Direct video streaming

[mike admin]

Starting from version 1.4.9 MakeMKV supports direct video streaming. Currently this feature is highly experimental. Direct streaming enables instant playback of blu-ray and DVD discs without converting them to MKV first - while less interesting for DVD it is quite usable for blu-ray since it enables blu-ray playback on Linux and Mac OS X directly from optical disc. Here is the list of known problems:

• Not all seamless branches are not processed correctly - you may get short AV glitch at each branch location. That includes DVD layer break. Most blu-ray discs do not use seamless branching.
• Some discs may fail to work at all due to mastering format

Otherwise this feature works and is usable - after opening the disc go to file menu and select "Stream". Next, launch your favorite video player that is capable of playing http streams with blu-ray codecs (examples are VLC and QT with Perian) and open the url http://localhost:51000/stream/title0.ts - you should see the first title. You may examine all titles and available formats by navigating to http://localhost:51000/ . MakeMKV contains built-in web server that is accessible over local network so you may launch MakeMKV on one computer and watch video on another - you'll have to change "localhost" in URL to a computer name or IP address.

Thank you for beta-testing MakeMKV - please share your experience.

[Andie]

Tried it with Snow White BD and I didn't experience any problems just a few buffer delays like you posted might happen. Is there a proper way to closing the program after streaming? I just closed it normally by clicking the X and makemkvcon or whatever was still running in the background so I stopped it like you said.

[dgktkr]

mike admin,

I suppose by QT you mean Apple's QuickTime Player (and not Nokia's Qt).

Streaming to VLC seemed to work after a fashion for me, but QuickTime Player with Perian did not.

On my lowly mid 2010 Mac Mini, streaming from makemkv to VLC yields extremely choppy sound and no video from a Blu Ray disk. VLC also chokes in the same way when trying to play the ripped disk. I'm guessing that VLC is trying to use software decoding so that the Mini's CPU is hopelessly overloaded. Players that make use of the video card's hardware (like Plex) do just fine with the ripped mkv file.

With QuickTime Player, the URL is accepted, but nothing happens after "Loading Movie" is displayed.

dgktkr

[captain]

This is a brilliant feature!

Is there some way to stream the .mkv files too? Will a PS3 play the .mkv directly? I'm pretty sure there is no way to get AppleTV to play them without handbraking them.

Before all the smartasses come in saying "but the PS3 will play the DISC directly, you fool!" note that among my friends we have THREE PS3s with broken blu-ray drives. It's a HUGE problem with PS3 owners, and Sony doesn't stand behind their products after just one year.

[skittle]

No, PS3 will not play mkv natively. It will play m2ts which is what makemkv exposes in the streaming feature.

[BitJam2]

I was easily able to stream mkv files by installing the Cherokee web server (on Linux) and then setting it up (via the web GUI) for media streaming. I just put a symlink to the file under the htdocs (the document_root) directory after configuring Cherokee for media streaming. This was fast, easy, and painless.

If Cherokee isn't available for your OS, I would imagine there would be a web server available that is just as easy to set up and use. The key idea is that streaming media files is the job of web servers.

[skittle]

why not just set up a NFS share then?

[dgktkr]

Does MakeMKV handle seamless branching well in 1.7.6 while streaming BluRay disks?

The reason I ask is that I'm trying to figure out what to do about very noticeable glitches that occur in direct playback of Alien.

I've checked, and the starting times of the glitches corresponds the transitions between one m2ts file and the next as indicated by BDInfo. Visually, the glitches start at scene changes and persist for a few seconds, exhibiting choppy motion with interspersed frames from the previous scene!

Accompanying this behavior is a pattern of network activity that consists of a drop for a few seconds from the average of maybe 10-20% (5MB/s to 4MB/s), followed by a a quick spike to 3X the average (15MB/s). The data rate then comes back down to ~5MB/s, at which time the glitchy scene change occurs and then a drop to 0MB/s for a few seconds, before coming back to the average.

Is the glitchiness caused by MakeMKV, XBMC, or something else? Does anyone have suggestions how I might understand/fix this?

dgktkr

XBMC 11.0, OS-X 10.7.4, HP BD240i, Mac Mini 5,1

[dgktkr]

I've started looking into it and it appears the problem could be dealt with by either MakeMKV or XBMC.

I get the impression from the logs, that XBMC sees dts/pts discontinuities and tries to seek way back on the previous segment of a seamless(!) branch. It partially freaks out when this happens. My feeling is that it should somehow detect that this is supposed to be a seamless branch and suppress the urge to jump on the timestamp discontinuity.

On the other hand, it appears that MakeMKV gives continuous dts/pts to frames when it rips to disk, but not when it streams. It would be nice if MakeMKV could construct continuous timestamps when streaming.

Is that a reasonable request: to have MakeMKV implement continuous timestamps when streaming?

dgktkr

[woody777]

Sorry to bump a really old thread...

I can get streaming to work if I go to a specific stream, like http://localhost:51000/stream/title0.ts.

But I can't get it to work by just going to http://localhost:51000. It sounds like I should be able to access all titles from here. I'm using VLC, and it just hangs. No error message or crash -- nothing happens.

Am I missing a step to be able to navigate titles?

[mike admin]

The top level URL is not accessible with VLC, but you can open it in browser.