Streaming Server for VDR 1.6 *recordings*.

Proof of concept.

Written in perl and using async I/O, ie. event loops.

Only one simultaneous client supported. This is *not* a live-streaming server.
It re-encodes VDR recordings on-the-fly and the client determines how fast it will re-encode.
Streaming is done via HTTP and seeking is supported. This is intended to watch one's own
VDR recording ad-hoc over a slow bandwidth connection.

VDR recordings are expected beneath /vdr.

I have a 100+ kb/s DSL upstream. SD TV re-compressed as h264 and streamed through
that little upstream bandwidth gives better results than one might first think!
I have an Intel Core i5 750 with 4 cores. A recent ffmpeg requires less than half of
that processing power for SD TV content.

The streaming server assumes 25 fps and looks at index.vdr to estimate the byte
length of the re-compressed stream -- we are basically faking the re-compressed file and
create parts of it on-demand. The HTTP streaming client seeks by sending an offset (range), which the server
translates into a relative position and then restarts re-compression at that translated position
within the VDR recording (001.vdr etc.). Of course, the client will not receive exactly the same octets
when re-reading the same part twice by seeking backwards.

There is a web frontend using DHTML/WebSocket tech needed to start streaming. Start the server with:

MOJO_MODE=development DEBUG=0 morbo mojo_vdr_streamer.pl daemon --listen 'http://*:3001'

Then go to http://your-ip:3001 to select a VDR recording for streaming.
Then point your client to http://your-ip:3001/playback.



The whole beast works with:

Server:

Ubuntu 11.10/amd64. Perl 5.14.0 with recent Mojolicious 2.38 and EV 4.03. 

$ ffmpeg --version
ffmpeg version git-2011-12-17-9cb6a39, Copyright (c) 2000-2011 the FFmpeg developers
  built on Dec 17 2011 23:26:19 with gcc 4.6.1
  configuration: --prefix=/home/build --enable-shared --enable-pic --disable-debug --enable-libx264 --enable-gpl --enable-libmp3lame --extra-libs=-L/home/build/lib --extra-cflags=-I/home/build/include
  libavutil    51. 32. 0 / 51. 32. 0
  libavcodec   53. 46. 0 / 53. 46. 0
  libavformat  53. 26. 0 / 53. 26. 0
  libavdevice  53.  4. 0 / 53.  4. 0
  libavfilter   2. 53. 0 /  2. 53. 0
  libswscale    2.  1. 0 /  2.  1. 0
  libpostproc  51.  2. 0 / 51.  2. 0

$ x264 --version
x264 0.120.2 0c7dab9
(libswscale 2.1.0)
(libavformat 53.25.0)
built on Dec 15 2011, gcc: 4.6.1
configuration: --bit-depth=8 --chroma-format=all
x264 license: GPL version 2 or later
libswscale/libavformat license: GPL version 2 or later

Clients:

Ubuntu 11.04/amd64.
mplayer/smplayer/vlc/pDLNA, best is vlc.
Seeking works with (s)mplayer and vlc.

pDLNA: https://github.com/geuma/pDLNA
  pDLNA extended with required externals support: https://github.com/jjYBdx4IL/pDLNA