Using Mac Subsonic 4.4, subAir won't play AACs

[manwithaplan]

Good advice Eric, I'm going to try that. Without transcoding, the quality is insanely good of course, but probably only suitable within my local LAN. But yes, having multiple players will help there. By the way, something I'm curious about...when I transcode to flv, I never can jump ahead in the video, only able to pause and release pause. When not transcoding, I can jump around in the video as normal for any video player. But not with flash, is that normal? You seeing this too?

Thanks again, will give your ideas a try here.

Brian

[epstewart]

Good advice Eric, I'm going to try that. Without transcoding, the quality is insanely good of course, but probably only suitable within my local LAN. But yes, having multiple players will help there. By the way, something I'm curious about...when I transcode to flv, I never can jump ahead in the video, only able to pause and release pause. When not transcoding, I can jump around in the video as normal for any video player. But not with flash, is that normal? You seeing this too?

Thanks again, will give your ideas a try here.

Brian

Brian,

I've found time to experiment. I find that having two players, one of them doing ffmpeg transcoding to FLV and the other not doing any transcoding, does in fact work.

My Player 16 transcodes. Player 17 does not. When I use Player 17, I find that Subsonic indeed plays my MP4 and M4V movies without transcoding them. It pre-buffers each movie before starting to play it ... which can take a while, but it permits jumping around in the movie.

When I use Player 16, Subsonic transcodes each movie, and I see playback start virtually instantaneously, but the lack of pre-buffering means I can't jump around.

When in Player 16, I can use the bitrate selector menu below the movie viewer itself to change the video bitrate! The default bitrate is 1000 kbps. I can select other bitrates as low as 200 kbps and as high as 2000 kbps. Subsonic responds to a new selection from this menu by changing to the new bitrate, without losing its place in the movie!

The change to the new bitrate can be confirmed by examining the log you can see by clicking on the Subsonic icon at upper left (at the dire cost of losing your place in the movie).

The bitrate selector menu also seems to appear for movies in Player 17 that are not being transcoded, but as far as I can tell it has no effect.

So the "two player" approach gives you pretty much what you want, except:

(1) The highest transcoding video bitrate seems to be 2000 kbps.
(2) When transcoding is in use, the user can't jump around in the movie.

[manwithaplan]

Excellent, thanks Eric. I've headed that direction myself, and set it back to %bk so that the player controls the bitrate. I am fine on the local LAN with no transcoding. My only goal now is for the remote users to get a better experience. Many of them are coming from office networks (not crappy coffeeshop wifi or something) and they are seeing stuttuering. The open coffee network crowd is also seeing some stuttering. I wonder if they should actually dial down their kbps for streaming, when coming from a rather crappy wifi network. Maybe there's nothing more I can do in the transcoding string really.

Hmmm...

[manwithaplan]

Eric,

I've tried several things, but having a real hard time with macroblocking for all my video's. It's not stuttering anymore, bandwidth doesn't seem to be the issue, but real bad macroblocking still. I poked around and found this thread that you might find interesting...

http://forum.subsonic.org/forum/viewtop ... ght=ffmpeg

I've tried to get libx264 working instead of the normal ffmpeg default flv conversion per the above thread, but I can't get it to play at all with variants of these strings. These guys were using Windows, so some things are different of course, but I made the proper changes I thought and I just get Video not found errors as before. The logs don't tell me much either. Have a look at it and see if you can get some of these suggestions working. I might have a corrupted version of ffmpeg and may have to load the bundle of yours that you made, just downloaded it actually. Let me know what you find, but I think these guys were able to smooth out the video side in a tremendous way from the sounds of it. Now we just need to figure out the Mac equivalent setup that will execute the same things.

-Brian

[epstewart]

Eric,

I've tried several things, but having a real hard time with macroblocking for all my video's. It's not stuttering anymore, bandwidth doesn't seem to be the issue, but real bad macroblocking still. I poked around and found this thread that you might find interesting...

http://forum.subsonic.org/forum/viewtop ... ght=ffmpeg

I've tried to get libx264 working instead of the normal ffmpeg default flv conversion per the above thread, but I can't get it to play at all with variants of these strings. These guys were using Windows, so some things are different of course, but I made the proper changes I thought and I just get Video not found errors as before. The logs don't tell me much either. Have a look at it and see if you can get some of these suggestions working. I might have a corrupted version of ffmpeg and may have to load the bundle of yours that you made, just downloaded it actually. Let me know what you find, but I think these guys were able to smooth out the video side in a tremendous way from the sounds of it. Now we just need to figure out the Mac equivalent setup that will execute the same things.

-Brian

Brian,

OK, that's a lot to try to absorb quickly, so I will be looking further into it this weekend, time permitting.

Meanwhile, I'll just report that yesterday while I was out and about, I intended to try the same sort of experimentation I reported on before. Before, I was at home and was running both my client Mac and my server Mac, connected to my base station via Ethernet, on my home LAN. The results were as indicated. But when I took my client MacBook Pro to the public library and tried streaming movies via their wireless network, I could not even get Subsonic to access my media library. Having coincidentally just replaced my Internet modem with a "DOCSIS" model supplied by Xfinity/Comcast, I suspected that might be the problem. Today, I'm back at home and hooked up as I was before, with no problems. However, my Subsonic URL seems to resolve to 10.0.1.___ on my client, meaning that I am bypassing the Internet.

I'll have to try access from a remote location again when an occasion arises, but all this got me thinking: I don't know about yours, but my Internet provider limits upstream speeds. If you have X-number of users out there, might not that impose a problem with stuttering, choppiness, etc.? It might lead to a bottleneck which makes no difference except when enough users are trying to stream enough movies, all at once. Or do you have that possibility under control already?

[manwithaplan]

Eric,

I've tried several things, but having a real hard time with macroblocking for all my video's. It's not stuttering anymore, bandwidth doesn't seem to be the issue, but real bad macroblocking still. I poked around and found this thread that you might find interesting...

http://forum.subsonic.org/forum/viewtop ... ght=ffmpeg

I've tried to get libx264 working instead of the normal ffmpeg default flv conversion per the above thread, but I can't get it to play at all with variants of these strings. These guys were using Windows, so some things are different of course, but I made the proper changes I thought and I just get Video not found errors as before. The logs don't tell me much either. Have a look at it and see if you can get some of these suggestions working. I might have a corrupted version of ffmpeg and may have to load the bundle of yours that you made, just downloaded it actually. Let me know what you find, but I think these guys were able to smooth out the video side in a tremendous way from the sounds of it. Now we just need to figure out the Mac equivalent setup that will execute the same things.

-Brian

Brian,

OK, that's a lot to try to absorb quickly, so I will be looking further into it this weekend, time permitting.

Meanwhile, I'll just report that yesterday while I was out and about, I intended to try the same sort of experimentation I reported on before. Before, I was at home and was running both my client Mac and my server Mac, connected to my base station via Ethernet, on my home LAN. The results were as indicated. But when I took my client MacBook Pro to the public library and tried streaming movies via their wireless network, I could not even get Subsonic to access my media library. Having coincidentally just replaced my Internet modem with a "DOCSIS" model supplied by Xfinity/Comcast, I suspected that might be the problem. Today, I'm back at home and hooked up as I was before, with no problems. However, my Subsonic URL seems to resolve to 10.0.1.___ on my client, meaning that I am bypassing the Internet.

I'll have to try access from a remote location again when an occasion arises, but all this got me thinking: I don't know about yours, but my Internet provider limits upstream speeds. If you have X-number of users out there, might not that impose a problem with stuttering, choppiness, etc.? It might lead to a bottleneck which makes no difference except when enough users are trying to stream enough movies, all at once. Or do you have that possibility under control already?

Great questions, and glad to see you trying remotely now, good stuff. You really need to NAT through your firewall that internal IP address. So to find out what your external IP is, just browse to http://www.whatismyip.com/ and write it down. Then make sure your router/firewall is allowing Port 4040 into the internal IP of your server. But let me know if you hit problems there as I think I can help you in this regard. I am a network engineer by trade, so LAN/WAN connectivity issues I've got a good grasp on you might say. My ISP does not limit my up/down bandwidth at all, I use Comcast Business class with static IP's and such. Even the normal Comcast residential they would not limit bandwidth per se. Especially on the odd port of 4040. Some ISP's (read many) will throttle port 80 traffic, or 443, or 25, the common well known mail and web ports. But the higher number (read strange) ports typically will not pose an issue. Though, in point of fact, if the ISP wanted to, regardless of port number, they could use several tools to limit web traffic regardless of port number. Comcast to my knowledge does not do that. Not sure what ISP you are using, but they will typically have to publish their guidelines on these things, or simply call them to find out.

A good speed/throughput measurement site, really the best one out there that I've found in terms of accuracy, is provided by none other than Vonage. I use this all the time to gauge WAN speeds. Currently I'm getting 25Mbps down/10Mbps up with the Comcast Business package I have. Check out yours by launching this from home at some point...

http://support.vonage.com/doc/en_us/497.xml

The ffmpeg transcoding settings that would use libx264 would be of great interest to me if we can somehow get them working on the Mac server. I'll keep testing from some remote locations, but I really think it's gonna take libx264 to improve significantly on the situation. Let me know what you find. Also, let me know who your ISP is, I may be able to shed more light on their usage policies.

Cheers,
Brian

[epstewart]

Eric,

I've tried several things, but having a real hard time with macroblocking for all my video's. It's not stuttering anymore, bandwidth doesn't seem to be the issue, but real bad macroblocking still. I poked around and found this thread that you might find interesting...

http://forum.subsonic.org/forum/viewtop ... ght=ffmpeg

I've tried to get libx264 working instead of the normal ffmpeg default flv conversion per the above thread, but I can't get it to play at all with variants of these strings. These guys were using Windows, so some things are different of course, but I made the proper changes I thought and I just get Video not found errors as before. The logs don't tell me much either. Have a look at it and see if you can get some of these suggestions working. I might have a corrupted version of ffmpeg and may have to load the bundle of yours that you made, just downloaded it actually. Let me know what you find, but I think these guys were able to smooth out the video side in a tremendous way from the sounds of it. Now we just need to figure out the Mac equivalent setup that will execute the same things.

-Brian

Brian,

OK, that's a lot to try to absorb quickly, so I will be looking further into it this weekend, time permitting.

Meanwhile, I'll just report that yesterday while I was out and about, I intended to try the same sort of experimentation I reported on before. Before, I was at home and was running both my client Mac and my server Mac, connected to my base station via Ethernet, on my home LAN. The results were as indicated. But when I took my client MacBook Pro to the public library and tried streaming movies via their wireless network, I could not even get Subsonic to access my media library. Having coincidentally just replaced my Internet modem with a "DOCSIS" model supplied by Xfinity/Comcast, I suspected that might be the problem. Today, I'm back at home and hooked up as I was before, with no problems. However, my Subsonic URL seems to resolve to 10.0.1.___ on my client, meaning that I am bypassing the Internet.

I'll have to try access from a remote location again when an occasion arises, but all this got me thinking: I don't know about yours, but my Internet provider limits upstream speeds. If you have X-number of users out there, might not that impose a problem with stuttering, choppiness, etc.? It might lead to a bottleneck which makes no difference except when enough users are trying to stream enough movies, all at once. Or do you have that possibility under control already?

Great questions, and glad to see you trying remotely now, good stuff. You really need to NAT through your firewall that internal IP address. So to find out what your external IP is, just browse to http://www.whatismyip.com/ and write it down. Then make sure your router/firewall is allowing Port 4040 into the internal IP of your server. But let me know if you hit problems there as I think I can help you in this regard. I am a network engineer by trade, so LAN/WAN connectivity issues I've got a good grasp on you might say. My ISP does not limit my up/down bandwidth at all, I use Comcast Business class with static IP's and such. Even the normal Comcast residential they would not limit bandwidth per se. Especially on the odd port of 4040. Some ISP's (read many) will throttle port 80 traffic, or 443, or 25, the common well known mail and web ports. But the higher number (read strange) ports typically will not pose an issue. Though, in point of fact, if the ISP wanted to, regardless of port number, they could use several tools to limit web traffic regardless of port number. Comcast to my knowledge does not do that. Not sure what ISP you are using, but they will typically have to publish their guidelines on these things, or simply call them to find out.

A good speed/throughput measurement site, really the best one out there that I've found in terms of accuracy, is provided by none other than Vonage. I use this all the time to gauge WAN speeds. Currently I'm getting 25Mbps down/10Mbps up with the Comcast Business package I have. Check out yours by launching this from home at some point...

http://support.vonage.com/doc/en_us/497.xml

The ffmpeg transcoding settings that would use libx264 would be of great interest to me if we can somehow get them working on the Mac server. I'll keep testing from some remote locations, but I really think it's gonna take libx264 to improve significantly on the situation. Let me know what you find. Also, let me know who your ISP is, I may be able to shed more light on their usage policies.

Cheers,
Brian

Brian,

This is just a partial response, as I have been quite busy and haven't made any progress yet on the main subject of our conversation.

I have an ordinary Comcast Internet account. On the Vonage speed test, my Subsonic-server iMac, connected by Ethernet to my base station, got over 23,000 kbps download speed and over 6,000 kbps upload, while my client MacBook Pro when using AirPort-only got virtually the same numbers. The numbers were basically unchanged when I turned AirPort off on the MBP and connected it to the base station using Ethernet instead.

So my server iMac faces a roughly 6,000k top speed limit when it streams movies in Subsonic. If I had 6 users on at the same time and they wee using the default 1,000k ffmpeg transcoding, there would theoretically be no problem. But if a 7th signed on, there would be trouble. Or if 1 of the 6 upped the bitrate, a problem would ensue.

Your rate of 10Mbps up gives you more elbow room, but the 11th 1,000k user would cause himself and all the other users trouble.

That is admittedly a simplistic analysis, as there is undoubtedly buffering going on on the Subsonic clients that could help eliminate such bandwidth bottlenecks.

I am happy to hear that you are a network engineer and can assist me in that regard. I browsed to the "What is My IP Address" site you mentioned and found out my IP address. Thanks for that and for the link to the Vonage speed test.

My external IP address is 69.nnn.52.13 (I've camouflaged the second node). My server when Ethernet-connected to the base station is 10.0.1.nnn, a manually chosen address. My client when Ethernet-connected to the base station is 10.0.1.nn, an automatically assigned address. When AirPort is on, it gets a different 10.0.1.nn automatically assigned as its IP address.

I have dalekhound.webhop.biz registered at DynDNS.com as a dynamic web address. When I put http://dalekhound.webhop.biz:4040 in the browser URL field on the client MBP, it brings up Subsonic as a client (I don't have Subsonic per se installed on my client MBP). Without the ":4040" it brings up a "Seeing this instead of the website you expected?" web page. So I think the 4040 port mapping is being properly handled by my server and my base station in tandem. When I use http://epstewart.subsonic.org, it also brings up Subsonic, but the URL immediately changes to http://10.0.1.nnn:4040/index.view. I am presently at home, so I don't know offhand what changes in the above behavior patterns would occur at a remote location with WiFi. I'll try it from Panera tomorrow, if I get the chance.

I will also try to look into libx264, but I can't promise anything quick on that. It looks as if someone figured out how to use it on a PC, but it might take some head-scratching to port that to a Mac ...

[manwithaplan]

Eric,

Your assumptions about bandwidth usage are fortunately wrong my friend! You'll be happy to know that it doesn't work that way. I won't go too far into it, but essentially bandwidth and bit rate have nothing to do with each other. Your 6,000kbps upload speed is more than capable of streaming movies to much more than 6 concurrent users. Likewise, mine much more than 10. I understand your concerns about bandwidth, but you and I are both just fine in that regard. It would be different if we had some old school DSL connection whose upload speeds are typically limited to 768Kbps and such. We should place our focus back on server/processor usage, that is much more likely to be maxed out than our bandwidth, again, in our cases at least. So far I've never had more than 2 concurrent users anyway, so again we're down a rathole there. So rest assured our problems are not bandwidth on the server's (home) WAN connection side. I'd be happy to help you t-shoot the external connectivity stuff, to make sure your NAT and port mappings are working properly. But of course I would need that third octet PM me if you want and we can t-shoot it on the phone much quicker.

But yeah, if you get time to look at the server-side libx264 issues, that would be great. I'll let you know if I have any breakthroughs over here.

Cheers,
Brian

[epstewart]

Eric,

Your assumptions about bandwidth usage are fortunately wrong my friend! You'll be happy to know that it doesn't work that way. I won't go too far into it, but essentially bandwidth and bit rate have nothing to do with each other. Your 6,000kbps upload speed is more than capable of streaming movies to much more than 6 concurrent users. Likewise, mine much more than 10. I understand your concerns about bandwidth, but you and I are both just fine in that regard. It would be different if we had some old school DSL connection whose upload speeds are typically limited to 768Kbps and such. We should place our focus back on server/processor usage, that is much more likely to be maxed out than our bandwidth, again, in our cases at least. So far I've never had more than 2 concurrent users anyway, so again we're down a rathole there. So rest assured our problems are not bandwidth on the server's (home) WAN connection side. I'd be happy to help you t-shoot the external connectivity stuff, to make sure your NAT and port mappings are working properly. But of course I would need that third octet PM me if you want and we can t-shoot it on the phone much quicker.

But yeah, if you get time to look at the server-side libx264 issues, that would be great. I'll let you know if I have any breakthroughs over here.

Cheers,
Brian

Brian,

More experimentation with Subsonic movie streaming to a client not on my home network (I was at my local Panera) has shown the earlier failure to connect to have been an anomaly. I connected and movie-streamed with great success. I believe the reason I could do so without explicit port mapping/forwarding of port 4040 to my server Mac is that my base station/router uses NAT-PMP to in effect let the Subsonic server command the base station to forward port 4040 to it.

I have been struggling with finding a way to utilize "server-side libx264" on a Mac. No luck yet. I'm not totally sure there's no simpler solution at hand, but my assumption is that I will have to "build" a Mac-compatible ffmpeg that does what we want. I've found out how to do an ffmpeg build, and I've actually done one, but there are as of this point major issues with it. I'm not at all certain that ironing out those issues would give us what we're looking for, either.

In fact, I'm admittedly a bit confused as to exactly what it is we're hoping for. Would you give me a condensed version of what the benefits of "server-side libx264" would be expected to be, in your view?

In my streaming experiments from Panera, I tried to stream a HandBrake-produced M4V with a data rate of a little over 1,600 kbits/sec and 960x528 resolution (per QuickTime Player). If I did so in a Subsonic web browser player that has transcoding off, the delay was interminable. In a player with transcoding on using the default ffmpeg command line, if I used the default client-side 1000 kbps bitrate I got occasional pauses for rebuffering. Raising the bitrate above 1000 produced more frequent pauses. Lowering it to 700 kbps gave me pretty much pause-free viewing. But it took a barely acceptable video quality (when looked at in full-screen mode) down to a fuzzier, more artifact-ridden one, with some distracting macroblocking on occasion.

At home, on my home LAN with all connections Ethernet-wired, I can boost the client bitrate to 2000 kbps and see pretty darn good video quality -- basically, it seems equal to the un-transcoded original, when I look at that in a different client-side player.

I imagine the bitrate that will produce pause-free playback using a remote WiFi hookup depends on several interacting factors. To be both pause-free and without noticeable reduction in video quality is a tougher goal.

Again, why are we thinking the use of server-side libx264 helps with that?

[manwithaplan]

We are simply thinking this because of the significant improvement in smooth playback and no macroblocking reported in the other thread I pointed you to. I'm taking their experienced word for it at this point, admittedly. But they indicated a significant improvement and "buttery smooth" playback when using libx264. That's why I was hoping we could find a way to utilize it on the Mac. My attempts have been unsuccessful with my build of ffmpeg in utilitizng libx264. I see libx264 is part of my libraries, but for some reason the commands they mention do not work for me on the Mac. Because you are much swifter at this server-side stuff than I am, was hoping you'd be interested in attempting it also, to see if you get better results. I'm more network engineering-minded and not a server app guy. Still trying to understand this stuff with Subsonic.

Let me know what you think.

Thanks,
Brian

[epstewart]

We are simply thinking this because of the significant improvement in smooth playback and no macroblocking reported in the other thread I pointed you to. I'm taking their experienced word for it at this point, admittedly. But they indicated a significant improvement and "buttery smooth" playback when using libx264. That's why I was hoping we could find a way to utilize it on the Mac. My attempts have been unsuccessful with my build of ffmpeg in utilitizng libx264. I see libx264 is part of my libraries, but for some reason the commands they mention do not work for me on the Mac. Because you are much swifter at this server-side stuff than I am, was hoping you'd be interested in attempting it also, to see if you get better results. I'm more network engineering-minded and not a server app guy. Still trying to understand this stuff with Subsonic.

Let me know what you think.

Thanks,
Brian

Brian,

Nor am I all that swift with doing things like building/installing open-source apps, sadly. My "expertise" is more with the practical side of converting and using videos, given the apps that others have created. So I suspect you and I are about at the same place ... we've both done ffmpeg builds, but they haven't delivered the goods we're after yet.

Just so we don't both bark up the same fruitless tree ... I'm working with something called MacPorts. I'm completely new to it. It allows me to follow (very roughly) the instructions given here. I've had to modify the procedure in several ways to obtain the latest Snow Leopard disk image for MacPorts, which in turn requires that I obtain a fairly recent (in my case, the latest) Xcode developer tools for my MacBook Pro running Snow Leopard. (I can give you all the necessary links if you want them.)

Once all those preliminaries were taken care of, I could enter in Terminal

sudo port install ffmpeg +gpl +lame +x264 +xvid

(where the +___ items refer to "variants" I want to include in ffmpeg).

That actually successfully installed a newly built ffmpeg into an '/opt' folder hierarchy which MacPorts maintains at the root level of my hard drive.

I tried doing various things with my new ffmpeg that seem related to what we're doing in transcoding from MP4/M4V files to FLV, and I ran into a problem ... However, further testing has shown the same "problem" to occur with the ffmpeg version I installed for Subsonic to use on my server-side iMac a few days ago, as part of what we've been discussing in this thread. So I may have been chasing a red herring, and for now I see no point in describing the "problem" herein ...

It will take me a fair amount of further noodling before I have anything more concrete to report. More later ...

[epstewart]

Brian,

I have continued noodling with my ffmpeg install. Right now I'm running up against a tough problem, i.e. that my ffmpeg does not accept the parameter

-vcodec libx264

If I enter in a Terminal window

ffmpeg -codecs

I get a list of all the available codecs. libx264 is in there, but it's marked 'EV', meaning it's a video (V) codec, yes, but it's only for encoding (E), not for decoding, which would require a 'D': 'DEV'.

I built and installed ffmpeg using MacPorts, as I indicated in an earlier post.

I'll try to research some possible way around this roadblock, if you're still interested. Get back to me and let me know, if you would...

[manwithaplan]

Interesting. yeah, definitely want to see if there's some way that we can mimic what these Windows guys are doing in that thread. The Mac ports seems the right move, you've gotten way further than me on it. Let me know if you're able to get some libx264 working. I wonder if it's worth building a Windows virtual machine and loading subsonic and ffmpeg there to try and mimic what they did. Not sure that would really help us find the Mac equivalents though...

Brian

[epstewart]

Interesting. yeah, definitely want to see if there's some way that we can mimic what these Windows guys are doing in that thread. The Mac ports seems the right move, you've gotten way further than me on it. Let me know if you're able to get some libx264 working. I wonder if it's worth building a Windows virtual machine and loading subsonic and ffmpeg there to try and mimic what they did. Not sure that would really help us find the Mac equivalents though...

Brian

Brian,

I do have the ability to run a Windows XP VM, through Parallels Desktop 5. I thought about trying Subsonic/FFmpeg/libx264 in it, but rejected the idea as unenlightening. I gather your main concern is hopefully to have libx264 decoding on the server side overcome to whatever extent possible the playback/speed/bitrate issues related to your users' use of WiFi and the Internet at remote locations. Your users do not get smooth playback, and maybe libx264 on the server can cure that.

I think the central issue is speed — speed of decoding on the server side, speed of transmission along the network, and speed of rendering on the client side.

If I set things up in Windows/Parallels, there will just be one more potential stage which can throttle down speed.

So ... it occurs to me that you might (or might not) want to let me log in as a guest on your Subsonic server and see what issues I experience. If you want me to give it a try, would you care to PM me with the relevant details?

If for any reason you'd like to try streaming things from my Subsonic server, I can set you up for that as well ...

[manwithaplan]

Interesting. yeah, definitely want to see if there's some way that we can mimic what these Windows guys are doing in that thread. The Mac ports seems the right move, you've gotten way further than me on it. Let me know if you're able to get some libx264 working. I wonder if it's worth building a Windows virtual machine and loading subsonic and ffmpeg there to try and mimic what they did. Not sure that would really help us find the Mac equivalents though...

Brian

Brian,

I do have the ability to run a Windows XP VM, through Parallels Desktop 5. I thought about trying Subsonic/FFmpeg/libx264 in it, but rejected the idea as unenlightening. I gather your main concern is hopefully to have libx264 decoding on the server side overcome to whatever extent possible the playback/speed/bitrate issues related to your users' use of WiFi and the Internet at remote locations. Your users do not get smooth playback, and maybe libx264 on the server can cure that.

I think the central issue is speed — speed of decoding on the server side, speed of transmission along the network, and speed of rendering on the client side.

If I set things up in Windows/Parallels, there will just be one more potential stage which can throttle down speed.

So ... it occurs to me that you might (or might not) want to let me log in as a guest on your Subsonic server and see what issues I experience. If you want me to give it a try, would you care to PM me with the relevant details?

If for any reason you'd like to try streaming things from my Subsonic server, I can set you up for that as well ...

Eric, just PM'd you cred's...let me know how things look to you for streaming. I'd like to see how yours are working also if possible.

Thanks very much.