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Stream MythTV to Your Cell Phone 105

Posted by CmdrTaco from the because-you-can dept.
lerhaupt writes "I've setup a howto for streaming your MythTV recordings to your 3G cell phone. In involves getting your myth box to convert recordings to 3gp format and then setting up Apple's Darwin Streaming Server to handle streaming the videos from a webpage it sets up. "
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Stream MythTV to Your Cell Phone More

Stream MythTV to Your Cell Phone

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  • I can just imagine... (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Now I can stream all my video pr0n to my cellphone!
  • I hadn't heard of the Darwin Streaming Server before - sounds quite cool from this review [streamingmedia.com]

    Thanks Apple - nice to see you contributing your own code rather then just grudgingly contributing back derived code!

    • Re:Darwin Streaming Server (Score:5, Funny)

      by gEvil (beta) ( 945888 ) on Wednesday May 17, 2006 @09:53AM (#15350341)
      Hmmm. Someone named Whiney Mac Fanboy who's unaware of Apple technologies (open source even) that have existed for many many years. Somehow it all makes sense...
      • Hmmm. Someone named Whiney Mac Fanboy who's unaware of Apple technologies (open source even) that have existed for many many years. Somehow it all makes sense...

        I'm a whiney-mac-fanboy, not a whiney-apple-open-source-products-fanboy! (and really, unless you want to setup a streaming server, why in hell would you have heard of this?)

        But I completely agree with your implication!
    • I hadn't heard of the Darwin Streaming Server before

      DSS was the subject of an InfoWorld article a while back (nov 03 [infoworld.com]) about setting up QuickTime-compatible video feeds.


  • Can someone enlight us with the quality and/or bitrate of 3gp videos? TFA and the wikipedia link are light on details.


    --
    Superb hosting [tinyurl.com] 20GB Storage, 1_TB_ bandwidth, ssh, $7.95

    • Re:3GP (Score:5, Informative)

      by dtsazza ( 956120 ) on Wednesday May 17, 2006 @09:45AM (#15350282)
      Can someone enlight us with the quality and/or bitrate of 3gp videos? TFA and the wikipedia link are light on details.

      3GP is just a multimedia container format - so the quality and bitrate depends on what codecs you use for the video and audio contained within it. Video is stored as MPEG-4 or H.263, and audio streams as AMR-NB or AAC-LC. 3GP does apparently describe "image sizes and bandwidth" - though from searching on www.3gpp.org [3gpp.org] I couldn't pick it out. There's a lot of technical specifications there though, so if you really want to know (as opposed to idle curiousity) I'm sure you can find out from their specifications.

  • Fair use... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jginspace ( 678908 ) <.jginspace. .at. .yahoo.com.> on Wednesday May 17, 2006 @09:29AM (#15350168) Homepage Journal

    Triumph. Indeed some beautiful uses of fair use. Fair use to record the tv program to my hard drive... Fair use to convert the video format to one viewable by my cell phone... Fair use to stream it to my cell phone for my own personal enjoyment.

    M'lud that wraps up the case for the defence...

  • Looks like he's serving his web page from his freakin' 3g phone.
  • In other news:

    I've setup a howto for Slashdotting pages submitted to Slashdot. In involves getting someone (the "submitter") to submit articles to Slashdot and then setting up your browser to point to the webpage in question.

  • ...and was far from impressed with how it ended up, I might see (after the slashdotting) what this is on about to see if the quality could be improved at all from what I got in the end. The best way to get tv on your phone is to put an avi on your sd card and then use a media player there to watch it (you could reduce the quality somewhat to compensate for the smaller screen)... where you get the avi from... "legal" channels
    • And when I'm traveling, or otherwise far away from my recordings, I'm supposed to just run home and load up my SD card, then make the trip back to wherever I was originally in order to watch video? That really makes no sense whatsoever, it solves a different problem altogether.

      • And when I'm traveling, or otherwise far away from my recordings, I'm supposed to just run home and load up my SD card, then make the trip back to wherever I was originally in order to watch video?

        No, you log into your MythTV box, transcode a show to a suitably low bitrate with MEncoder (or whatever), and download or stream the resulting file. I typically encode video to 320x240 MPEG-4 at 384 kbps and audio to 22.05 kHz mono MP3 at 64 kbps. If the remote location has broadband access of some sort, I c

    • Re:I've used 3gp before... (Score:4, Informative)

      by Tx ( 96709 ) on Wednesday May 17, 2006 @09:51AM (#15350330) Journal
      3gp is a container, what you said makes as much sense as saying you're unimpressed with the quality of AVI video. It depends what codec was used (MPEG4 basically), what bitrate, and the quality of the playback software and hardware.
      • your right, what I said wasn't clear enough, so I'll go into what I meant... The quality I had to use to get the file really small (which is what I think would be needed to do this and send it over to a phone which for a point of refernce I was using about the quality of a video message. This would let it be downloaded pretty much in real time (because of how slow GPRS is on phones). At this size the quality wasn't very good which I know isn't really a fault of 3gp but in this instance I was (wrongly - bu

  • Oh good... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by gearmonger ( 672422 ) on Wednesday May 17, 2006 @09:35AM (#15350216)
    Our access is becoming more and more universal just as the amount of watchable content on TV becomes less and less.

    I'd prefer a truly rich web experience on my phone WAY more than streaming TV garbage.

    • Our access is becoming more and more universal just as the amount of watchable content on TV becomes less and less.

      Says you! Right now I'm using my phone to watch a great program with Chuck Norris talking about the Total Gym. I can't wait to see what happens in the next episode!
      • Chuck kills everyone at the gym after they give his co-host a lethal injection of some drug.

        Best Chuck Norris quote ever, "Chuck Norris's tears cure cancer! Too bad he doesn't cry."
    • That's the whole point of MythTV. Why would you record garbage? Even with only the *four* channels of TV I have available there is enough good content because I am not tied to a schedule.
    • You're obviously not a sports fan. I think most people who buy this kind of technology do so in order to not miss the game [mercurynews.com].

      (My subject line is a reference to a Married with Children ep where Al gets a 1,000 channel cable connection — and discovers nothing worth watching on any of them. An ungodly number seem to be running reruns of a certain TV show...)

    • Not to mention that the battery life on some of these phones is horrible.

      I got the Samsung Blade....great phone, neat features, but, battery life is mostly hypothetical, and that is just for phone calls, and picture mail (free where sms text is charged for). If you try to watch any media content on the thing, you'd better have it plugged into the charger while you're doing it...

      I got the phone for about $50...so was a great deal, but, I sure hope they come out with a better battery. I love the features, a

  • I never thought TV on a tiny phone would take off enough to interest people into doing it with a few nifty hacks and some FOSS, but then again I never thought embedding low-quality cameras into phones would take off either. Funny old world.
    • I'm wondering who can afford to watch streaming video on a cell phone, when the cell providers charge by the MB. ($.03/KB on my cell plan, $25/month to watch the provider's mobile TV product)
      • There are operators with unlimited data plans. The operator 3 (Tre) in Sweden has one for ~$70/month.

        http://www.tre.se/templates/SubscriptionPlan.aspx? id=19365 [www.tre.se]

        (It even sounds a bit better than that. If you manage to use a maximum of 1Gb a month you're down to ~$27/month - and if you exceed 1Gb you pay $70 instead and then it's unlimited for that month)

      • I'm wondering who can afford to watch streaming video on a cell phone, when the cell providers charge by the MB.

        Sprint doesn't. I'm paying $15 per month for unlimited data (in addition to $25 for the cheapest voice plan...only 300 minutes or so per month, but I don't use anywhere near that.)

        The data service works with the apps in the phone or with my notebook over a Bluetooth connection, too, so I can avoid hotel broadband charges if I want.

  • Great, now we can get into car accidents with people watching their cell phone while driving Paulie Walnuts talk on his cell phone while driving.
  • Or does anyone expect the MPAA to sit and watch? I'm pretty sure they're already trying to find a loophole where this MUST NOT be allowed.

    And if the old laws ain't good enough, buy a new one.
    • Who are they gonna sue? You can put together a mythTV setup using an ordainary PC, a distro of linux and some video capture software. There's no-one to sue except the user, but surely that' never..... oh wait.
  • Its not something I can can do (no 3g and no tv card), but that sounds pretty cool

    I was impressed by standard downloadable movie clips so would expect the 3g ones to be much better especially if its your own recording you actually get what you want not what other people decide everyone wants.

    So while everyones watching the world cup highlights on their 3g phones, I could be catching up on lost (which btw the uk channel 4 are offering all aired episodes for free) or something.

    If I had the kit I'd definatly g
  • 1. make app X convert to a format device Y can understand
    2. put the format in a streaming format header
    3. put the format on a website
    4. ??? wtf?

    So this specifically was a tutorial with regards to MythTV and seeing your recordings on your mobile phone, and the steps were pretty much as above? Why is this front page news? Why is this news at all? Would it be front page news if I used a combination of my Avermedia recording app, mIRC, windows media encoder and the Apache web server to achieve the same but f
    • The T-Mobile 'limitless' data access is actually limited to a 2Gb 'acceptable use' limit, but then hey that's about 1996 Mb more than just about all other carriers.
    • This is exactly the same thing I thought. All he's doing is preconverting his recorded programs to 3gp and then serving them up. I can do the same thing with nuvexport to asf and apache.

      I've dug around trying to get my recorded programs to my phone, but most solutions require you to pre-transcode the file. Things like SlingBox and Sony LocationFree do it on the fly, which is what it should be. The big problem I have that everything wants you to define your video list ahead of time, rather than have a Vi

  • 3GP sox? (Score:1, Offtopic)

    by Doc Ruby ( 173196 )
    When will sox [sourceforge.net] support conversion from/to the 3gp format?
    • Moderation -1
          100% Offtopic

      A process for streaming AV to 3G mobile phones requires converting the AV to a 3G format: 3GP. A popular audio format conversion tool, sox, doesn't convert it. I ask when that tool can be used to "stream MythTV to your cell phone", and that's "Offtopic"?

      TrollMod slashstalkers, phone home. Your mommy knows you need another spanking.

  • vlc (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Lussarn ( 105276 ) on Wednesday May 17, 2006 @10:07AM (#15350449)
    I use vlc to stream TV to my work. Seems to be very similiar to this but possibly easier to set up.
    Beyond my GUI this is basicaly what I do. I use http but I think vlc can do rtsp if needed.

    At home:
    vlc -I http /mnt/big1/incoming/now.mpg --sout '#transcode{deinterlace,vcodec=mp4v,acodec=vorbis, vb=300,ab=80,width=320,height=240,fps=12}:standard {access=http,mux=ogg,url=111.111.111.1111:9000}' &/dev/null &

    At work:
    vlc http://111.111.111.111:9000/ [111.111.111.111]

    • Re:vlc (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      And how do you choose a different stream to playback? By restarting vlc through ssh? the web interface (even the pockety one) of vlc does not allow easy selection of streaming title.

    • I use vlc to stream TV to my work.

      Does your boss know that?

  • Changing channels? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Durzel ( 137902 ) on Wednesday May 17, 2006 @10:09AM (#15350464) Homepage
    Unless I'm missing the obvious, how would you go about changing the channels whilst streaming Live TV?

    The article seems to mention streaming movies you have already pre-recorded, which is all well and good but if you are just going to watch pre-recorded films whats stopping you from just sticking them on your phone the next time its in the base station?

    I would've thought with MythTV in the equation that streaming live TV and being able to change channels (on your phone) would be the killer app.
    • >I would've thought with MythTV in the equation that streaming live TV and being able to change channels (on your phone) would be the killer app.

      watch live TV? thats so 1990's. I even record the morning news so I can fast forward to the weather, when I wake up (although whats the point, I live in southern AZ, the weather is just HOT and sunny everyday.)

      I assume you browse mythTV web interface to choose to record the channel to watch, then you play that. Besides someone who is this addicted to gadgets

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • why stream recorded shows (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    when you could just copy them onto a 2gb memory stick which should hold 6+ hrs of 320x240 h264 content

    no internet required
    • Cause you don't get the sense of accomplishment after having spent 1 week, $100, and a couple hundred rebuilds later.

      Pssshhhh copying to a mem stick and plugging it in. STUPID!

      (yes this sarcastic)

  • Serial Evolution (Score:1, Offtopic)

    by Doc Ruby ( 173196 )
    Has anyone packaged the Darwin server in a Debian or Ubuntu .deb package? Has anyone got a Darwin server to act as a stream source for a shoutcast or icecast server?

  • No use here in Europe (Score:4, Interesting)

    by OlivierB ( 709839 ) on Wednesday May 17, 2006 @10:13AM (#15350490)
    While we may get all the new shiny phones here in Europe, 3G and other data plans are priced so high that nobody uses them (as opposed to the US where you typically get unlimited bandwith).

    FYI, I am with Orange in the UK where I am charged £4 for 4MB per month (that's about a Slashdot page per DAY!).

    I went to the Netherlands for week-end and unfortunately needed to lookup a few things on my PDA while over there, I totalled £60 for almost 5MB (that's USD 100 for you guys).

    So I won't be streaming 24 and al from no mythbox to my cellphone.

    T-Mobile launched web-n-walk which they sell as unlimited usage for £30 except you can't use it for P2P (duh), but excludes as well any IM (!!) or VOIP usage.

    I hope data-plans are next (after roaming charges) on the EU's commission list of but-rape things to fix.

  • Now I just have to find something on TV I actually want to watch so badly that I can't wait until I get home and I'll be the shizzle!

    MjM

  • I've set up a web page too (Score:3, Funny)

    by Call Me Black Cloud ( 616282 ) on Wednesday May 17, 2006 @11:54AM (#15351453)

    On it, I tell you how to take a book with you and read when you're bored.

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