Low Compression Codec OR No Codec?

[Scott JHU-ECE]

All the Codecs that come with VLC seem to be rather processor intensive, and, I presume, costly in the time in the few hundred milliseconds they take to compress the stream.

VLC seems to necessitate some kind of encoding when streaming over UDP with MPEG-TS. I'd rather it not encode/compress the file at all - is there a way to get around this? If not, is it possible to install add a codec into VLC, presuming that I can find a codec that does minimal compression?

I've tried streaming as RAW over HTTP, but it doesn't seem to like that. What's the best way to capture from a direct show device, and send that stream as fast as possible, and compressing it as little as possible, across a network?

Much thanks,

Scott

[dionoea]

can't you just remux to mpeg-ts and leave the audio and video elementary streams as is ?

[Scott JHU-ECE]

I would love to! Alas, I'm afraid VLC won't even try to send the stream across the network if it hasn't been compressed in some way, shape, or form. i.e. If I check off the options for video and audio codec, it takes up 2% of my network bandwidth, however, if I deselect just the video codec, this goes down to about 0.27% of my network bandwidth (clearly, just sending the compressed audio stream now). And if both are unchecked, neither the audio or the video stream get transmitted.

I am able to get it to stream if I'm streaming from a file; it's only when capturing from a camera through directshow that I run into this. Also, am using version 0.8.4a, if that makes a difference.

If I'm not missing something, and VLC does indeed need a video stream to be compressed before passing it along, why is this?

Thanks in advance,

Scott

[Scott JHU-ECE]

Alternatively, I was hoping that I could do hardware encoding beforehand; this would seem to be a sensible solution to the problem.

I get the impression, however, that VLC isn't particularly fond of receiving input from an external hardware encoder? Is this correct? Does any hardware encoding option exist? With the Hauppauge cards, perhaps, since these seem to be the device of choice for VLC? I have a Hauppauge 250 on order at present; I tried hardware encoding with a Plextor USB device - no luck.

-Scott