[MPlayer-dev-eng] sending mplayer video to stdout?
Michael Joosten
joost at c-lab.de
Thu Sep 25 00:55:26 CEST 2003
Christopher Cope wrote:
> hi,
> im interesting in a "distributed movie player" over multicast, where the
> master will play and can pause a movie, and the other participants' see
> their stream play/pause in sync. a possible way to do this would be to
> have the participants simply receive an rtp stream via the live.com
> enhacement. if i could send a copy of the video from my mplayer to stdout,
> then live.com could read from stdin. possibly, this could allow me to
> pause my stream, and have the other participants' videos pause as well,
> though im not sure if i pause the video from my end, it would break the
> pipe going to the live.com streamer.
>
> so my question is, can/how do i send the video from mplayer to stdout? ive
> tried -vo /dev/stdout and -o but can't get it to work. i didnt see this
> anywhere in the docs. if its there, i apologize. also, has anyone tried
> something like this before with mplayer?
Actually, yes ... The VDR project (DVB Videorecorder) has a plugin
that uses mplayer to convert the files in the playlist into MPEG-1
and sends this via TCP connection to the VDR system, where the DVB
satellite adapter card's hardware MPEG decoder is used to display
the stream.
mplayer -ao mpegpes -vo mpegpes file.avi...
should do this trick. It creates/opens a file 'grab.mpg' in the
current directory, which could also be a named pipe, and then it's
up to you...
Look for vdr-mplayercluster-001a.tgz. The idea behind this is to
use mplayer as a converter, as VDR only understands MPEG-1/2.
Now... I wonder why the audio that's grabbed in
libmpdemux/tvi_v4l.c when using tv:// URLs is NOT available to
mplayer, but apparently to mencoder. Would be nice to use this
trick for TV and video/audio sources, too.
Next choice is VideoLAN, but it is very fuzzy about the type of
MPEG files it groks. Grabbing from TV tuner cards works, but the
sound was a little choppy. Then.... you could use ffmpeg/ffserver.
AVI streaming over HTTP works quite well, but I haven't tested
SDP/RTP.
In general, getting a well working combination of server (with
compression) and client is not THAT simple. ffmpeg/ffserver looks
good in quality, but I do not see how to change media files or
change some settings of the frame grabber card.
mencoder with some ffmserver functionality and RTSP might be an
interesting combo for compressed streams.
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