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Background:

I'm pretty familiar with DLNA servers from an end-user's perspective (on Linux at least). I've played around with PS3 Media Server, TVersity, Serviio, Plex, minidlna and mediatomb. All seem to basically provide a UPNP discoverable file system for DLNA compatible (?) clients:

  • I've looked at how PS3 Media Server and Serviio do (pretty much) on-the-fly transcoding using FFMpeg and/or Mencoder.
  • I've looked at how to fudge details in video container formats to achieve "live" streaming via DLNA per Michael Fötsch's blog.
  • I've got streaming of various IPTV channels working on Serviio with recent rtmpdump-based improvements in librtmp (here librtmp does lots of work to authenticate and download the rt[ms]p(e) stream, and FFMpeg does transcoding; I'm not sure if the live-streaming via DLNA part works the same way as the blog above.

I've also used a view different Android apps that allow you to play some well known stream (e.g: Youtube, Dailymotion, etc) to compatible TVs (e.g: PlayTo Roku/Chromecast/DLNA TV, Play To Universal and Twonky Beam).

Finally, I've also used specific apps (i.e: Youtube) on my Samsung SmartTV which allow "pairing" of the TV with some website such that you can stream some video to the TV on demand (i.e mid-playback) without the TV being in the related app (Youtube in this case).

Questions:

Could someone help clarify what's going on in the 'play to tv' and 'pairing' cases? Are these both uses/implementations of DLNA? If not, what are these apps actually doing?

I should explain that my eventual goal is to write something which runs on my Linux PC which streams arbitrary online video streams to my TV on demand. Something like:

  1. User browses to ANY site on tablet/smartphone via HTTP proxy on local subnet.
  2. Proxy re-writes HTML such that known or familiarly structured streaming sites have "Play to TV" link, which when clicked sends relevant information to a local web-server.
  3. Local web-server organises to start downloading the stream, transcoding as appropriate via FFMpeg.
  4. <insert magic here> to play to TV.

I think I understand how to approach steps 1-3 with the tools available (and with reference to the Serviio code), but I don't even know where to begin with step 4 because I don't know how those Android/TV apps do what they do :-).

Any help clarifying the concepts, or pointers to documentation, or relevant source-code all would be much appreciated.

David-SkyMesh
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  • encode your video so its chrome compatible and use chromecast. Browser discovers/Plays and the Chromecast icon is avail on any browser tab to fling it to TV. – Robert Rowntree May 20 '14 at 02:23
  • @RobertRowntree It's not *my* video. It's any arbitrary stream on the web. I already have these same streams working when adding them manually as "live streams" in Serviio, but I'd like to avoid doing that, and instead do something like 'Play To'. – David-SkyMesh May 20 '14 at 02:57
  • I've updated the question to clarify that I mean *ANY* site's streaming video, on DEMAND. I'm comfortable doing the proxying, parsing, video URL detection, and rewriting. I already have a DLNA stack that plays the same streams. – David-SkyMesh May 20 '14 at 03:02
  • Video sourced from web is all Chromecast compatible (webm , H264). Anything that will play in browser (chrome tab ) can be , as you say played to TV. – Robert Rowntree May 20 '14 at 03:16
  • @RobertRowntree That's not true of arbitrary WEB SITES. That's why the chromecast SDK exists for webmasters to do the integration themselves. Same reason for having ChromeCast in Chrome browser itself. Also, you're excluding rt[sm]p(e), and various other streaming media standards that run from flash-based players. In any case, that's not what I'm asking for here -- clarification on how 'Play to TV' and video app-based 'Pairing' work. – David-SkyMesh May 20 '14 at 04:12

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