VLC as a backend transcoding engine

[TheLQ]

More updates from the day

1. I've found another glitch where when video scale is 1, vlc makes a garbage video. I've reported it here: http://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=102618
2. With that same video and I think others (can't exactly remember) there's no video at all when displayed on an Xbox or PS3. Lowering the video scale seems to of fixed this, so I went ahead and added a video scale slider to the gui. This also has the added benifit of lowering the bitrate of the stream, which may or may not expliain blank video's.
3. 2 video's had garbled audio and jerky. However when audio-sync was removed they worked fine. It hasn't seemed to effect other video's, so now by default its disabled and can be enabled in the gui
4. VLC/ffmpeg has several experimental codecs. By default they are disabled (I guess so VLC doesn't implode each time), but now there's a GUI option to enable them.
5. Because I got tired of constantly recompiling PMS to change the video, audio, and container codecs they are now specified in the gui. But sometime soon were going to have to figure out how to select the right codec to tell to VLC. I can tell you the existing confs for the UPnP players are more of a guide to which codec to use, not the exact name. If you have any idea on how to turn the UPnP confs into this: http://wiki.videolan.org/Codec please let me know
6. How do I save configuration data? Can't figure it out
7. EDIT: Embeded subtitles might occasionally be tiny. Especially when you run something like my setup with an Xbox hooked up to an ancient 30"-ish CRT tv. A potential issue is that I'm not sure we can configure subtitle size, at least from what I've seen

[Redlum]

Awesome work

Shouldn't you report those VLC bugs in their bugtracker? Probably will get more attention there.

https://trac.videolan.org/vlc/

Also see: http://wiki.videolan.org/Report_bugs

[TheLQ]

VLC's bug tracker: {1} Active Tickets (1509 matches)

Wow. That coupled with the many "We are not obligated to fix bugs" statements sprinkled throughout the FAQ and bug tracker makes me really question how VLC still functions and still manages to innovate. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt though and submit them to trac

More updates:

1. Codec auto-detection is now implemented. However it required modification of the FormatConfiguration class and made VLC (on windows at least) a lot less stable and prone to crashing when streaming to a PS3. I had to disable auto-detection (new feature) and specify the old codecs to get it working with all my video's again. This might mean that stable codecs need to be specified in player configuration files
2. Finally JGoodies form's syntax clicked with me and now the GUI doesn't look like crap. Wootz
3. Can now add custom parameters to VLC in GUI
4. Manually selecting audio and subtitle tracks in the #Transcode# folder on the client actually play's those tracks now
5. Saving configuration changes in the GUI is being worked on by valib

I still have no guidance on fast fowarding or how to make UnbufferedOutputFile not simply break PMS. If anyone has any suggestions please let me know

[Skylion]

EDIT: Embeded subtitles might occasionally be tiny. Especially when you run something like my setup with an Xbox hooked up to an ancient 30"-ish CRT tv. A potential issue is that I'm not sure we can configure subtitle size, at least from what I've seen

I found some useful information on this over here.
http://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?t=19901

Anyway, apparently, assuming VlC is using the freetype2 font renderer, their are two commands that can be sent to vlc to alter the subtitle size.

"freetype-fontsize <integer>"
|-> Changes the Font size by designating the height in pixels (no quotation marks in the actual command)
and also
"freetype-rel-fontsize {20 (Smaller), 18 (Small), 16 (Normal), 12 (Large), 6 (Larger)}"
|-> Changes 'relative' Font size, I would personally recommend trying the large value, (12). The default value is 16.

[goonx]

I would love to see the use of VLC as the transcoder. It plays everything i throw at it and i've been using it for years as my go-to player. Hoping to see more dev in this area. Keep up the work!

[ExSport]

MPlayer plays same way almost all file types. Difference here is decoder X transcoder.
That VLC is able to play(decode) your file doesn't mean it can transcode it. Transcoder can have some limits like it can't make file with 15fps but decoder can play it.
Result is that 15fps file is played but encoder can't use 15fps (I spotted this behavior for some codecs in MPlayer and I think it can be case also for VLC)
I don't want to say MPlayer/MEncoder is better than VLC but that VLC can have same problems like MEncoder

[TheLQ]

I am aware of this issue which has caused some problems, but its not bad. The reason though I've done all this is because VLC's transcoding engine works way more times than Mencoder's engine does.

Just as an FYI to everyone, I plan on making a pull request very soon once I see if I can iron out an issue.