Playing Video

[broth]

I have all of my DVD's copied into Video_TS folders and stored on a server in folders by the movie name. The video files are .vob files. I've read thru the forums and am very new to this, but I either found posts that said it wasn't available yet or posts that I had a very hard time understanding. Basically I'm a little lost. My server is Ubuntu 10.10 and I really like to stream trans-coded video if possible. Could someone point me in the right direction to a tutorial for the newb.

Thanks in advanced and my apologies if the information is already here and I missed it.
This is such an amazing software package coming from Jinozora. Works great and the phone apps are a huge plus.
Thanks, Bill

[random_id]

I think you will need to first convert your DVD folders to a video file. Take a look at Handbrake (http://handbrake.fr/). You can add the entire folder, and convert it to a file that will work within Subsonic. For most DVDs, there will be a number of different titles. You have to tell Handbrake which title is what you want to encode. Unless you are converting a TV series type of disk, normally the title that is the longest is the movie (and the only one you need to worry about). The Handbrake website is also a nice place to look for tutorials and how-to guides.

I would recommend starting with the 'Normal' profile. There are tons of tweaks and opinions as to how to encode, but this should get things rolling. In the end encoding is a balance between compatibility, file size, encode time, and decode time.

I have been using a tweaked profile based on the Normal profile and it is working pretty nicely with Subsonic. My ISP is not fast enough to stream over the Internet, but it works well on the LAN.

[djembeman]

I was able to sync up my android phone and am able to stream music to it, but videos will not play at all. I have already used Handbrake to convert my video files to smaller MP4 videos. These videos will play on my computer when on the subsonic webpage.

I'm on MAC OS X and a Droid 1.

[tclement]

I have an adroid and can't get videos to play.

Music plays and videos play on the subsonic server.

[GJ51]

The best setup for video playback with Subsonic is pretty simple. I use AVS converter to format all my videos into mp4 for internal playback, and flv for mobile playback. If you disable mp4 transcoding, JW player will playback video at its native resolution. I usually format the flv video at a format appropriate for the mobile devices I use for playback. This way, transcoding is eliminated and performance is mostly a function of connection quality.

Mp4's over gigabit lan will playback at blueray quality. I have several 1920X1080 HD movies that work just fine.

Flv's I usually run at H.264 352X288 15fps quality that takes about 800 kbps for playback.

You need to test your mobile devices to see what quality they can play. Of course you get better results over Wifi than 3g.

It's all a matter of finding out what your particular hardware is capable of.

You aren't going to watch a blue ray on your phone being transcoded by an Atom powered server over a 3g connection. But if you do, please let us know how you did that!

[djembeman]

I've already ripped my video files that I want to stream to an iPod screen quality file size (320x240 on a full screen video). Should it matter if it is an MP4 or an FLV. My ripper will only do MP4 and MKV. Video codec choices are H.264 and MPEG-4 (ffmpeg). Does the JWPlayer require a certain format?

I always rip mine at MP4 and H.264.

I've tried the Dolphin Browser and the default browser.

I tried disabling the transcoding of MP4 to FLV and it seemed to make streaming in my FireFox Browser on my MacBook fail. Don't think that's gonna work. Haven't got that to work again yet. You'd think it's as easy as checking a box, but I'm guessing I have to restart my browser, clear cache probably.

Thanks for the help and ideas.