[mythtvnz] Frontend over slow wifi link

[Graeme Woollett]

I'm wanting to watch tv recorded on my sisters mythbox via a wifi link.  
It records from a PVR150. The link doesn't quite have enough speed to 
play the stream without pausing.  I've been playing around with mencoder 
and netcat to compress the video into MPEG4 before sending over the link.

Script on backend box

 #!/bin/bash
# 500 is acceptable for bitrate, 1000 gives very nice quality
BITRATE=1500
MAX_XRES=768
MAX_YRES=576
LISTEN_PORT=1234

# oac copy should work fine most of the time
#AUDIO="-oac mp3lame -lameopts preset=192"
AUDIO="-oac copy"

mkfifo "/tmp/maemo_stream-$$"
{ nc -q 0 -l -p $LISTEN_PORT < "/tmp/maemo_stream-$$"; killall -9 
mencoder; rm -f "/tmp/maemo_stream-$$"; } &
mencoder -o "/tmp/maemo_stream-$$" $AUDIO -ovc lavc \
    -lavcopts 
vcodec=mpeg4:vbitrate=${BITRATE}:aspect=${MAX_XRES}/${MAX_YRES}:mbd=2:trell 
\
    -idx -zoom -vf-add dsize=${MAX_XRES}:${MAX_YRES}:2,scale \
    -vf-add expand=${MAX_XRES}:${MAX_YRES}::::${MAX_XRES}/${MAX_YRES} 
-vf-add crop=${MAX_XRES}:${MAX_YRES} \
    -ffourcc FMP4 "$1"
rm -f "/tmp/maemo_stream-$$"


command on "frontend" box

 nc.traditional -q 0 192.168.2.230 1234 | mplayer -vf pp=lb -cache 8192 
-cache-min 80 -

this works OK, no pausing.  

Now for the Problems -
1. no index skipping, if I lose my place in the stream I have to start 
from the beginning.
2. It would be nice to "chase the tail" of the file that mythbackend is 
writing to, but I don't know how to get mencoder to read piped output 
from  the tail -f command.
3. It would be nice to not have to search for the cryptically named file 
that mythbackend generates.  I have tried used mythtvfs, this seems not 
to support the version of the backend I have i.e mythtvfs has a version 
of 40 while the backend is version 50.  Only some of the recordings show up.

What would be even nicer than this hack is for mythtv (from a frontend 
point of view) to manage the encoding and bitrate for me.  I can't cut 
the bitrate on recording on the backend as this would annoy my sister!

I've also tried the asx stream from mythweb, seems to work but any 
attempt to skip crashes vlc.

Any ideas??  Am I going about this the wrong way?