streamming to a Windows Media Player step-by-step guide? :)

[pt2vhf]

Hi folks.
I´m so confused and I need to stream both audio and video to windows media player clients. Can anybody help me? Thanks! Alex, alex@bsbnet.com

[markfm]

It's all about getting compatible formats.

The mix I use is:
Streaming method mmsh
Encapsulation method ASF
Transcoding Video CODEC DIV3
Transcoding Audio CODEC mp3

vlc c:\temp\Dive1_3_out.mpg :sout=#transcode{vcodec=DIV3,vb=320,scale=1,acodec=mp3,ab=96,channels=2}:duplicate{dst=std{access=mmsh,mux=ASFH,url=:1234}} --sout-transcode-width 320 --sout-transcode-height 240 --sout-transcode-fps 20

Is a Windows command:
take the .mpg
Transform it to 320 kbps DIV3 video, and 96 kbps 2-channel mp3
Make it available as an mmsh stream, with ASFH encapsulation, accessible by anyone connecting to the PC's port 1234
Force the width and height of the output image to 320x240
Force the output video frame rate to 20. This is a personal choice thing. It cuts the CPU load on the server (CPU load is pretty much linear to the fps), you get decent motion in the output video.

A client using WMP would then select File -- Open URL, and input:
mms://server_IP_address:1234
in the address bar.

If a local WMP client cannot connect, the thing to check is to go into WMP's Tools -- Options, click on the Network tab, make sure that TCP is checked.

[xizor]

I've followed these steps and they work, however when streaming over wireless WMP buffers pretty often and then will quit with an error after buffering too many times. This happens on any bitrate stream.

[markfm]

Different problem
I've been mucking about a little, have something that at least works VLC - VLC mmsh over WiFi, at up to about 512K. It's a .reg, modifies the WinXP default TX and receive buffer sizes, and how many packets total can be in the TX buffer.
This will take time -- TCP serving is a bit of a pain.