Support transcoding to H264

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SonicSam
Posts: 2
Joined: Sun Jul 29, 2012 11:45 am

Support transcoding to H264

Post by SonicSam »

As someone who has recently acquired a Raspberry Pi, this has become a bigger interest to me.

The Raspberry Pi has 1080p H264 Hardware Decoding.

In the process of making my own .conf file for my Raspberry Pi, H264 for TranscodeVideo is not a possiblity.

Having manually transcoded a file via mencoder, it is possible, however UMS cannot call the right stuff. (Looking at the commands called, there are mpeg2 specific stuff such as -mpegopts, where that'd need to be replaced with -x264opts, etc).

For example: I ran:

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mencoder -ss 0 H:\[gg]_EUREKA_SEVEN_AO_-_14_[CC946B7C].mkv -ovc x264 -x264encopts subq=6:partitions=all:8x8dct:me=umh:frameref=5:bframes=3:b_pyramid=normal:weight_b -oac mp3lame -lavcopts acodec=mp3:abitrate=128 -srate 48000 -ass -sid 0 -mc 0 -noskip -o D:/test 
UMS handles everything so nicely, it would be awesome to add in this option for people with H264 media players (such as Raspberry Pi).

Thanks!

Edit: Additionally, if this cannot be done by someone, I could attempt to fork UMS from GitHub and implement it myself.
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SharkHunter
Developer
Posts: 648
Joined: Fri Jun 01, 2012 9:36 pm

Re: Support transcoding to H264

Post by SharkHunter »

Is raspberry any good? I though about buying one myself but I already got 3-4 boxes :)
Yes this shouldn't be hard to add. But how well the encoders actually supports the h264 encoding is something that needs to be investigated....
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We believe in: rough consensus and running code.
SonicSam
Posts: 2
Joined: Sun Jul 29, 2012 11:45 am

Re: Support transcoding to H264

Post by SonicSam »

SharkHunter wrote:Is raspberry any good? I though about buying one myself but I already got 3-4 boxes :)
Yes this shouldn't be hard to add. But how well the encoders actually supports the h264 encoding is something that needs to be investigated....
I'm enjoying the Raspberry Pi at the moment. I'm currently running Raspbian for an OS on it. Planning to use it as my media player and a portable torrent device (to use when my main PC is off). Tiny little device that can replace my PS3 :). If support from UMS goes into this, than I wouldn't even need to use XBMC to access the UPnP/DLNA share.

I would be accessing UMS from the Raspberry Pi with djmount that allows mounting mount MediaServers content as a Linux filesystem. Having tested this with UMS with "No encoding" on a #TRANSCODE# file. It works fantastically.

I only tested mencoder.exe from win32 with x264 encoding, using a command similar to the above (have slightly tweaked for performance since then) I'm not sure if the ffmpeg that comes with UMS is compiled with x264.

For example I modified my x264opts to

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subq=6:rc-lookahead=10:trellis=0:8x8dct=0:level=4.1
Running on an i7 920, this process is fairly taxing for the CPU, however, it is enough to be able to watch it on a Raspberry Pi in near-realtime :).
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SubJunk
Lead Developer
Posts: 3706
Joined: Sun May 27, 2012 4:12 pm

Re: Support transcoding to H264

Post by SubJunk »

I have thought about adding this but it would only work well for fast computers, and even then realtime 1080p encoding in x264 may not happen fast enough. So while the feature could be added (and probably will eventually considering the bandwidth benefits) now there are more urgent things considering that not many people's computers could do it.
MetalHead-666
Posts: 15
Joined: Wed Jun 20, 2012 8:48 pm

Re: Support transcoding to H264

Post by MetalHead-666 »

Maybe you can build in an option to preprocess, i run my media server 24/7 but doesn't do much about 20 hours a day :-) so this time could be used to convert video to h264 ...
ums_rules
Posts: 4
Joined: Tue Jan 22, 2013 7:37 am

Re: Support transcoding to H264

Post by ums_rules »

I would love more support for Raspberry Pi on the Universal Media Server. I have bought the MPEG2 license. However the MPEG2 files do not seem to work on the Raspberry Pi. H264 work very well even in 1080p.

Does anyone have succesful settings that Ì could put in the XBMC.conf file so it may work. I do not know which MPEG2 format RaspBMC takes.
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