Raspberry Pi DLNA Client

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damianiw

Member
Hi

I've been struggling to get my Sony CX523 in the spare room to stream via it's inbuilt video player from the humax hdr fox t2, it would see the files but not play .ts files.

So after a bit of playing, I tried unprotect - still no joy, I also decrypted a file - still no joy.

I installed the pkg to allow convert to mpg option via webif, and once catalogued by the built in DLNA server this file works - streaming straight to my spare TV !

I was going to ask / work out a way to automatically convert all to mpg but I realised once in mpg the Humax cannot skip forward when playing :-(

So next step:

See if my raspberry pi running xbmc will work, xbmc on my old xbox and PC work so fingers crossed. Aim is to hide the pi behing the tv and get the Remote for TV controlling the pi!

It'll probably be a week or so until I get time to test
 
I think there will be a lot of people interested in following this progress. As the OP, would you consider asking the moderators to change the title of this topic to something like "Raspberry Pi DLNA Client" - we are already well aware a typical smart TV can't cope with .ts.
 
Thanks - yes more than happy to have this thread changed to : Raspberry Pi DLNA Client

Will the mods monitor and do this or do I pm one ?
 
I never did write up my experiments with a Raspberry Pi...

I played around with XBMC on an RPi for a while using RaspBMC (http://www.raspbmc.com/).
At the time, OpenELEC for the RPi didn't seem to be very well developed or stable but it may be better now.

I was able to browse the media list on my Humax HDR but couldn't get video to stream at all, although I got the sound.
Looking at the XBMC log files, they reported "Unsupported video stream".

At that point, I read about the codecs which are supported in the RPi. Like most Broadcom SoCs, the chip used in the RPi has wide codec support. Unfortunately, in order to keep costs down, the RPi foundation have only licensed some of them - the rest are disabled (See http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/592 for more details). MPEG4 and h.264 are there though so there is still hope!

I do plan to get back to this when I have the time but it may not be practical to use an RPi as a DLNA client for the Humax - it doesn't have the horsepower to show video without hardware acceleration.
 
Hi Yep I just managed to try with Raspbmc RC3 (http://www.raspbmc.com/) and here are my findings

1) SD Content will not stream anything but sound, due to no licensing on the MPEG2 decoding, read here - http://forum.stmlabs.com/showthread.php?tid=863 it may happen at a license cost in future but guess don't hold your breath

SD content exported to Mpeg also only plays sound - same reason.

2) HD Content Worked via DLNA / UPNP ! beautifully in 1080p because it's encoded in .h264 which is licensed in the raspberry Pi!

My same issue I've not looked at yet exists, not all my HD content shows up on DLNA connections - it shows dlna indexed on the webif interface, I have auto-unprotect enabled, I have also using webif unencrypted in place an episode of coast - however the unencrypted doesnt show but strangely the original in the original folder does!

Weird, any ideas why I'm getting that ?

I'll try and upload a video to youtube of it working

Anyone tried an appletv ?
 
damianiw said:
2) HD Content Worked via DLNA / UPNP ! beautifully in 1080p because it's encoded in .h264 which is licensed in the raspberry Pi!
Click to expand...

Nice! I'll have to try that.

Weird, any ideas why I'm getting that ?
Click to expand...

Try resetting the DLNA database via webif->Diagnostics->DLNA Server and reboot to let auto-unprotect do its work.. could just be a confused database.
 
They aren't actually contrary, the GPU is fast enough to decode video but doesn't have the licence to hardware decode MPEG2 and the the CPU isn't powerful enough to software decode it.

It is licensed for h.264 and therefore can show HD recordings.
 
Oh I see. I did not understand from your previous post that there is hardware acceleration available.

I am a little surprised that a modern CPU can't process a StDef stream in its sleep, but there we are.
 
Software decoding of SD (mpeg-2) video generally works quite well on Android tablets and iPads, both of which share similar CPUs with the Raspberry Pi. I wonder if it is just an absence of codec and not a lack of CPU power that is stopping SD video from working in this case?
 
af123 said:
They aren't actually contrary, the GPU is fast enough to decode video but doesn't have the licence to hardware decode MPEG2 and the the CPU isn't powerful enough to software decode it.

It is licensed for h.264 and therefore can show HD recordings.
Click to expand...

Apologies for any confusion af123 is correct, to keep costs down they only licensed some codecs, the GPU in the pi is capable of doing it via hardware.

If they can mpeg2 via software then I'm sure they will with the raspbmc project or openelec which is another variant but not so far.
 
I believe some individuals are looking into optimising an MPEG decoder for the Pi using Open GL, but I imagine it is a far way out yet. Until something happens to change the status quo (e.g. the foundation getting a license), by all accounts the Pi won't be able to decode MPEG well enough.
 
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