Streaming to a settop box get audio but no video

[ddales]

Hi all, VLC newbie here trying to stream video from my Suse 10 x86_64 to my TV set top box with no luck.

Situation:
I'm an American in Germany and download my favorite TV shows so we can keep up with them here in Europe. My set top box is a DBOX2 which runs a linux OS and is connected to my network via WLAN. It has the ability to mount network drives via NFS among others and play them back to the TV with VLC. I can mount the drive to my set top and browse the NFS shares without issue. However, when I start playback for an AVI I can get sound but no video.

I've tried various settings, including the VLC streaming wizard in the GUI, but can only get sound, no video. One thing I'm not 100% sure about is if I should stream a particular file or if it is Ok to just start the http interface then choose a file at random from the NFS share "sort of a listening mode"?

I've talked with another DBOX owner here but he streams everything from Winblows not from a Linux box like I do. I doubt that makes a difference though. It does indicate that other people have this working with VLC.

I also found a posting that mentioned ffmpeg support is not built into VLC by default and that you have to specify that option in the "./configure". However, I didn't install from source. I grabbed the RPM version for my distribution. Also, as far as I can tell at least, the ffmpeg is built in to the RPM that I installed.

Available modules from VLC -l
I'm not sure if these are "available for install" or "installed and available to VLC for use?"
The list is mega-long so I just included the listing dealing with the FFMPEG modules:

DDA-HOME:~ # vlc -l | grep -i ffm
VLC media player 0.8.4a Janus
ffmpeg ffmpeg audio/video decoder/encoder ((MS)MPEG4,SVQ1,H263,WMV,WMA)
ffmpeg ffmpeg chroma conversion
ffmpeg ffmpeg audio/video encoder
ffmpeg ffmpeg demuxer
ffmpeg ffmpeg video filter
ffmpeg ffmpeg deinterlace video filter


VideoLan Version
DDA-HOME:~ # rpm -qa | grep vlc
vlc-mozillaplugin-0.8.4a-1.pm.7
vlc-0.8.4a-1.pm.7

FFMPEG Version
DDA-HOME:~ # rpm -qa | grep -i ffmpeg
libffmpeg0-0.4.9-4.pm.cvs20060201

Start Streaming
DDA-HOME:~ # vlc -I http
VLC media player 0.8.4a Janus
[00000270] main interface: creating httpd

Start Playback on the TV (get this error from VLC console on my PC as soon as I start playback
[00000325] ffmpeg encoder error: cannot open encoder
[00000276] stream_out_transcode private error: cannot find encoder
[00000264] main playlist: stopping playback

That's the whole deal. Any help, and or advice, would be deeply appreciated. I still have the option of burning to DVD-RW and using my PS2 for playback so this isn't all that urgent just annoying.

Thanks in advance!

[Guest]

start the vlc wit the following command:

vlc --extraintf=http --sout-transcode-fps 25.0000

this should solve your problem. It works for me wiht XP.

[ddales]

That seemed to do the trick. Well, that and installing ffmpeg. I had the libffmpeg installed but not the binary. After that, everything works well.

Thanks!