MobileVDR - Stream Live-TV from VDR to your Tablet
 

I would like to announce the first public release of MobileVDR*, as small tool which acts as a frontend for MPlayer and VDR, in its current state it just allows you to get the channel-list of your VDR Host and to select a channel for watching it with MPlayer. The UI uses a finger friendly Kinetic Scrollbar.

If you are interested, please visit http://mobilevdr.garage.maemo.org , where you can find some addtional information, including the .install-File.

Here's a screenshot:
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2236/...c40ba6b0_o.png

(I know that the UI is currently not the best, i am open for other suggestions.) :)

* the name was a little bit inspired by MobileMyth ;-)

Re: MobileVDR - Stream Live-TV from VDR to your Tablet
 

Really great application, resembling VDR-C for Symbian phones
http://gallery.mobile9.com/f/19234/

Are you aware is it possible to set up video server to multicast media over wifi (using DHCP and multicast IP address range)
and have your application to access video stream on-the-fly in multicast mode on a number of Nokia tablets ?

Darius

Re: MobileVDR - Stream Live-TV from VDR to your Tablet
 

I haven't tried it yet, but that sound really great!
I've had limited success using mediaserv for recordings and manually typing the url for streamdev live viewing (or just cutting and pasting from the Extern/channels.htm listing exposed by streamdev), but having everything in one place, with an interface tailored to the tablet, is very convenient.

Re: MobileVDR - Stream Live-TV from VDR to your Tablet
 

Thank you for you feedback.

I know that there currently is no good solution to stream transcoded VDR-Recordings , mediaserv could be an option, if it would get proper VDR-support. Maybe mediaserv could be used as backend for streaming redordings then.

My favourite option currently is to add support for streaming+transcoding recordings on-the-fly via streamdev-server, but this is obviously not implemented yet. I allready looked at the sourcecode of streamdev-server and i think this should be doable. (Unfortunately i will not have very much time in the next weeks for doing this, if i can spend time for coding in the next weeks at all, i guess i will try to add the schedule support to MobileVDR first.)

Re: MobileVDR - Stream Live-TV from VDR to your Tablet
 

Hmm, this similiarity in names is just a coincidence, the application you are referring to seems to be used for video surveillance. The VDR i am referring, is the Linux Video Disk Recorder, a mediacenter application like MythTV. VDR is rather popular in Europe, it does not seem to be very well known in the US. :)

Yes, of course i am aware of this, unfortunately it is no real option in this Use-Case because the VDR-System can only receive a limted number of tv-channels at the same time and the Server needs to switch the channels automatically when a clients wants to receive a certain channel.
(The bandwidth also is no problem in a LAN, such a stream just uses max, 100 kByte per sec., depending on the selected quality.)


Regards,
Thomas

Re: MobileVDR - Stream Live-TV from VDR to your Tablet
 

It should be relatively straight forward to add VDR recording meta-data support to mediaserv (and would seem to link up nicely with the live VDR interface you're doing). I've already got some information on that already (thanks to luca), but without a VDR system to play with, testing's obviously a bit tricky.

If anyone knows Perl, fancies hacking on mediaserv and has a VDR system to play with; please get in touch: it'll get done much quicker if we're scratching your itch.

Re: MobileVDR - Stream Live-TV from VDR to your Tablet
 

Yes, i allready saw luca's posts in the mediaserv-thread and they seems to describe the file-structure of VDR's recordings really well.
As luca allready pointed out, the main problem could be that VDR stores the recordings in files with the names 001.vdr up to 255.vdr, depending on the length of the recording and the configured maximum file size (up to 2GB per file).

There is allready a shellscript to be called from the VDR Osd, which can transcode vdr-recordings with your 770-encode.pl. This script basically does just use cat to concatenate all .vdr-Files belonging to a recording to one big .vdr-File and afterwards calls 770-enode with the big file as input.

My Perl knowledge is limited (i can at least read the code, as long as it is not too obfuscated :)), i could of course test patches for mediaserv and maybe could debug them a little bit.

Re: MobileVDR - Stream Live-TV from VDR to your Tablet
 

I think it should be possible to enhance 770-encode (or, rather, it's next version tablet-encode) to support converting VDR directories into a single AVI (without combining them into one big file first)

Then, mediaserv gets enhanced to support VDR meta-data.

Shouldn't be too hard at all, really... I'll try and find time.

Re: MobileVDR - Stream Live-TV from VDR to your Tablet
 

Sounds really great.

I can also record a short clip with the maximum filesize in VDR set to 1MByte and send it to you, if this would help. (This way a very short clip should be sufficent to give you an example.)

Re: MobileVDR - Stream Live-TV from VDR to your Tablet
 

@aflegg, mencoder will happily accept all *.vdr input files to generate a single output file. I'll have a look if I can add vdr support to mediaserv (I'm just procrastinating, I promised myself I'd do it as soon as I learned about mediaserv, and I still haven't started;)). Now, I'd like if you added multiple languages to the metadata, and pass the corresponding aid to mencoder, so I can procrastinate even more :D, no, seriously, that would be a useful option.

@chelli, I tried mobilevdr, unfortunately I cannot even get the channel list: I have many channels and vdr.svdrp chokes reading them. If I had access to a keyboard I'd patch it to read line by line instead of putting them all in a big string, than it is then split in a list to be processed line by line.....