[streaming] Transcode MPEG-2 Transport Stream to H.264

[Dave Schroeder]

Hello,

I've been working for quite a while on a live TV streaming project at 
the University of Wisconsin. The first incarnation of this project has 
been running for about a year now, using QuickTime Broadcaster for live 
encoding and multicast delivery, and QuickTime and VLC on the client 
end for playback.

We're now going into the second phase of this project, and we would 
like to possibly get away from digitizing analog video, and go directly 
to transcoding digital content, perhaps from MPEG-2 Transport Stream, 
to H.264. Yes, I realize this is very processor intensive, but we're 
already doing 29.97fps 720x480 H.264 live software encoding with other 
products, so it's possible. The machines we'd be using would be dual 
2.3GHz Xserve G5 systems.

Now here comes the question: looking at VLC, it looks like it doesn't 
currently support really any type of input on Mac OS X, and just does 
broadcasting from static files. The questions are:

- Will this be changing at some point?

- Since CyTV <http://www.lucid-cake.net/cytv/index_en.html>, in my 
understanding, already uses VLC to simply take an MPEG stream from a 
device (in this case, El Gato USB- and FireWire-attached external TV 
tuners) and toss it onto the network, would it not be possible to 
somehow get an MPEG-2 Transport Stream into the host and then just 
transcode it to, say, H.264?

We do NOT have any programming capability for this project in-house, so 
we can't write anything for VLC to make this happen. I'm just trying to 
get a feel for whether this would be remotely possible with VLC.

Information about our current project is at: 
<http://datn.wisc.edu/about/>

Regards,

Dave Schroeder                 |    University of Wisconsin - Madison
Email: das at doit.wisc.edu       |   Division of Information Technology
Pager: das-pager at doit.wisc.edu | B263 Computer Science and Statistics
Pager: +1 800 449-4951         |              1210 West Dayton Street
Phone: +1 608 265-4737         |        Madison, Wisconsin 53706-1685

-- 
This is the streaming mailing-list, see http://www.videolan.org/streaming/
To unsubscribe, please read http://www.videolan.org/support/lists.html