Our upcoming vacation has got me thinking it might be nice to be able to take our TV viewing with us. The kids watch their PBS shows daily and might miss them. There are also a few city meetings I’d like to keep up with while we’re gone. This has led me to see what it would take to make our MythTV server act like a Slingbox, so we can watch TV remotely.
Myth isn’t set up to do this out of the box, though. It requires a new module to the MythWeb setup called MythStreamTV. MythStreamTV provides an interface for a VLC server process, which then launches in the background and streams the captured MythTV content over it.
The problem is that the ffmpeg binary available in Ubuntu (and other Linux distros) does not include the proprietary, patent-encumbered mp3 codec. Another problem is that the VLC binary that comes with Ubuntu does not know how to speak to the Myth backend. Thus both must be compiled with the appropriate options to get them to work.
I’m finding it slow going at this point. I did get VLC to stream a recorded program, though without mp3 support it was like watching a silent film. Should I find the magic combination of options I’ll post them here to make it easier for others.
For users coming from a web search engine, Medibuntu is a useful repository in this situation for ffmpeg at least.
Sweet. Thanks for dropping by, Dan!
Are you using Mythbuntu? I was able to get the flash client on the web page to work without too many problems and I haven’t recompiled ffmpeg (although I remember doing that before I started using Mythbuntu).
Yes, but I distinctly need to transcode the video for a slow link. The out-of-the-box MythWeb does stream the files but does not compress them any. That’s why I’m working to get MythStreamTV/vlc going.
Ah, that makes more sense. Good luck! I’ll be interested to hear how things turn out.