[mythtvnz] DNLA/UPnP server

[Stephen Worthington]

On Mon, 7 Dec 2009 23:16:12 +1300, you wrote:

>
>On 5/12/2009, at 9:08 PM, Stephen Worthington wrote:
>
>> On Fri, 04 Dec 2009 21:05:40 +1300, you wrote:
>> 
>>> On Wed, 02 Dec 2009 20:46:29 +1300, you wrote:
>>> 
>>> 
>>>> 
>>>>> I too am interested, could you post an update showing how you 
>>>>> (hopefully) achieved it?
>>>> 
>>>> Changing the MythTV box to use its external IP address worked fine.  I
>>>> just changed the fields in the MythTV Backend Setup to the correct IP
>>>> address, and for good measure also made the Frontend use the same
>>>> external IP address for accessing the MySQL database.  It all worked
>>>> without any problems, unlike the last time I tried it with Ubuntu 8.04
>>>> and MythTV 0.21.  So maybe something there has been fixed in 0.22 so
>>>> it all just works.  upnp-inspector now says the MythTV box is a UPnP
>>>> server.  But the Sony TV does not yet see it as a server, although it
>>>> does see my Vista WMP UPnP server and so far I have been able to get
>>>> it to display some stored photos from there.  I have to experiment
>>>> more with it all, but Mum wants to use her TV now, so it will have to
>>>> wait for tomorrow.
>>> 
>>> I was unable to get the Sony KDL-32V5500 TV to see the MythTV UPnP
>>> server, so after some googling I tried minidlna:
>>> 
>>> http://sourceforge.net/projects/minidlna/
>>> 
>>> With that, I can get the TV to play the MPEG2 recordings from the
>>> PVR-500 card (Sky programs), but the H.264 FreeviewHD programs do not
>>> work so far.  And of course, the raw filenames that minidlna serves up
>>> are pretty useless for working out which program is which, so ideally
>>> once I get minidlna working, I would want to port that code to the
>>> MythTV UPnP server.
>> 
>> OK, I have now got a little further with this.  I used an SQL UPDATE
>> to change the data in the minidlna database to something suggested by
>> the author, and that made the Sony TV see the FreeviewHD files.  But
>> unfortunately it will not play them.  To confirm that, I put a small
>> Prime SD recording on a USB stick and plugged that into the Sony TV
>> and it would still not play the file.  So now I need to find out what
>> format H.264 files it will play, and see if it is just a case of
>> changing the container format, or something more difficult that would
>> need full transcoding.
>
>
>I've done a bit of testing with the Sony's and neither the Series 2 or Series 3 Bravias will currently play our broadcast H.264 streams, or pretty much any H.264 streams, off USB or other media which is a real shame.
>
>I'd be interested to hear if anyone has made things work.
>
>Steve

I have found what the problem is.  The TV manual say it plays only
these format video files: AVCHD, HDV and MPEG2 PS.  The relevant one
for H.264 is AVCHD.  This appears to be a specialised subset of MPEG2
transport stream files:

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVCHD

The files recorded by MythTV are H.264 transport streams, but they are
not in AVCHD format.

I found a tool called tsMuxer that could remux the TV3 .ts files
recorded off air by MediaPortal to AVCHD files.  It only works with
the TV3 files as it does not recognise the AAC audio streams (probably
for the obvious reason that the AVCHD format only allows AC3 or linear
PCM audio).  I got it to convert a TV3 file to an AVCHD disk format,
then found the .m2ts file in one of the subdirectories of that disk
format and copied it to the MythTV box.  Using minidlna (and altering
its database manually as suggested by the author to change the DLNA
file type data to something the Sony liked), the TV saw the file and
could play it.

I also downloaded a tiny AVCHD test file and put that on a USB stick
and the TV could play that too.

Unfortunately the .mpg transport stream files created by MythTV are
different from the .ts files created by MediaPortal, and tsMuxer can
not see any streams in them at all.

So what we need is a tool to remux MythTV transport stream files to
AVCHD, converting AAC audio to AC3 if there is no AC3 audio present
already.  Or an option on MythTV to get it to record valid AVCHD files
instead of the current format.

Apparently ffmpeg has recently had some AVCHD support added, but I
have not had time to try that out yet.