[vlc] Re: HDTV Streaming ?

[Chhaya, Harshal]

Jim,

I have tried to stream HDTV and play it on vlc and the
mailing list archives are full of my questions. (-8

To make a long story short, a 2.4Ghz P4 is not enough
to play streamed HD in vlc.

And now the longer version:
I have a 2.4G P4 and couldn't play a streamed HD file
because the CPU was pegged at a 100% and the playback
was very choppy. Since my video card has some hardware
support for MPEG decoding I tried to find a player
with DxVA (DirectX Video Acceleration) in the hopes that
offloading some of the video decoding tasks to the graphics
card might help. Unfortunately, DxVA is not implemented
in any of the open source decoders because it is too
platform-specific.

I ended up trying a couple of different things. One was 
to use accessDTV tuner cards and the player that comes
with them. This player uses DxVA and can playback HDTV
with lower CPU utilization. I 'streamed' HDTV by using
the player's DVR features and saving the live stream on
a shared folder. This worked but wasn't real streaming.

Since my setup was somewhat different than yours - it
was more for a demo and I wasn't planning to use it 
regularly-, I also tried transcoding to MPEG4. Here 
I wasn't dealing with live TV so I tried a bunch of 
different things and found that the HD DivX 
format worked the best. vlc can play it and since the
data rates are much lower than 'true HD', the CPU or
the network aren't loaded much. I don't know what the
CPU load on the server would be for transcoding a
live TV stream to MPEG4.

I realise that none of these may help you but I wanted
to explain all the things I tried and what worked for
me. 

If you get this working, please let me know what you
did.

Good luck!
- Harshal

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