Quick and Dirty Hacks Hacks, code, etc…

I am about to embark on the biggest crack smoking off the wall hacktastic madness ever attempted by myself.

Using a patch from here and a source rpm for this from there I am going to do the only thing that I can possibly think of to allow me to use audio from my line-in accompanied by composite video from my bt878 card to stream TV accross my network.

There are two places I want the TV to stream to, the first place is a digital picture frame I’m building out of an old LCD and the other is my mac.

The basic premise is that I receive video input from my TV through mencoder, this video input along with the audio can usually be captured alright, well using force audio it can. I use the following recording command for this crackness;

mencoder tv:// -tv driver=v4l2:input=1:norm=pal:outfmt=i420:device=/dev/video0:adevice=/dev/dsp:forceaudio:forcechan=2 -ovc lavc -oac mp3lame -lameopts br=128:cbr:mode=0:vol=0 -o video.avi

now I want to combine that command with this command

DISPLAY=:0 vlc v4l:/dev/video0:norm=pal:channel=1:adev=/dev/dsp:audio=0 –sout ‘#transcode{vcodec=mp4v,acodec=mpga,vb=3000,ab=256,venc=ffmpeg{keyint=80,hurry-up,vt=800000},deinterlace}:std{access=http,mux=ts,url=192.168.1.1}’ –ttl 12

So the chain of processing goes like this;

mencoder -o stdout | vlc /dev/stdin >—network—-> LinuxPC/Mac

hopefully if all goes well I’ll have total cracktastic streaming television, this would be much easier if the VLC guys actually had their head screwed on and allowed me to capture audio from line-in, but nomatter what I try it won’t allow this to happen.

Anyway, after a day of hacking this apart and that together and rebuilding copious RPMs for the latest Mesa/Glitz/Xgl/Compiz CVS (all so I could unfold the cube) I’m exhausted and although I have the power of redbull inside of me it isn’t anywhere near enough of a stimulant to get me to make that patch work with the source distribution of mplayer I have (many rejects!) so I’m gonna hack some C, create a better patch and crack hack spack track bewk trewk through to getting streaming TV working.

When I should be working on wine-doors.

Well, irc.freenode.net #freevo has been where I’ve been at for the last week almost. Dirk Meyer (Dischi) and I have been working very hard to bring freevo2 webserver2 to the masses (well a few people who use svn at the moment) and we’ve put some effort into some cool new webserver features…

Webserver2 introduces some new stuff, we’re looking at lots of ajax and tonnes of prettyfying. The idea is that first of all we should make webserver2 look as much like freevo as possible. Secondly we want to update metadata relating to files when they are selected. Replacing a lot of the hrefs with javascript and ajax handlers which call python functions using cherrypy and cheetah templates.

Features we’re working on…

• Clicking on a file once will update metadata, and for files of type video/music will introduce controls to start playback on freevo. You can also download the files, but we also would like to add streaming to web clients. Gstreamer/Fluendo looks like the first thing to do this well.
• Webremote, this is currently just a dream but soon we should have a web enabled remote, which will look spiffing on wifi tablets like the nokia 770 and possibly also the PSP. The idea is that you have a remote control which doesn’t work on IR or RF but WiFi via the freevo webserver. This employs a lot of ajax and should in theory be able to provide information about currently playing media over the remote, imagine for instance program information being displayed on your remote.
• Restyling of the entire interface to resemble freevo closely.
• New tv guide, which will hopefully be capable of setting scheduled recordings, favourites etc… via ajax and also should be able to set the channel to watch TV.
• New image viewer which looks like freevo.

Well I hope this is enough to keep all the freevo patrons loyal, this stuff is pretty kickass, and features like this are pretty new for a PVR system. Freevo2 should be coming along soon with many really cool features which will hopefully get some jaws dropping at CeBIT germany this month.

A lot of work still needs to go into configuration, initial setup easy setup and installation of freevo, along with an extended default plugins set which has more popular items like ipod support and various other cool stuff, we also need  TV timeshifting as this is one of the big features which interests people in PVRs. This is all to come and maybe by CeBIT next year we’ll have something which will beat up mickysoft with a big thick stick.