Popcorn Hour and transcoding

[renzz]

I've been using the Recording service to stream to my Popcorn Hours since it became available, and must say it is really excellent. The ability to stream, change channels and record, controlling it all from your TV is such a good idea and really easy to use.

 

I am now looking at streaming over the Internet, and have had a play with the current transcoding functionality of the Recording service, which all works well, but I was wondering if it would be possible to incorporate transcoding into the PCH interface? If a remote user could do all that you can currently do with the interface, but view all TV or recorded programmes at a reduced bitrate, that would really be fantastic. There don't seem to be too many solutions out there that offer this user-friendly way of streaming over the Internet to a remote TV - Slingbox and Slingcatcher are probably the only ones but they are expensive.

 

Here's hoping this can be considered for a future release.

 

On the subject of the current transcoding, obviously you want the best quality at the lowest bandwidth and H264 offers that. However, I find when I use this, the DVBVService.exe process max's out at 25% CPU, which I think is just one core of my Quad core machine. Is it possible to multithread it, or is that VLC that's doing that? As far as I can see, VLC does support multi-threading.

 

One other question about the current transcoding settings - on the page where you set transcoding parameters (bitrate, codec etc), you have a drop down box to select bitrate for video and audio, but to the right is a box where you can type something - what does that do? Is it related to bitrate in anyway? Can you use it to set bitrates other than those offered? If so, how - whatever I put in there doesn't seem to correspond to the bitrate I get when I stream.

 

Thanks in advance.