I want to play DVDs and DVD ISO images across my network. MythTV is an obvious solution. Yet all I want is to play across the network. My new box has plenty of muscle to do all the latest tricks, but my old boxes do not. I need decompression at the server end, not the client. My new box stores my DVD ISO images and has a DVD burner/player.

I have read that I can stream with VLC. I found build scripts at slacky.eu and Eric's site.

Is there a way to stream DVD images with xine or mplayer? I have both installed although I never use mplayer. I have mplayer installed mostly for mencoder.

Are there streaming options other than VLC?

Regardless, does this streaming ability include decompression or only file serving? Streaming provides me no benefit without decompression.

Is streaming my only option to play DVD images across my network?

Perhaps too I am making this too complicated and all I need is a video card with built-in decompression. However, as my new box can handle decompression easily, then a software solution seems better than spending money on additional hardware.

I'm using Slackware 12.1.

Thanks.

Background:

I had been wondering whether I could use my 350 MHz PII Deschutes as a MythTV front-end, or as a DVD player (disks and images). Because my new computer is in my office, I would like a front-end or player for the living room. I could spend money on something like the MediaMVP, but I was thinking of using the PII. Newer often is nicer and faster, but if I can put old hardware to use I'd like to explore that option.

The PII box is an Asus Rev. 1.10 P2B motherboard with 448 MB of RAM, a Blaster Banshee AGP video card (no TV Out), C-Media 8738 PCI sound card, and 10/100 NIC. As an experiment, I played a video DVD ISO image across my network using xine (I have everything installed to make xine-check happy). The ISO is stored on my new box. The DVD image played on the PII with some minor pausing but did not lose sync, skip, or falter. The pausing was apparent but tolerable. I don't think I'd want to watch many videos with the pausing, but as a simple test I was tickled to see this old box nonetheless handle the video.

Copying the ISO image to the PII hard drive made no difference. I also tested an AVI that I created from the DVD image using K9Copy. There was still some pausing on the PII.

A video card with built-in decompression likely would resolve the pausing problems and basically solve my desire to play DVD images with this old box, yet I surmised that if all the decoding was handled by my new box, the PII more than likely would play the DVD image without any pausing and without any new hardware. A MythTV back-end would provide this decompression, but MythTV is one of those projects that will require a lot of concentration for a while.

I then wondered whether options less complicated than MythTV existed. The only streaming option I found is VLC, which I would have to build. I think I have most if not all the dependency packages already installed. But I don't know whether streaming includes decompression.

If you can play your DVD iso images locally, then yes, you can play them over the network.

Place them in a directory that is NFS exported and mount that directory to a location of your liking.

Look at the below scenario as a simple example:

Server01 has DVD iso images loaded to /movies which is exported via NFS. Client01 wants to play the movies over the network.

At Client01 issue:

Code:

Mkdir /media/movies
Mount –t nfs Server01:/movies /media/movies
Cd /media/movies

You should now see your iso images. Now, do a loopback mount to your iso images.

Code:

Mkdir /mnt/movie01
Mount –o loop /media/movies/goodmovie.iso /media/movie01

Enjoy and good luck.

I hope this is close to what you were looking for.

If using mplayer, you don't have to do the loopback mount, mplayer will read directly the DVD iso image
[edit]
Another solution than NFS could be use httpd (apache) to share videos accross network
(this way you don't have to mount anything)
You put videos in DocumentRoot or set a virtual host, then on the client:
Just a though
[edit2]
Ok, I admit I did not completely read the first post about video decompression on server side
I am not aware of a network video protocol that could send 24 or 25 non-compressed images per second, not sure if such a thing exists.

From what I understand, VLC should be able to stream to your other computer. It started as a client for a streaming server, which ended up getting built into VLC. I don't know how works as I have never tried using it as a streaming server. It supports RTP unicast and multicast and HTTP streaming if thats of any help. EDIT: and MMSH and UDP.

Even though it seems overkill, I would use Eric/Alien Bob's script, as VLC seems incredibly sensitive to library versions and his script builds all the libraries for you. It is the only way I have been able to get VLC running properly on my machine. The SlackBuild also supports x86_64, which is a bonus (thanks Eric).

EDIT the stream does get transcoded, so I assume it down-samples it (or it can be down-sampled) to something which should be easier for your computer to decode.

By the way I have 'secretly' been building packages of the SVN version of VLC (which will be 0.9.0 soon) based on QT4 instead of wxWidgets. So far, I have not seen any other Slackware packagers publishing anything for vlc-0.9.0_SVN less than a year ago. There are good reasons for that, believe me...

While I do think this new version is a moving target, not at all as stable as the 0.8.6.x series and a bitch to build (indeed, much worse than what I do in my published vlc.SlackBuild for 0.8.6.x) I do think that it has a much nicer interface and should be given some more exposure.

If people are interested, I may upload snapshot builds from time to time, to play with. I do not encourage mucking around with the SlackBuild script though... however it is included in the package if you want to examine it.

Eric

Thanks for the infos, I did not know RTP protocol
http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~hgs/rtp/faq.html#transport

I likely confused everybody by the way I formatted my post , but as I wrote in the background section, I already can play DVD ISO images across the network. Samba, NFS, ssh, scp, rsync, etc., all are working fine. The challenge is with the old box as a client --- there is pausing when playing because the hardware lacks decompression/transcoding muscle. Although on the PII xine-check provides a perfect report, Xine complains often about skipping frames.

I have so many supporting multimedia packages already compiled and installed from slackbuild.org. I'll have to look at Eric's build script. I do not want to duplicate packages.

That is good news. Thanks.

Prompted by my own post, last night I fired up my old NT4 box, which has VLC 0.8.6c installed. Strangely, although I played many different types of files, when I played DVD ISO images I had no sound --- only video. I don't know the cause and found no cure after searching the web. The problem likely is NT4 related because when I played the same VLC version in my virtual W2K machine, I had both video and sound. NT4 never supported DirectX very well and perhaps that is a clue for troubleshooting, but I would rather let my old NT4 system dwindle away and focus my time on solving my multimedia issues in Slackware.

Strangely too, and my observation is inconclusive because of the lack of sound, I noticed no pausing or hesitation during the playback of the image across the network. This is on a 400 MHz K6-III+ box with 256 MB of RAM and a puzzling Diamond Stealth 3D 3000 video card (S3 Virge). The PII is 350 MHz but has an AGP video card. I would think the AGP a better performer with the two CPUs being about equal. But on the PII I tested only with Xine.

Perhaps VLC is a superior product than Xine. Or VLC in Windows is a better performer than Xine in GNU/Linux. I don't know.

More strangeness: The K6-III+ box is dual boot. I booted into Slackware 12.1 and tried playing the DVD ISO image across the network with Xine. The image starts to play with a moment of audio, but then pukes. The video turns green and the machine stalls. I have to SSH into the box to kill the process. Running xine-check indicates various components are missing. I am told I have MTRR support but MTRR is unused. I don't know how to provide remedy to that. I also am told that the X server does not support YV12 overlays or XVideo. Yet there are no Xorg.0.log error messages regarding loading any of the X related acceleration modules. I have all the same required libraries and packages installed on all three of my computers, but the K6-III+ box won't play DVD images through Xine.

As a further experiment, I temporarily moved the Stealth 3D card into the PII. Same oddball problems reported in my other thread. The problem seems to be the card. Yet the card plays DVD images just fine in NT4 with VLC.

This has all been very puzzling. Although I am learning much, multimedia is still rather foreign to me. I'm wondering whether to forego all of this and just compile and learn MythTV. All I am hoping for is to use some old hardware as a makeshift DVD player or front-end while my new hardware provides all the decompression/transcoding muscle work.

Thanks for the replies thus far.

Have you seen this ? (VLC streaming)
http://www.videolan.org/doc/streamin...o/en/ch02.html

I used to play high quality videos on a system like yours a long time ago. So I will give you what I'd would do. Try mplayer. Build it optimized for Pentium 2. Read the mplayer docs and find out which hardware configuration gives you the fastest speed.

Things to note
* MTRR used to be required for higher performance, but I am unsure how this is handled these days. The latest kernels seems to be making changes here.
* C-Media 8378. This is a nice cheap card. I still use it on my current box. Unfortunately this is probably the biggest reason for your skipping, as it was mine. Like you said, without sound it is fine, but mplayer uses the sound playback to keep the video in sync. The problem is these cheap cards lack the hardware for precise timing mplayer demands. I used parameters such as -autosync and -framedrop and even -hardframedrop. These help, and unfortunately are necessary. If you make sure to pick the fastest settings this problem should be minimal.
* Mplayer's vesa or cvidix (but you use virge which I dunno if it has a vidix driver) modes are the fastest when X windows performance is poor. But these modes may have changed as I haven't used them for my newer systems. I'm unsure of mplayer's support now.
* The P2 should be faster than the K6-3 (maybe not K6-3+). This is my experience because I tested both architectures too under the same conditions.


BTW, NT4 is limited to DirectX 3.

Also, it's hard to compare to windows when the linux drivers for virge are probably incomplete.

Yes, I've known that for many years. Still, because VLC is supposed to be stand-alone, I would think there would be an option somewhere not to depend upon DirectX. Not a big deal as my NT4 box is slowly fading away into non-use.

The driver is indeed incomplete. Reading the man page indicates the driver does not support XVideo for the VX version of the chip, which my card has. Odd, considering the chip and video card were available in the mid 90s.

I have given up trying to do anything special with the Diamond Stealth card.

I'm still going to try running the MythTV front-end on the PII. If the back-end (my new box) is doing all the muscle work and merely streaming data to the PII, then there is a good chance playback will be smooth. Browsing the MythTV forums seems to indicate as much but only real-world testing will provide a final answer. Hopefully too that eliminates bottlenecks with the cheaper sound card.

If the PII fails as a front-end then I am resigned to building a new HTPC.

I might still try to compile VLC too.