[MPlayer-dev-eng] sending mplayer video to stdout?

[Michael Joosten]

Christopher Cope wrote:
> hi,
> im interesting in a "distributed movie player" over multicast, where the 
> master will play and can pause a movie, and the other participants' see 
> their stream play/pause in sync. a possible way to do this would be to 
> have the participants simply receive an rtp stream via the live.com 
> enhacement. if i could send a copy of the video from my mplayer to stdout, 
> then live.com could read from stdin. possibly, this could allow me to 
> pause my stream, and have the other participants' videos pause as well, 
> though im not sure if i pause the video from my end, it would break the 
> pipe going to the live.com streamer. 
> 
> so my question is, can/how do i send the video from mplayer to stdout? ive 
> tried -vo /dev/stdout and -o but can't get it to work. i didnt see this 
> anywhere in the docs. if its there, i apologize. also, has anyone tried 
> something like this before with mplayer?

Actually, yes ... The VDR project (DVB Videorecorder) has a plugin 
that uses mplayer to convert the files in the playlist into MPEG-1 
and sends this via TCP connection to the VDR system, where the DVB 
satellite adapter card's hardware MPEG decoder is used to display 
the stream.
mplayer -ao mpegpes -vo mpegpes file.avi...
should do this trick. It creates/opens a file 'grab.mpg' in the 
current directory, which could also be a named pipe, and then it's 
up to you...

Look for vdr-mplayercluster-001a.tgz. The idea behind this is to 
use mplayer as a converter, as VDR only understands MPEG-1/2.

Now... I wonder why the audio that's grabbed in 
libmpdemux/tvi_v4l.c when using tv:// URLs is NOT available to 
mplayer, but apparently to mencoder. Would be nice to use this 
trick for TV and video/audio sources, too.

Next choice is VideoLAN, but it is very fuzzy about the type of 
MPEG files it groks. Grabbing from TV tuner cards works, but the 
sound was a little choppy. Then.... you could use ffmpeg/ffserver. 
AVI streaming over HTTP works quite well, but I haven't tested 
SDP/RTP.

In general, getting a well working combination of server (with 
compression) and client is not THAT simple. ffmpeg/ffserver looks 
good in quality, but I do not see how to change media files or 
change some settings of the frame grabber card.

mencoder with some ffmserver functionality and RTSP might be an 
interesting combo for compressed streams.