Additionnal features request

Good morning,

Excellent application, which I bought literally five minutes after trying the free version.

A list of suggested features, some of them might already be listed elsewhere, but I include them here for sake of completeness. Many of them will require to 'deviate' from the common OSX/Windows architecture, as there will be OS dependencies

- HW decoding: right now you use ffmpeg for decoding and x264 for decoding. When doing a conversion (both offline and live conversion), this result into a very high CPU usage just for decoding, which makes less CPU available for encoding, hence affecting overall performance and system requirements. Implementing this would at least allow to improve performance for encoding. Under Windows that would require DXVA, not sure about OSX. One suggestion would be to replace ffmpeg with ffdshow tryout, the latest build has native DXVA support

- HW encoding: ah well, I know this one is sticky. There are no readily easy to use solution out there, but just adding it there for completeness. Maybe a partnership with the company called 'Elemental Technologies' who has done Badaboom, a very efficient GPU/CUDA based encoder specifically for mobile devices

On OSX, you could consider supporting the Eye.TV HW module.

- WTV support: many people use Windows 7 Media Center for recording live TV (as frankly, I really could not find an alternative that would provide the same level of functionality/interface wihtout extensive investment in terms of customization). I know WTV is problematic, however since Orb Live has implemented support for it (but Orb has a crappy picture quality), I would assume this would be feasible

Having all three above would allow for a very nice solution running on MCE based PCs, which are traditionnally lower performance than desktop equivalent (power consumption, noise, thermals, etc)

- Running as a service: I think I have seen a solution on this somewhere, I just don't recall what it is

- Capability to queue offline encoding directly from a browser (ie outside of the client app). It would be useful when the target device (ie ipad for ex) is not available to prepare encodings.

- Direct playback of divx/xvid/CPU based decoder without live encoding: the ipad application called CineXPlayer uses a CPU player which works fine without conversion.

Those are just ideas, I would be interested into formal feedback

Regards,

Vincent Nguyen

CineXPlayer has custom decoder and doesn't use hardware accelerate decoding. Apart from the possible increased power consumption Air Video could never use approach like that as it streams videos over 3G. For streaming over 3G Apple has very strict and very specific rules that force us to use iOS Media Player component.

Orb live supports WTV (on Windows only) but it's architecture is different with some really iffy decisions (like linking to GPL library - libx264) from a closed source software) which we definitely won't do.

Thanks for the preliminary answer. This does raise additionnal questions though.

- On CineXPlayer: I was only referring to this application as an example. With your comment, I assume that you cannot use CPU based decoding when streaming over 3G, but could you detect Wifi vs 3G, and enable local CPU decoding when streaming over Wifi ?

This would allow for using the ipad as an extension to the TV within the household, without the need to reconvert a complete existing library. Of course CPU decoding would only be applicable for relevant video files (ie easy to decode using ARM for example).

- On OrbLive: I am not sure I understand the comment on Orb Live. I was just referring to this application again as an example. On a sidenote, it looks like there has been some progress on WTV support, see below:

MCERemux Added - Wednesday, August 04, 2010
MCERemux has been uploaded. This will remux WTV and DVR-MS files to a TS container without conversion (transcoding).
This is a major step as it has been the main holdup for MCEBuddy 2.0. That being H.264 support extraction for WTV using open source / freeware for conversions, remux and ad conversion. This has only really been supported since June this year.
I am now in the process of adding this code into the next MCEBuddy build. Please let me know how it goes as I will be relying on it completely for Windows Media Center systems.

Any feedbacks on the other suggestions ? HW decoding especially.... I tried to use Live Conversion for playing back a 1080p 8Mbps bitrate video file on my setup (a simple dual core), and it just could not cope. 720p was fine though (I don't remember the bitrate).

Regards

Vincent Nguyen

So far, I've gotten AirVideo Server on the PC to read a file as an input and output it to the iPad app for live viewing. Is there a way to input a network stream? If I have a live camera feed (an MPG2 transport stream) coming into the PC via tcp or udp. Can AirVideo use that as an input instead of a file? If it can't is it something you plan to do?

Good morning,

I was wondering if you would have any formal feedback on my suggestions (ie HW decoding/encoding primarily) ?

Also, with regards to WTV support, MCERemux Beta 3 has been released, it converts WTV to MKV
http://mcebuddy.com/Downloads.aspx

Regards,

Vincent Nguyen