[MarkyC]

I've no idea what you mean by formally join.

How does one contribute to this project? Is there a page on GSoC (I've never participated before, but as a CS student I assume I am eligible)?

This is a project that alcoheca is going to do. You need to do a project of your own to join.

Ahhh, gotcha. Well, good luck alcoheca!

[natethomas]

Don't forget to submit this, alcoheca!

[alcoheca]

No danger of that, just got some exams to think about today! Ill submit tonight.

[Kib]

Congratulations on having your proposal accepted!

[LongMan]

Congrats.

[Rakeesh]

Any chance if dtcp support? With any luck the unlocking technology act will pass, making it legal to reverse engineer.

[Starstream]

Any chance if dtcp support? With any luck the unlocking technology act will pass, making it legal to reverse engineer.

That's totally outside the scope of this project and XBMC itself. The solution is to avoid products from companies that make use of DTCP DRM in their DLNA PVR's like Panasonic for instance.

Speaking of Panasonic their 2013 TV's at long last have been updated media player wise to handle most common media formats so the need for transcoding on those is minor unless it's a really old or obscure video format, older generation Panasonic's though are terrible and heavily reliant on transcoding.

LG have been pretty consistent over the years, their media player has always been decent without the need for special profiles. Though older models prior to 2012 series do lack DTS audio decoding.

Samsung appear to be getting worse each year in customizing DLNA requiring a specific profile to connect to the server, lots of complaints from off the shelf NAS owners who have old versions of Twonky (Western Digital My Book and others) that doesn't have the necessary profiles for Samsungs latest 2013 TV's.

Sony still erratic as ever, while Sony BD players may support most common formats their TV's are still a crazy mixed bag sometimes only doing the bare minimum, this article on Sony Japan shows all the sets going back to 2007 (circle means supported).

Not sure on some other smaller players like Sharp or Toshiba but I hear Toshibas newest models do play most things.

I have newest Panasonic ST60 and LG LM7600 to test with.

[Tolriq]

Not really sure how this would integrate in this profile thing, or if some special things would be needed.

But when I see requests on Yatse and the success of Plex for this use, one thing that is exploding is streaming from home to phones / tablets with different transcoding mode, high quality but still lower resolution for wifi@Home.
And lower quality (also for music) for 3G and such.

[Ghostdivision]

Just wanted to ask as a user who discussed this very feature as much needed a few months back.

Just a question as I grasp this, would this at all integrate with the new play using feature? Or is that completely separate? I was thinking how nice the play using feature will be but many of my upnp devices dont support some formats so transcoding for that would work nicely, although maybe these are two separate projects that wont be intertwined.

[alcoheca]

Just wanted to ask as a user who discussed this very feature as much needed a few months back.

Just a question as I grasp this, would this at all integrate with the new play using feature? Or is that completely separate? I was thinking how nice the play using feature will be but many of my upnp devices dont support some formats so transcoding for that would work nicely, although maybe these are two separate projects that wont be intertwined.

Yes it should all integrate together nicely. The play-to part will determine what formats are supported on the device and trigger playback based on what is available.

[Ghostdivision]

One last question as I want to thank you for one of the most important xbmc features I have seen in a long time.

Transcoding, im just curious where this is handled. You might have explained it in the OP and it might be over my head, but my research on plex for instance indicated high bitrate files need a very powerful cpu.

Should we expect similar behavior? And will this all be done on the xbmc machine using xbmc? In my case the htpc. Would that render the htpc inoperable for playback if its currently transcoding a high bitrate file to another dlna device?

Thanks again, and your work on this is much appreciated.

[alcoheca]

Hi thanks for your support.

I imagine the performance will be similar to other servers out there. My goal isn't to be more efficient than other servers, but on the other hand I do hope in the long term it could make software like Plex surplus to requirements..

[Tolriq]

We've already talked about this in PR but please don't forget the JSON part or at least a way to add JSON after for this (And external subs in the transcoding :p)

So we can make remotes as good as Plex one

[Montellese]

Ideally the transcoding could be used from anywhere so also through the webserver, then remotes could use HTTP streaming and don't have to rely on a UPnP implementation. In that case there's probably not much (if anything) that needs to be added to JSON-RPC.

[Tolriq]

There will still be a lot needed

A new flag to know if a media is streamable or not (for example lot's of addons generated content won't be).
Some commands to get the streaming capabilities of the media (ie : the possible audio streams, the possible subs stream, the possible bitrates or quality / resolutions available and perhaps more.

Then of course the commands to get the corresponding stream with the correct audio / sub and quality.

I may forgot other but whatever solution is chosen those will be needed.