BTV + Silverlight Streaming = viewing on other platforms

[mayhem70]

I thought I'd create this thread since I've done a "proof of concept" streaming to another platform via Silverlight streaming.

Linux

So I have a Linux buddy of mine on the other coast who I used as my test. He installed Moonlight beta 4 a couple of months ago, and I wanted also test some other Silverlight code I'm working on.
We were not able to get it working with Linux Firefox. He had installed IE 7 as part of some other reason on his Linux box. For those interested, here is an example of how to do that. Web Expose Blog Archive Internet Explorer 7 on Linux. And he was able to see the Silverlight player in IE, and use the controls to watch the video streamed from my machine.

I believe Moonlight is in beta 5 now, so we haven't tested to see if anything broke, but if anyone else wants to verify...feel free to try.

Also I don't think that the Silverlight implementation that BTV uses is up to Silverlight 3. I haven't been able to use the player with any files created from my HD-PVR. But I've had no problems with the QAM recordings.

[mayhem70]

Okay, I actually talked to him and convinced him to participate in some more testing since Moonlight is now 1.99.5 (I think beta 5).

We actually did a quick test this evening but got mixed results. The first attempt in placeshifting to him (in ff) went perfect, the second was choppy. Which got us to consider maybe there is some connection balancing that might be happening. To see, we are going to stream sd mpeg, hd mpeg, hd divx, and hd h.264. We know that the last will fail, but we just wanted to verify that the Silverlight implementation is still using 2.0 and not the latest.

[aboutu123]

click here click here

[Fickey]

Mayhem, are you doing all this Silverlight streaming/placeshifting on your Pentium D 935 system? If so, what kind of CPU loads are you seeing, and does it increase as you go from mpeg -> h.264?

[ZetaVu]

I should have time this week to mess with it, I'll try the latest firefox solution (on network, not internet). If that works, what would really be cool would be to make a community webadmin page that mimics BTV's viewscape, and be able to assign shortcuts for remotes. I'll also keep an eye on cpu loads, unfortunately this loses vdpau support (which xbmc has built in, vlc, Totem and Myth can be tweaked. Vdpau is nvidia's hardware acceleration for H.264 in linux, and my tests in xbmc have been impressive, low cpu even on unsupperted nvidia cards. Unfortunately XBMC goes out of sync on HD PVR recordings (at least btv ones, have not tried Sage or TMC).

[mayhem70]

Originally Posted by Fickey

Mayhem, are you doing all this Silverlight streaming/placeshifting on your Pentium D 935 system? If so, what kind of CPU loads are you seeing, and does it increase as you go from mpeg -> h.264?

Correct on the machine. When we resume the tests tonight or tomorrow, I'll make sure I keep an eye on the CPU load. I can say that when we did the first part of the updated test using the HD QAM recording, I was also watching a HD-PVR recording at the time...and had 3 other recordings going as well. No stutters or hiccups while I was watching.

Also, we confirmed that the Silverlight implementation that SS is using has not been updated for h.264 streaming (ala Silverlight 3). None of the HD-PVR recordings nor even the movies I encoded directly to h.264 stream. So Divx and Mpeg2 for now.

[mayhem70]

Originally Posted by ZetaVu

I should have time this week to mess with it, I'll try the latest firefox solution (on network, not internet). If that works, what would really be cool would be to make a community webadmin page that mimics BTV's viewscape, and be able to assign shortcuts for remotes. I'll also keep an eye on cpu loads, unfortunately this loses vdpau support (which xbmc has built in, vlc, Totem and Myth can be tweaked. Vdpau is nvidia's hardware acceleration for H.264 in linux, and my tests in xbmc have been impressive, low cpu even on unsupperted nvidia cards. Unfortunately XBMC goes out of sync on HD PVR recordings (at least btv ones, have not tried Sage or TMC).

Actually you took the words from my mouth, Zeta. I wanted to replace the current SL player in the Community Web Admin. There are a couple more samples that are much cooler/slick but until last night I wasn't sure if BTV used S2 or S3. More importantly, we could build a community standalone client with Silverlight, which we could launch just like Link. Since the BTV APIs would allow us to fetch data like guide and show info, we could do something pretty close.

[ZetaVu]

Ok, installed the beta in Ubuntu 9.04, FF 3.014 (beta 5), had to load m$ media pack, then sd worked, 100% cpu on my ubuntu machine, 50% on server. same with OTA HD. Did not try HD PVR.

Vlc, which works for all but two channels (audio issues with the channels) I get 70% cpu and much better playback on both sd and hd (did not setup vdpau yet) and server is next to nothing.