UPnP for VDR’s Live Streams
I recently realized, that I just have to announce streams by UPnP to access them using my Asus O!Play.
Since my VDR installation provides URLs like http://MyVDRHostname:3000/EXT/ChannelNo access to the live channels, I started using MediaTomb to publish the URLs by UPnP.
Asus O!Play Release
I upgrade my O!Play media box to the newest Release 1.30P on Sunday and CIFS really improved.
Before that upgrade I had to open the Network folder twice to get my Samba server into the list, now it will detect that immediately.
You can download the new release at the Asus Support Download Site. Please choose product Multimedia, series Digital Media Player and model O!Play HDP-R1.
A popup will ask for the operating system, select Linux and you will find a list of downloadable files.
The item Firmware contains the archives with latest firmware releases. Please choose the file properly, and follow the comments about NTSC resp. PAL. In the moment the version number contains a suffix P or N accordingly.
Conduct the upgrade on your OWN RISK by extracting the archive on an USB stick. This will provide a HowTo for the installation.
Streaming MPEG-TS
Up to release 1.6 VDR is recording into MPEG-PS files named *.vdr.
In newer release this was switched to MPEG-TS (with some impact on moving marks).
The Asus O!Play is fine with the TS (Transport Stream) format, but lacks support of the *.vdr files.
Since I want to stick to release 1.6 of VDR for now, I just wrote a script, that will convert the recordings into MPEG-TS files using ffmpeg, all contained on a Samba export, which is connected to the streaming device:
#!/bin/bash
find . -type f -name "???.vdr" | while read vdr; do
dir="$(dirname "$vdr")"
file="$(basename "$vdr" .vdr)"
target="$dir/$file.mpg"
[ -f "$target" ] && continue
nice ffmpeg -i "$vdr" \
-vcodec copy \
-acodec copy \
-scodec copy \
-sameq \
-f mpegts \
"$target"
done
Since only the container format changes, this script does not cost that much performance and I can even run it without larger problems on my Atom-driven VDR host.
Streaming VDR
Since my VGA to PAL adapter for my VDR host is not really working well for video, I am now owner of a media player that covers the following options:
- low-cost
- wired networking capabilities
- support of "open" formats
- small, moderate power consumption, ...
The Asus O!Play HDP-R1 meets these requirements. But there are still some issues:
- VDR/MPEG-PS is not working, so I have to convert most of my VDR recordings. In contrast MPEG-TS provided by bleeding-edge releases of VDR is working well.
- MKV (Matroska) is showing strange speed changes in first tests. I am currently testing, if this is related to the server system. In tests I just converted the VDR/MPEG-PS container to a MKV container leaving the contents as is.
- I have not testet the setup with HDMI, since our TV just don't give up, it's still a low-resolution PAL system. But it's pure weight is an advantage in the context of playing children
.