Tvheadend

I've not been able to get it to work when I've looked, but I don't use it so it's not a problem. It seems from my quick examination that whatever browser I try tries to download the file instead of handing it to an application to stream... maybe it's a MIME type issue.

Anyway, if you right-click on "Play" and copy the URL you can then open that in VLC and it'll play fine. Ugly but workable.

Prof Yaffle, are you really using 3.9.470?

I don't experience the same issue you mention with "downloading".

Also I dont have any "Play" I can copy any url from.

This new version seems to be using some kind of flash based player..

Apologies for the half-baked answer!

1. I'm on 3.9.438 for the moment, but that should be close enough.

2. The "Watch TV" function on the EPG tab gets me nowhere.

3. Navigate to Configuration -> Channel/EPG -> Channels and you'll see the "Play" links for each channel. However, clicking them simply results in a download instead of a stream (for me)

4. However however, right-clicking a link and copying the URL gives me something like

http://<server-IP>/stream/channel/89bf3a4277d34af5a6bea33191efbcc7

Switching to VLC and using Media -> Open Network Stream with that url and all works fine.

I suspect it's all to do with the changes in channel config during the dvb rewrite - the /stream/channel/xxxxx URL isn't being detected as streaming so never triggers a handover to VLC.

Two additional thoughts:

1. If I use the "Watch TV" function, the generated URL is this:

http://server-ip:9981/stream/channel/b38163920494a4130ae7f13606828639?transcode=1&mux=webm&acodec=VORBIS&vcodec=VP8&scodec=NONE&resolution=384&bandwidth=0&language=

... however, as I'm using the prebuild debs, I don't have transcoding support enabled. I suspect the problem here is the use of HTML5 instead of the VLC plugin. Emphasis on suspect.

2. Looking at the "Play" code, the URL above (http://server-IP/stream/channel/channel-ref) is correct, it simply doesn't trigger any action because it's just a plain URL. There's no mime-type specified, no handler.

I'll think further.

@Prof Yaffle

For html5 streaming you will probably need to enable transcoding while compiling tvh (src/plumbing/transcoding.c transcoding_enabled = 1).

Agreed, and that's easy enough to fix for myself.

What's odd is that the streaming is hard-coded to transcode from what I see, when transcoding isn't enabled by default. Shurely shome mishtake.

I'm looking to see if there's at least some fallback.

Initial conclusion:

HTML5 can't handle MPEG-2 streams, so they have to be transcoded or handed to an external player.

And browser support for H.264 is patchy - Firefox chokes, Chrome plays (although I thought Google had withdrawn support in favour of VP8, so I may be falling back on a third-party codec?).

Summary:

HTML5 will require transcoding 'cos the underlying ts stream isn't likely to be in VP8. VP9 or Theora...

Thanks alot for the well explained answer.

My current install is from the PPA.

Is the only way to enable transcoding to edit src/plumbing/transcoding.c transcoding_enabled = 1 and compile tvheadend from source? And that will make the flash player work?

Kinda.

If you plan on doing transcoding (also optional):

$ sudo apt-get install libavcodec-dev libavfilter-dev libavformat-dev libavutil-dev libswscale-dev

You might also like to install the extra codecs pack (incl. H264 encoder):

$ sudo apt-get install libavcodec-extra-53

Then change transcoding_enabled to 1 and compile. Seemed to work okay on my system, anyway!