HLSDVD-1: Source hardware

There is a kickstarter for a Raspberry Pi HDMI input expansion board (with an IR sender) which could potentially be perfect - http://www.auvidea.com/index.php/theme-styles/2013-06-22-21-23-34/raspberry-pi-hdmi-in - unfortunately it looks like development has stalled so it's not currently available.

Kickstarter is at https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1419380698/connect-your-hd-camcorder-to-your-raspberry-pi

Have ordered a Lenkeng HDMI over IP extender - http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Up-to-100m-120m-HDMI-Extender-Over-Signal-Cat5-5e-Cat6-LAN-Cable-HD-1080P-TCP-IP-/111450816069?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_3&hash=item19f2fc7e45

It's got a few benefits

- Claims to be HDCP compliant (so should be no evil downscaling by Blu-ray players)
- Sends the video using TCP/IP so the platform I'm aiming to build can sit elsewhere on the network

As an added bonus, it looks like someone else has already reverse engineered an earlier model - https://danman.eu/blog/reverse-engineering-lenkeng-hdmi-over-ip-extender/ - which should give me a good headstart towards doing what's necessary to push the data into HLS-Stream-Creator.

As the kit seems like a good starting point, have raised HLSDVD-2 containing requirements/aims based on what'll need doing assuming danman's script works from the get-go.

This script - https://github.com/toru173/Lenkeng373/blob/master/hdmicap.py - is actually half way to being what's needed. If we take away the ffmpeg encoding and just have it write to the FIFO's that should be sufficient for a copy of HLS-Stream-Creator to work with.

It's here - default IP out of the box is 192.168.168.55

There's an (unauthenticated!) web interface which can be used to change this.

Danman's script works, but there's no audio. Can get a more or less realtime stream from the VM by doing

ssh encoder@$VMIP "sudo /home/encoder/encoding/Lenkeng/capture.py" | vlc -

HLS Output
Had to make a few small fixes to Torus script, but that works for pushing via ffmpeg. There's about a 12 second delay (with 1 second segments!) and the VM struggles to keep up.

There also seem to be quite a few dropped audio packets

With a few additional tweaks, got Toru's script working reliably. Switched to using mpeg4 instead of libx264 which has dramatically decreased CPU demand. Also set segment size to 1 second.

~$ sudo python Lenkeng/hdmicap.py --input eth1 --ffmpeg /usr/bin/ffmpeg --heartbeat

There's currently about a 4 second delay between changing the input (e.g. opening a menu) and display, whilst not quite quick enough yet, it's a significant improvement

Looking at it, only currently getting half the theoretical bandwidth of the hardware - it's currently connected directly to a dedicated NIC, but that NIC is a USB2 dongle. Out of a theoretical maximum of 54Mbps currently receiving at 49Mbps which is pretty respectable.

The final deployment will use either a real NIC, or at worst a USB3 one so should achieve better rates. That said, the framerate and resolution still aren't too bad as it stands

Bulk Change

Realistically, if I wanted to restart work on this, I'd probably start from scratch, so marking as Won't Fix