The VideoLAN Forums

G'day,

I have just begun using VLC as a means to view & record a h.264 stream from a LAN which is being generated by a h.264 hardware encoder attached to a 720p camera. The setup appears to be working and I am quite happy with the smoothness of the stream and lack of blocking/pixelation but I do have a couple of questions.

The encoder is running at 8Mbps, I:P of 20 using TS
I have VLC picking up the stream at 8000kbps via UDP
My objective is to record the stream with as little loss of quality as possible.

I have ended up using the record button to initiate recording, in my case I expect to record for periods of about 6hrs at a time. I have recorded for 1hr to check the filesize and it's about 4GB. VLC appears to be able to playback these files without issue. Would recording for 6-8Hrs straight make the file sizes unmanageable for VLC or cause other issues ? (I note that the recorded file remains readable even if VLC exits or the laptop is shutdown prior to pressing stop-recording.)

During playback of the recorded .ts file the elapsed/remaining time counter is all zeros and positioning the cursor over the time slider also shows a zero time. Is this a program limitation or something i have not configured correctly ?

In my case, a user will note events of interest based on time of day - the notes are in a written log and then at a later time someone else will review the recording of the event, thus they need to open the file and cue the playback to the time of day noted in the log. I note that the file name is based on the time of day that the recording starts, is it possible to configure VLC to display time data on the time slider based on time of day ? For example if the recording began at 0900 and went for 2 hours, can VLC be configured to show 0900 when the time slider is at its left extremity, 1000 when at 50% and 1100 when the slider is all the way to the right ?

I note about a 2 second lag between my source video and the playback in VLC, I'm not sure how much of that is from the encoder. This is manageable but would be beneficial if it could be reduced, any tips on reducing the lag (without sacrificing quality) would be appreciated.

Cheers. (& thanks to the VLC team for a great app thats letting an amateur make useful progress).

- Files that are way above 10GB limits are largely untested in VLC.
- TS files have no time in it, and VLC doesn't compute time in it, therefore 00:00
- No, VLC can only display the current time, not the past time.
- Try to reduce the udp-caching to speed up.

And cheers.

Thanks for the feedback j-b.

Is it likely to be viable for VLC (in a future release) to calculate and display elapsed time & duration from a .ts clip or am I barking up the wrong tree, should I be looking to transcode to another format (which includes time) for recording?

I am assuming that loew cpu overheads from recording in the same format as the stream (.ts) is one of the reasons that my recordings have been smooth and free of blocking/pixelation and dropped frames etc. I'll have a go at converting a file to a different recorded format and see how that goes.


EDIT-----> Attempting to convert/save as .mp4 created lots of blocking/pixelation and long pauses in the recording as expected.

Try to remux to ps and NOT transcode.