needed to take a command line tool that can transcode in real time, to integrating it into xbmc or some other web based front end.

So, not impossible, but no out of the box solution. Personally I wouldn't involve xbmc in this. A standalone Pi that takes in MPEG-2 and transcodes to a lower bit rate H.264 which is streamed from a web server would be feasible, but would involve a fair amount of work.

[Ancillius]

Xbmc was just a fast idea because of the pvr Plugin that connects to my VU+. But of course the STB providers web interface which is also utilized by the xbmc Plugin. Thank you for all your input!