Streaming Mechanism

[babgvant 143]

I'm curious about how to hook into MB's mechanism for mobile streaming. Specifically how I can use QSTranscode (or make its codebase useful in MB) to use QuickSync for mobile streaming instead of the CPU.

 

Thanks

[Luke 42077]

Tikuf is the best person to talk to here, he's our resident encoding expert.

 

Some consideration off the top of my head though - we are looking to port the server to mono so that it can run under linux. so is there a linux build of QStranscode with an identical api, and if not, then how would that work.

 

Then, we have quite a few output combinations, so will they be possible - for example, we encode to Webm for chrome, mp4 for other devices (using h264), and others use apple's HLS protocol (h264-based). So how would that work.

[babgvant 143]

Intel recently released the MSDK for Linux, so it is possible to port. Is the integration b/w FFmpeg and MB3 at the API level or do you spawn a process? If it's the later, it should be possible to just support multiple options even if it's hacked in by the user.

 

QSTranscode uses FFmpeg for encoding audio and muxing the A/V streams so anything FFmpeg supports should work.

[Tikuf 663]

TBH I have not even looked at it.

[babgvant 143]

I found it. it executes ffmpeg.exe to manage the streaming.

[Luke 42077]

Ok. We'll see what @@Tikuf thinks. 

[coolspot 22]

Hey Babgvant, you appear to be the dvrmstoolbox guy correct? I used your product for a long time and I'm excited you're in the mb3 community.

[babgvant 143]

Hey Babgvant, you appear to be the dvrmstoolbox guy correct? I used your product for a long time and I'm excited you're in the mb3 community.

 

Guilty . Thanks

[jhoff80 94]

I'm curious as to whether any further work has been done on getting QuickSync-based transcoding working?  I've been trying out the streaming features and have occasionally been hitting a wall with the CPU-based transcoding.

[babgvant 143]

I haven't had a chance to test it out, but the latest rev of QSTranscode might work. I added a "ffmpeg.exe" that will convert the cmdline args that mediabrowser uses into qstranscode args and execute it. You should be able to drop the whole thing in the place where MB expects ffmpeg to be and see if it works.

[KRA 39]

Any updates to this? 

[Luke 42077]

we're doing everything we can to make streaming as efficient as possible.

[babgvant 143]

Any updates to this? 

 Have you tried dropping QSTranscode (and its fake ffmpeg.exe) in the ffmpeg location?

Edited April 13, 2014 by babgvant

[Luke 42077]

does the fake version support everything, such as outputting to an HLS playlist with segments, and also image extraction?

[babgvant 143]

does the fake version support everything, such as outputting to an HLS playlist with segments, and also image extraction?

I'm not sure. QSTranscode uses ffmpeg internally for demux/mux and audio so many of its features are supported "for free".

 

Image extraction is not. I'd have to add that.

[Luke 42077]

well nonetheless it would be safer for us to use only when needed, so i wouldn't want to call it for image extraction.

[KRA 39]

 Have you tried dropping QSTranscode (and its fake ffmpeg.exe) in the ffmpeg location?

 

Yeah, tried unzipping all the contents in the ffmpeg folder, it broke transcoding

 

 

we're doing everything we can to make streaming as efficient as possible.

 

I know I've seen improvements, I'm just looking for more options. And having the gpu offload transcoding task sounds nice. 

[babgvant 143]

Yeah, tried unzipping all the contents in the ffmpeg folder, it broke transcoding

 

I must have gotten distracted before I finished . Couldn't remember where I left it. Will try to take a look this week.

[babgvant 143]

well nonetheless it would be safer for us to use only when needed, so i wouldn't want to call it for image extraction.

What arguments do you use to do extraction?

 

Would it be possible add support for QSTranscode directly?

[Luke 42077]

adding direct support would be cleaner, yes. because even if you add support for everything we do as a direct replacement, it does not make sense for us to use it when it's not needed, just from the standpoint of maintenance, debugging, introducing additional point of failure, etc.

[KRA 39]

I must have gotten distracted before I finished . Couldn't remember where I left it. Will try to take a look this week.

 

Sorry, an error on my part, I though my Sandy Bridge Xeon CPU had quicksync support, but it seems it's doesn't.

[babgvant 143]

Hmm... looks like it's using webm w/ vorbis and VP8/9 for encoding so it won't work.