[RockerC]

@RockerC: Indeed I saw it more like it was suggested by Montellese and UPnP was not my first priority.

First step would be to implement transcoding and test it via the webserver.
I thought about choosing different containers and video/audio codecs and quality attributes such as resolution through different HTTP requests.

Using this kind of API at least mobile phones could stream media properly. And this could be used in many of the existing remote apps to stream media content directly into the app.

Cool, but still suggest that you implement MIME Type profiles for device interoperability, as the server-side need to know what formats/codecs/resolutions is supported on the client-side.

As topfs2 noted, sometimes only remuxing is needed, like for example if a video is encoded in H.264 but the stream is in an MKV container then demux and mux to MP4 might be enough.

Even if your transcoding system will initially be limited to only providing APIs for JSON RPC or Web Server I think that you will still want the the client (player) begin communication with handshake where it state exactly what formats/codecs/resolutions it is capable to playback. And to achieve this I suggest you use DLNA's Media Format Profiles standard as a basis, and as a proof-of-concept maybe copy the XML profile files for clients from Plex Media Server as suggested here https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/6179 and see https://forums.plex.tv/index.php/topic/4...a-devices/ or for a specific example http://nine.plugins.plexapp.com/system/b...ofiles.xml.

The basic idea with Media Format Profiles is that the client (player) begin its connection with the server (transcoding system) by sending a manifest with a capability specification lists. And if you implement this using the standard DLNA Media Format Profiles then it will also be easier to later reuse your transcoding system for the UPnP server in Kodi.

That said, no matter which solution you choose I think that device interoperability and selection of formats to transcode to should be done fully automatic from the end-user perspective.