Streaming via PPTP to iphone or PC

[davegravy]

Thanks to donpaul for his work in bringing VPN to linuxmce. I'm excited about streaming video from the core to an external pc or my iphone using this.

I typically get 50kb/s from my core to another consumer quality point of access over the VPN. This is not enough to stream most of video material in my library, from my initial tests. I assume there are ways to compress the video in realtime and stream it at a lower bitrate so that I don't need to create lower quality copies of all my material just for remote viewing.

Where can I learn more about implementing something like this? I read up a bit on mediatomb, and I get the impression it can do this. I'd like to know what I need in the way of a client (on a PC or iphone) and what configuration needs to happen on the two ends.

Thanks,

Dave

[colinjones]

Your fundamental issue is going to be your uplink rate - if you can't get more than 50kb/s, then no amount of compression is going to provide you usable video! 50kb/s is barely enough for telephone quality audio, much less video. What is your connection? If an assymetric technology like ADSL then your uplink is always going to be much slower than your downlink, but still should be at least 256kb/s. On my ADSL2+ I get 2.4Mb/s.... So you need to fix that first before even thinking about adding compression. You should also check that it isn't the VPN/PPTP that is slowing down the uplink.

[davegravy]

<Slaps forehead>

I meant 50 kByte/s. So 400kbit/s. I have cable internet.

[colinjones]

ok, 50kB/s is obviously far better than 50kb/s! Still going to restrict you heavily... although probably workable for a screen as small as the iPhone.....

however adding that to LMCE is going to require some development to create a device that will allow the interaction. There have been others that have discussed it in the past but I haven't seen any material results. By all means head down that path if you have the skills to create such a device... we badly need the help... failing that the only workaround solution that springs to mind is use a service like Orb running on a PC internal to your LMCE network to access the media and relay it out to your remote devices... surely someone is working on or has created an iPhone client for Orb (or an equivalent)?

[donpaul]

For now get a UPNP player (pplayer I think) for your iphone and stream your media. Obviously you would need media that is playable on the iPod/iPhone.

[Raul102801]

Collinjones yes you are correct. There is an iphone application called Orblive. The server app is free but the Iphone app is not even though it is not very expensive. They have a free version but only allows you to stream up to 10 minutes or so. I think the full app was around $10. It works great but unfortunately there is not a linux client (at least not last time I checked) so you would have to have it on a Windows machine and maybe access a shared directory from your linuxmce or a NAS.
Something Orb like between linuxmce and the iphone would be awesome.

[colinjones]

That's why I suggested placing the server on a PC internal to your network (not LMCE itself)... that being said, they are working on a Linux version.