Modify placeshifter for H.264? Low bandwidth cases?

[bluenote]

My placeshifter trial works, but the PQ is just not up to par. I've tried it from two different locations -- one with (for our purposes) near unlimited bandwidth, and a location with limited bandwidth (around 250 kilobits/s ~ 30 kbytes/s). both locations perform similary.

What I'm wondering is -- my server has literally crap for a cpu, but generally speaking it works fine for everything but this. I'm guessing that its the processor that is the bottleneck, forcing the realtime transcode to be at a pretty low quality.

So. My questions are:

1) if i throw just CPU at this problem, will I succeed in ending up with watchable video in the ~30KB/s bandwidth I have at my preferred location?

2) if I throw CPU at this, can I also change the encoding to perhaps H.264? Is there any adjustability beyond changing the few GUI-accessible options in placeshifter? ie: can I change settings like I can adjust for the built in sage mplayer conversions in the properties file?

3) What about pre-processing recordings (a la batch H.264). When placeshifter does a "no compression" stream, is it actually transfering the file in its original encoded format, or is it unencoding it to some kind of raw format? I wouldn't mind running H.264 converts to a low bit rate offline so my shows would be ready and able to run snappily later in the day over low bandwidth. ?

This problem should be able to be solved within the limitations of the situation, but the question is, can I do it within sage???

I've experimented a little bit with VLC -- anyone want to speculate on using that?

Cory

[sandor]

What is your servers CPU?

transcoding is very very CPU intensive (you are re-encoding all the video and audio on the fly - even the highest end MPEG2 encoders used by Hollywood can only achieve about 7x realtime with the fastest available CPUs)

to encode low bit rate is even more intensive, and h.264 ever more so. For bit rate comparisons, iTunes SD TV encodes are about 1600 kbps h.264 - approx 200 KB/s. 250 kbps is really really low.

I would say throw as much horsepower at it as you can, but you probably still wont be fully happy with the results.


As for a couple of your other questions, the no compression setting simply slings the original file (MPEG2 for ATSC, whatever you encode to for SD) over the network - for another bit rate comparison, ATSC is about 10-19 mbps (1.25 - 2.375 MB/s). You can also set up auto encoding of recorded shows, and have either an h.264 copy replace the original or be added "in line" with it (ie have two copies, the original and the encoded)