n00b question

[jdw6415]

Howdy,

Let me start by saying I know very little about streaming video (at the moment). I am trying to decide on how to setup my home streaming environment.

What (I think) I would like to do is rip DVDs to my hard drive and serve them up without conversion to AVI, (DIVX or another format) to a network streaming device. Can someone recommend if VideoLan is the right way to go and if anyone has a similar configuration.

Thanks in advance

[aegyssus]

Hi jdw,
I am not an expert, but it looks like you found what you were looking for.
VLC is able to stream DVD (MPEG2) content over the network. Unless your network player is limited to a proprietary format, I think you should be able to do the job using VLC for streaming.

Briefly, you need to figure out what format accepts your player, then set it up with VLC, press play button and that's it.
However, "results may vary" depending on your network performance, how reliable is you player and so on...

Ripping your DVDs on the local drive will definitely help, as the system will not have to take care of handling the DVD drive at play time. VLC is not necessary famous for ripping DVDs but, if they are not copyright protected, Windows Explorer will be all you need to copy the files from disk to your hard drive.

Good luck!

[sherington]

Hi,

I think I am trying to do the same or a similar thing and have had a little bit of success. I can't find the forum topic now, but I found some help in these forums which I can summarise here...

I do still have some problems (see the end of the post) so I hope someone will chip-in and offer some advice.

(My idea was to wrap-up all of the configuration and telnet stuff below with some bespoke software, but I haven't got that far yet.)

For the streaming server:

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vlc --ttl 12 -vvv --color -I telnet --rtsp-host 192.168.0.1:5678

192.168.0.1 is the server IP. 5678 is just some arbitrary port number that you choose to stream from.

You then can use telnet to configure a new video on demand:

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telnet 192.168.0.1 4212

'4212' is the default telnet interface port for vlc. The default password is 'admin'. Both of those can be overridden on the first vlc command-line above.

Type something like this in the telnet session:

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new Serenity vod enabled mux mp2t input dvdsimple:/home/dvd/Serenity

Obviously you can do that as many times as you want for as many videos as you want. As I said above, I know this is not ideal, but the idea was to automate/script this in the future once I had it all working.

You can check the server's console window output, it should show the dvd video being detected.

By the way, without the "mux mp2t" above you get choppy dvd video and no audio.

Now, on the client:

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vlc rtsp://192.168.0.1:5678/Serenity

...and your streaming video appears.

Note how the various strings above (IP address, port number, media name) match the earlier configuration.

I use dvdsrhinker to reauthor my dvd to include only the main title, dropping the redundant audio tracks, extras, menus, and trimming the end-credits etc. I know I don't actually need to shrink the dvd down since I really want full quality DVD images on my hard disk and disk is cheap, but dvdshrinker had the most convenient re-authoring that I could find and it works for now.

I have that all working very nicely from my Linux server over a regular WIFI local area network to a vlc running on a Linux client and a WinXP client. It doesn't run so well with vlc on my more powerful Vista laptop, you see various artefacts like it just can't process the data fast enough. It runs flawlessly to the WinXP client over WIFI though.

My problems and I really hope someone can help here:

- what I really want to be able to do from the client is cleanly pause and resume (the VLC player on the client seems to choke on resuming, but it does eventually catch up)
- more importantly, I want to be able to do client-side DVD navigation like "next chapter", "next title", "previous chapter", "previous title", I'm not all that bothered about seeking within the stream so long as I can navigate chapters and titles.

I can handle scripting or writing some bespoke software to do that, I just don't know the mechanism - does the HTTP interface provide an API to do that?

Hope that was all helpful to someone and hope that someone can help with my DVD navigation questions.

[sherington]

By the way, the "-ttl 12" that I used in the vlc command above is not really needed - that is related to how 'far' the network packets travel through the network, "-ttl 2" would suffice for most home networks I think.