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:

In mime type profile mappings in the config:

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

video/mpeg

yes

yes

yes

yes

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.