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Could TVHeadEnd do what PlayOn does?

Added by K Shea almost 9 years ago

I run the current stable version of TVHeadEnd (4.0.8) so I am not exactly on the bleeding edge, but I have heard that the next version of TVHeadEnd will have additional iptv functionality, I just don't know what specifically.

There is a software package called PlayOn that basically allows you to access and record a lot of free and subscription content from the Internet. If you are not familiar with them their site is at www.playon.tv but I am not here to shill for them because there are several things I don't like about their software, in particular:

  • It runs under Windows only and in fact relies on Internet Explorer in some fashion (IMHO no one should ever run a server under Windows)
  • It transcodes everything even if the source is in a perfectly usable format
  • If the video is better quality than 720p it reduces the quality to make it 720p
  • If the audio is dolby-encoded multichannel too bad, it changes it to 2 channel stereo
  • AND you have to pay for a subscription

I guess what I am wondering is, what do they do that TVHeadEnd could not do? And in particular, could TVHeadEnd do it without reducing the quality of the received signal?

I know they say that in some cases they are simply getting the content right from websites and recording it somehow. In most cases this is not live content; instead you select programs you want to watch and it downloads them as they become available and saves them in transcoded mp4 format. The idea would be great if they did not mess with the quality, but they do, and if it did not require Windows, but it does.

So I am just wondering if the next version of TVHeadEnd would have any functionality that would be similar to, but better than what PlayOn does. I wouldn't think it would be that difficult to do it better, but then I really don't understand how they do what they do in the first place. Note I am not a subscriber to PlayOn; I can't see spending the kind of money they want for low quality video and audio, and I am really not the slightest bit fond of the idea of running Windows on a server!


Replies (2)

RE: Could TVHeadEnd do what PlayOn does? - Added by Hanspeter Müller over 8 years ago

K Shea wrote:

I run the current stable version of TVHeadEnd (4.0.8) so I am not exactly on the bleeding edge, but I have heard that the next version of TVHeadEnd will have additional iptv functionality, I just don't know what specifically.

It's stuff like HLS and *.m3u support for networks (if you have a playlist with several IPTV/HLS urls where tvheadend can autogenerate channels from it)...

There is a software package called PlayOn that basically allows you to access and record a lot of free and subscription
  • It runs under Windows only and in fact relies on Internet Explorer in some fashion (IMHO no one should ever run a server under Windows)

Not only IE, but also Windows Media Player/Encoder, Flash and probably a lot of other evil things ;)

I guess what I am wondering is, what do they do that TVHeadEnd could not do? And in particular, could TVHeadEnd do it without reducing the quality of the received signal?

Yes and no:

No, simply because of the way PlayOn works, it seems to capture the output of the flashplayer (you can sometimes even see the Flash Player Control Buttons inside the videostream). For a lot of sites, flash with a proprietary, drm infested player, is the only way to access the content, at least as far as i know.

Yes, for some sites, that use less crappy tech like unencrypted rtmp, hls or even html5 video, there is a python app called livestreamer (http://docs.livestreamer.io/plugin_matrix.html) that supports a lot of live-streaming-sites, and even a naked ffmpeg can access a lot of streams...

Note I am not a subscriber to PlayOn; I can't see spending the kind of money they want for low quality video and audio, and I am really not the slightest bit fond of the idea of running Windows on a server!

Well, it boils down to the question, what content you want to access, if you can access it via any kind of shell application that can stream to STOUT, you can use the pipe:// handler, if not, PlayOn is probably your only way to go...

Regards,

/hp

RE: Could TVHeadEnd do what PlayOn does? - Added by K Shea over 8 years ago

Thanks for the response and through explanation. So as far as we know, there is nothing that will capture the output of a Flash player under Linux? Or is it that Linux simply won't play the DRM infested stuff?

One thing I have noticed is that Opera (the browser) seems to have its own built in Flash player (not 100% sure, but I think it does). If it were open source, maybe some Linux programmer could adapt their code, but I am not sure that it is. It's too bad that something like ffmpeg can't do it (not as far as I know, anyway) but then they probably don't want to have to deal with the DRM either.

I looked at livestreamer but when I got to their page at http://docs.livestreamer.io/plugin_matrix.html I was pretty unimpressed; I don't see anything there I would go out of my way to watch.

I'm not a programmer so I speak out of ignorance perhaps, but I always thought that anything that was possible on Windows could also be done (and often done better) under Linux. Of course I can see the advantage of writing for the more popular platform for most types of software, but with PlayOn you are essentially setting up a server, and servers should NOT be run on Windows if that can possibly be avoided.

My other curiosity about PlayOn is, when you say it captures the output of Flash player, I wonder how it does that. Does it actually create some type of virtual display internally and then essentially do a screen capture of each frame? If so, I can see why it would struggle to convert 1080 content. You'd probably need a pretty fast computer to pull that off!

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