Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Steaming to iOs and Android from Gentoo

[Alan McKinnon]

On 21/02/2013 20:52, James wrote:
> Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon <at> gmail.com> writes:
>
>> Do you have a special need to use Plex over XBMC for the back-end?
>
> No.
>
>> I would say XBMC does everything you need. It supports profiles, which
>> give you the password protection you mentioned, and there are many
>> awesome front-end/remotes for android and i* in the markets. Just don't
>> use the so-called "official XBMC remotes", that one uses an obsolete
>> http API to XBMC, the current code base (Eden and Frodo) uses something
>> much better in json. The best remote/front-end currently for android is
>> Yatse IMNSHO
>
> All good to know.
>
>> Ditch gentoo entirely for this and use OpenElec instead (openelec.tv).
>> It's XBMC on an appliance, and all of the maintenance issue you will
>> experience (like broken libav or ffmpeg....) just ImmediatelyGoAway(tm)
>
> This looks promising. I need to drill deeper into the Arm chips (SOC)
> that support OpenElec, Geexbox and such application.
>
> What about geexbox? How does it stack up in a comparision to what
> you have tried? I just stumbled across it. In fact, is there
> a good review somewhere that talks about many of these sort of HTPC
> systems in a feature comparison?
>
>
>> minidlna (in the tree) is a nice minimal media server, you get none of
>> the xbmc awesomeness (like fanart and libraries and posters), but it's
>> quick and fast and delivers content nicely. There are many front ends
>> out there all speaking DLNA, and they support pushing and pulling
>> content to varying degrees.
>
> Another interesting offering.
>
> Do any (all?) of these video servers mearly work over wired ethernet
> or the HDMI output port, or do some of them broadcast locally over wifi,
> which can be picked up by apple and android phones?
>
> My video camera can stream into a linux device via the the usb or the
> mini HDMI port. I'm not sure how to set up a hdmi port on a linux host
> to receive input from the hdmi output on the camera?  What I want to do is
> then rebroadcast over wifi so every phone in the local (wifi) area can
>  watch the video live on their phone as well as playback and other
> intersperced content (player stats etc).
>
> What would you recommend ?
>
> Which apps would the iphone or the android phone run to receive the
> wifi re-broadcasts?

My setup:

Content on an HP microserver with regular consumer SATA drives
(5400rpm). Network is 100mb FastEthernet (it's a gig nic but the switch
is 100m). It runs FreeNAS and serves content over NFS, SMB and DLNA.

XBMC is latest OpenElec Frodo RC3 on an Xtreamer Ultra2, HDMI 1.4
straight into the TV. Sound is plain 2.0 into the the TV. Network is
802.11n locked to 145mb (the AP is too unstable at 300 at my house).
Uses NFS to get to backend storage.

I went with this setup as I'd been burnt trying to go cheap. A
RaspberryPi just barely managed to run 1080p and would stutter badly
with any audio it couldn't just pass through direct to the TV. And
there's the MPEG-2 license thingy as well.My research showed that even
the latest ARM chips from 6 months ago were still not quite there yet
(hopefully that will change real soon now), and the XBMC gui was
annoyingly sluggish. Chaps at work had Popcorn hour boxes and other
similar ARM based devices, with without the rich XBMC experience - the
gui on all of them sucked. Probably because the device didn't have spare
resources for a GUI.

So I went for Intel based with a good nVidia card, and the XBox is the
backup (also wireless at 145) if the Xtreamer goes south - that's what
the DLNA is for :-)

Network performance is great, even when playing full 1080p Bluray rips
or .vob rips off dvd. I can get the network to max out, but have to do
much crazy stuff at the same time as watch a movie to pull it off :-)

I haven't looked into Geekbox at all, I understand it's a nicely
packaged XBMC so all the same performance comparisons should hold.

The way I use it on the tablets and phones is to use the functionality
of the remote. AFAIK it asks xbmc for stuff and it comes over the
network as uPNP, but I'm a little fuzzy on the details. It works for me,
that's what I care about :-) I have a Samsung10" first gen tablet and an
S2 phone, both cope well. XBMC doesn't transcode, so the device has to
be able to deal with the content as delivered. Or, just download the
file and watch later (that's why the content server supports smb)

As for your camera, maybe OpenElec isn't the solution for that - it's a
barebones appliance and might not support everything you need. Check out
XBMC Live (it's also an installer) which is Ubuntu based, and you could
use v4l to deal with the camera's video stream and broadcast that way.
You would have to give up emerge in favour of apt-get thoguh....

Which did I go with FreeNAS and OpenElec? Because I got sick and tired
of dealing with gentoo on what is essentially a single-purpose
appliance. I want the NAS and media front end to work like a DVD player
- switch on, wait 10 seconds max, be good to go. It must also update
like a DSL router - upload a 70M single image, reboot, be good to go. My
notebook is Gentoo because it does 100s of things and it must work *my*
way, the media server does 1 thing and it must JustWorkRight always


-- 
Alan McKinnon
alan.mckinnon@×××××.com