TWiT Live via MediaTomb for your WDTV Live (and probably ps3, whatever..)

Linux

I recently upgraded from a WDTV media player to a WDTV Live. The WDTV is just a simple set top box that allows you to play video on your tv, much like an xbox 360 and a whole bunch of other devices. The WDTV live allows you to play stuff over the network which opens up a whole host of cool stuff if you use the mediatomb DLNA server software available for linux (google tversity if you want something similar for windows..)

Anyway, I managed to get my wdtv live to play the live TWiT (http://live.twit.tv) video stream – meaning I now have a real internet tv station right up on my tv!

This is a bit rough and ready, but hopefully I’ll improve it over time. You’ll probably need to have a rough idea of what you’re doing.

Make sure transcoding is set to yes in the config:

<transcoding enabled=”yes”>

In mime type profile mappings in the config:

<transcode mimetype=”video/x-flv” using=”ffmpeg”/>

So anyway, you’ll want to add this profile to your config:

<profile name=”ffmpeg” enabled=”yes” type=”external”>
<mimetype>video/mpeg</mimetype>
<accept-url>yes</accept-url>
<first-resource>yes</first-resource>
<accept-ogg-theora>yes</accept-ogg-theora>
<agent command=”/usr/local/bin/ffmpeg-tr.sh” arguments=”%in %out” />
<!– <buffer size=”14400000″ chunk-size=”512000″ fill-size=”1024″/> –>
<buffer size=”5242880″ chunk-size=”102400″ fill-size=”1048576″/>
<hide-original-resource>yes</hide-original-resource>
</profile>
And create this shell script:
#!/bin/sh
exec ffmpeg -i “$1” -sameq -f mpeg -me_method zero -aspect 16:9 – > “$2”
The final piece of the puzzle is to create a link to it in the mediatomb database via the web interface:
Type: External Link (URL)
URL: http://bglive-a.bitgravity.com/twit/live/high
Protocol: http-get
Class: object.item.videoItem
Mimetype: video/x-flv
Notes:
  • You might be able to/want to change the mimetype to a made up one, video/x-twitlive or something so it doesn’t conflict with other types.
  • You’ll probably want to turn off the other profiles you won’t be wanting.
  • Play with the buffer sizes, the commented out one seemed to go a bit funny for me.

A special thanks to aTc from #mediatomb on irc.freenode.net – without whom this wouldn’t exist.

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