wooops, sorry. I meant to send this to ports@.
On 08/08/18 23:14, Jordan Geoghegan wrote:
On 08/08/18 16:14, Marc Espie wrote:
On Wed, Aug 08, 2018 at 11:30:52AM -0700, Jordan Geoghegan wrote:
I know minidlna is in ports, but it doesn't do on the fly media
transcoding/remuxing with FFmpeg nor does it have an integrated
HTML5 video
player like Serviio does. I tried minidlna, but it unfortunately
doesnt work
for me as my devices need the transcoding/remuxing feature that Serviio
offers. For example, my bluray player refuses to playback most video
containers over DLNA (mp4, mkv etc) but will play most video formats
(AVC,
Xvid, mpeg2 etc) all it needs is for the video files to be remuxed
into an
M2TS or AVI container, which Serviio is able to do on the fly without
transcoding. It's also useful for making my H265 content available
on my
older devices that don't natively support the newer
codecs/containers. I
also quite enjoy the HTML5 video player, as it allows me to watch my
movies
on the go. It's annoying that it's proprietary, but at least it
works well
on OpenBSD.
Tip: devices like android tablets or the XBox One don't necessarily
advertize
it, but they DO have VLC, and it's fairly happy with most x265 content.
The only issue I've had with ldna service so far is the need to remux
subtitles
into an mp4/mkv because separate .srt files do not work.
That's fairly easy to do and rather permanent. Out of a fairly large
sample
of video files, I can say that VLC on those devices handles
everything but
maybe 0.05%.
Yes VLC is an amazing program and I use it heavily. MiniDLNA is also a
great project. Unfortunately VLC isn't available for Xbox 360.
MiniDLNA doesn't work very good for my BDP S5200 bluray players or my
Xbox 360 devices (of which my family owns over half a dozen) as they
require AVI, M2TS or WMV containers respectively. It isn't feasible
for me to remux/transcode my 10TB media library (which is comprised
mostly of mkv) just so I can watch cartoons on my living room TV.
Granted I could just build a dedicated OpenBSD media streaming box,
but that isn't a feasible solution for my mother or my technophobe
sister who both live on the other side of the country from me. It was
easy enough for me to just set up a small machine next to their router
and just scp new shows over to them as needed, where Serviio then
detects the new content and automatically adds it to their library;
From there it can then be accessed on their smart TV, bluray player,
360, computer or iPad either at home or abroad.
MiniDLNA and VLC also don't really have an equivalent to Serviio's
HTML5 streaming server. It is nice to be able to just pop open a
browser and have access to all my media on my home server. I like that
Serviio can parse movie/TV show names and connect to IMDB / TVDB to
grab relevant metadata and cover art for my files. It is nice to see
my files optionally presented with actual correct episode names,
rather than "S01E03$TVShowName$TorrentersName". I find that the video
metadata makes wading through 10,000+ movies and TV episodes a much
more pleasant experience, as I can search by year, actor, genre etc.
Another neat feature it offers is the ability to automatically
download subtitles for all your videos and either on-the-fly transcode
the file to burn them in, or remux on-the-fly to embed the subtitles.
On my home server, I run Serviio in a vmm(4) virtual machine with
read-only NFS access to my media library. Proprietary software is bad
ju ju, but I find Serviio to be a preferable all in one solution to
Plex, as I can at least run it on my favourite OS.
