Thinking About On-The-Fly DivX to WMV9 Transcoding
I’ve been thinking about a solution to transcoding DivX to
WMV9 for streaming to Extenders. I’ve
come up with a few problems in the design using current hardware &
software. The first is that one-pass
encoding is all that could be done, you really can’t do two-pass encoding. This isn’t a deal breaking, but would mean a
lower quality streaming once transcoding.
For SD material, I don’t think this would be a huge problem, although I
haven’t done any comparison testing. I
would think anything above 720x480 would be out-of-the-question for on-the-fly
transcoding to WMV9.
The second issue might be a deal breaker. I can’t really find any evidence that the
video is passed through DirectShow before it being put out on-the-wire. What this means is that a transcoding
solution using DirectShow would never work using ‘My Videos’. It does however mean that if Brian could add support to ‘My Movies’ for
the video to be passed to DirectShow first, then a transcoding solution might
just work. Maybe Stephen Toub could be of some assistance
in creating a solution.
Anyone have other thoughts or any DirectShow/Media Center Developers
who could let me know if the idea would even be possible?