Tuesday, September 25, 2012

Transcoding to play for DLNA capable TV

I have a Canon camera (Power Shot ELPH 310 HS). It produces good enough HD videos. I also have a DLNA server built using Open WRT+minidlna.
minidlna does not do transcoding. And somehow the MOV files produced by the Canon camera can not be played by any of the DLNA players that I have. I know you would say I deserve it, since DLNA is a deliberately crippled spec, but right now I want to play my home videos.

Finally I found a solution using Arista Transcoder (http://www.transcoder.org/).
I created this profile called "SamsungTV" on a device named dlna. You can download it here and install in Arista. Then use the UI or command line to do the format conversion.

$arista-transcode -v -p SamsungTV  -d dlna  -o tmp.MP4  ../../inbox/MVI_0648.MOV

The resulting MP4 can be played in following DLNA players.
Samsung 3D TV , Sony BlueRay player BDP  500 and Samsung BlueRay player.

Note: I had to restart and rebuild  the database for my dlna server for some reason after I added a bunch of files.

#/etc/init.d/minidlna stop; /usr/bin/minidlna -R -f /tmp/minidlna.conf

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