Hauppauge Media MVP

[henrib]

The Media MVP is a small (Linux embedded ) box that is capable of hardware MPEG2 decoding getting its file from a server.
This box cannot read dvds (nor divx) by itself thus I was wondering whether VLC would be a suitable transcoding server.

More to the point; is it possible to use Videolan to transcode a DVD to a "simple" mpg file (no vob, etc)? I'm under the impression that this would not require reencoding the mpeg2 but only demux/transcode audio.
Actually, could VLC transcode from other formats (say DivX) to mpeg2? I browsed the doc but did not find mpeg2 as a possible encoding.
If not strictly by software, would it be able to use the mpeg2 hardware encoder of a PVR250?

If I missed the obvious, could someone kindly point me to the docs/simple example ?
Please accept the sincere apologies of a newbie.
Many thanks

[Gibalou]

VLC should be able to do what you want (supports re-muxing / audio transcoding / video transcoding).

[Guest]

VLC should be able to do what you want (supports re-muxing / audio transcoding / video transcoding).

How does the Interface on the MVP work with videolan? Can you request videos (vod)? How does that work/look?

[henrib]

Can't answer your question in a direct manner...
The MVP needs a server to run somewhere; it expects to find a DHCP server to give it an IP adress, it boots using tbootp, it uses a modified version of VNC's RFB protocol to display navigation screens & consumes MPEG2/MP3 streams natively (hardware decoder) on demand through tftp if I'm not mistaken.
There are several servers (usually with PVR capabilities) available besides Hauppauge's; http://www.gbpvr.com (based on MSFT .NET, closed source) which has an API to create plug-ins and mvpmc.sourceforge.net (based on Linux).
The idea would be to extend one or the other to allow playing "any kind" of file by transcoding to MPEG2/MP3 on the fly; for DVDs, it seems it would mostly require extracting the MPEG2 stream and transcoding the AC3 to MP3.
Thus my original post about using VLC to transcode (I guess Mplayer/MEncoder would be an alternative).
Regarding the interface itself, it would mimic whatever the server video library skin looks like; is would allways be vod since there is no storage on the MVP (besides 16Mb RAM).
I've yet to find time to dig into VLC doc to see how to drive it through http & find the correct parameters, then pick one of the servers & hack...
Hope you'll find an answer in my blurb.

[tvtalkshowshigh]

i'm getting one of these STBs in a few days for some testing. i'm hoping to be able to stream to it with VLC. i'm not too bothered about control from the client box, the content just needs to be changable at the server end.

Is this possible?

cheers,
mark.