[wellylug] Streaming Video

[Glen Ogilvie]

That's a pretty cool thing to be doing with netcat and mplayer.

Let me know if it works now, cos I'd be keen to give that a try also. (not 
with an xbox, but...)  I've got the same sort of problem, i.e. Laptop with 
DVD drive, but small screen..  main PC, with no DVD drive, but good screen 
and speakers.  and too lazy to change screen and speakers over to laptop 
just to watch a DVD.

---
Glen

A
On Mon, 21 Feb 2005, David Antliff wrote:

>
> On Mon, 21 Feb 2005, Pete Black wrote:
>> I have my Linux-runnin' XBox ripping a DVD to a file with mencoder over the 
>> LAN, and MPlayer on my main machine will happily play the partial file. (or 
>> vice versa if I am ripping on my main machine and playing on my XBox).
>
> Hi Pete, thanks for your reply.
>
> What I tried to do last year was the following:
>
> - box A has a TV tuner card. mencoder is quite capable of realtime encoding 
> on this machine. I directed the mencoder output to /proc/self/1 (stdout) and 
> then piped this into netcat which was connected to another machine (because 
> at the time, perhaps still, mencoder will only output to a file).
>
> - on box B, I wanted to watch this (with a few seconds latency of course) so 
> I had a netcat server receiving the stream from box A and redirecting the 
> output into a file. So, over time, the proper output gradually built up on 
> box B. No problem there.
>
> The trouble was that mplayer would only read up to the length of the file at 
> the time it was initially opened. This made it impossible to follow a growing 
> file. I even performed experiments where I checked EOF condition on my own 
> 'growing' files and it seemed to be a feature of the filesystem. At that 
> point I wrote the idea off as a limitation of the operating system and looked 
> at VLC instead. This worked well for the video but I never got the audio 
> working. I suspected it was related to the funny way the TV card sent audio 
> to the line-in on the soundcard via an external cable.
>
> So, I gave up on this idea entirely, bought a really loud stereo and 
> installed an elaborate set of mirrors throughout my house in order to watch 
> Shortland Street while surfing slashdot. Some or all of this and the last 
> sentence may be false.
>
> Anyway, if mplayer is now resetting the EOF on a file somehow, then this 
> might actually work.
>
> Thanks,
> David.
>
> P.S. I too compile mplayer from source (Gentoo) - I have 'media-video/mplayer 
> ~x86' in my /etc/portage/package.keywords file).
>
>
>