Monthly Archives: November 2008

Streaming video from Slingbox to VLC

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In short, you can’t. Well, at least not with the more recent Slingboxes as far as I can see. If anyone wants to tell me how to do it, I’d be very grateful.

Some background…

After getting fed up with the complexity of my previous way of streaming video around the house with EyeTV and VLC (details here), I gave in and bought a Slingbox. I’d been interested in the Slingbox since it first came out, but was put off by the reputation that Sling Media acquired for being rather too optimistic about when the product would actually work with a Mac (they seemed to claim it was ready about a year before it actually was).
Anyway, by this time, this had all been resolved, so I bought a Slingbox Solo. And it’s great – it’s plugged into the back of my Sky+ box, and can stream video to other PCs and Macs in the house.

But it requires the Sling Player software to view the stream. I find this hugely annoying, as I would like to read the stream with VLC and transcode it to allow a couple of other non PC/Mac video boxes I’ve got.

The is a Slingbox plug-in for VLC that someone has built, but as far as I can see, this only works with the original Slingboxes; the later ones encode the video stream so the VLC playback is garbled.

But if anyone knows how to do it, I’d be very interested to hear.


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Streaming video from EyeTV

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I have a Mac Mini under the TV running EyeTV to record the DVB signal. Normally, it just sits there recording stuff, which I then copy off and put on DVD. But sometimes I want to stream the live signal to other computers in my house.

First, you need to set the program you want to stream recording. Then, run this script which will stream the current recording using VLC (you need to have VLC installed, of course)

#! /bin/bash

# change this to the location of where VLC is installed
vlc=/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/clivlc

# change this to the location of your EyeTV archive
cd “/Users/rhughes/Movies/EyeTV Archive”

eyetvr=`osascript -e ‘tell application “EyeTV”‘ -e “repeat with r in recordings”
-e “if busy of r then set a to path of r” -e “end repeat” -e “end tell” -e “PO
SIX path of a”`
mpg=${eyetvr%*.eyetvr}.mpg

echo Streaming $mpg

$vlc “$mpg” –sout “#standard{access=http,mux=ps,dst=}” –intf=http –http-host 192.168.0.91:8081 vlc:quit # &

You should also change 192.168.0.91 to the address of the machine running EyeTV.

To view the stream, use VLC (or other compatible player) on a remote machine and point it to http://192.168.0.91:8080 (changing it to your EyeTV machine’s IP address).

The script also starts the VLC web interface on http://192.168.0.91:8081 – you can connect to this from a web browser and control the playback.

It all works OK, but I have to admit I got fed up with the complexity of it all, and bought a Slingbox. More on that another time


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Encode normal files with Handbrake 0.9.3

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I only just noticed that a “snapshot build” of the next version of Handbrake was released last month. There seem to be two major differences – firstly, it can take normal files as input (the previous versions could only read from DVDs). Secondly, you need to have VLC installed if you want to rip DVDs.
But it’s the first point that’s really useful. A lot of my use of ffmpeg from the command line was to enable me to encode many files in one go (typically running overnight). Handbrake has a batch queue, and a good preset system, so it’s easy to build an encoding queue quickly, and let it run.


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