Transcoding to lossy format for bandwidth reasons

[polpo]

I like to use Firefly to listen to my home audio library while I’m at work. This works great for MP3, AAC, and OGG, but many of my files are stored as flac and this uses too much bandwidth. Having ssc transcode to one or any of the above formats would be quite beneficial.

I’ve tried hacking this in to both script- and plugin-based SSC but it seems like too much of the code is built around providing WAV data to make quick work of it.

[rpedde]

@polpo wrote:

I like to use Firefly to listen to my home audio library while I’m at work. This works great for MP3, AAC, and OGG, but many of my files are stored as flac and this uses too much bandwidth. Having ssc transcode to one or any of the above formats would be quite beneficial.

I’ve tried hacking this in to both script- and plugin-based SSC but it seems like too much of the code is built around providing WAV data to make quick work of it.

True. I had at some point toyed with the idea of doing anything to anything, but it seems like mp3 is the lowest common denominator, so I think I will end up with a mp3 transcode target at some point.

— Ron

[emma_peel]

Oh yeah, this functionality would be great.

The players that don’t support .ogg & .flac, do not require more than .mp3.

That would be really better for the bandwidth, especially while tunneling over internet. 😉

[ginormous]

This would be great. My coworker tunnels his home collection into work network. He has resisted ripping his CDs to Flac because he doesn’t want kill his bandwidth when he tunnels. I’d probably tunnel as well if I could transcode into mp3 (since collection is largely Flac).

[hypatia]

I’d like to add my vote for this too.

What exactly has to be done to make this work? Rewrite wavstreamer as mp3streamer?

Thanks for a media server,
hypatia

[rpedde]

@hypatia wrote:

I’d like to add my vote for this too.

What exactly has to be done to make this work? Rewrite wavstreamer as mp3streamer?

Thanks for a media server,
hypatia

That’s almost all. The cheap answer, if you wanted to *just* do mp3, and didn’t want to be able to choose which, would be to change the transcode script mt-daapd-ssc.sh so that it converted to .mp3 by using lame or something after converting to wav, then changing line 507 of plugin.c to emit a header type of “audio/mp3” rather than “audio/wav”.

But I’d like something that could choose to transcode to mp3 or wav depending on connection IP, so that when you connected via a tunnel from work, it would automatically transcode to mp3, but transcoded to wav at home. Something more integrated like that. But the above would work if that’s what you wanted all the time.

— Ron

[Anonymous]

@rpedde wrote:

…The cheap answer, if you wanted to *just* do mp3, and didn’t want to be able to choose which, would be to change the transcode script mt-daapd-ssc.sh so that it converted to .mp3 by using lame or something after converting to wav, then changing line 507 of plugin.c to emit a header type of “audio/mp3” rather than “audio/wav”….

Is this still a legit way of getting firefly to stream transcoded mp3? I grabbed the source and can’t locate the file plugin.c nor can I find ‘audio/wav’ in anywhere is the source code. Am I not looking in the right place?

[fizze]

Which source did you grab? 😉

The source sure hasn’t change much since late 2007.

[Anonymous]

I grabbed the lastest stable release from source forge: 0.2.4.2. I grabbed it from this page: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=98211&package_id=105189

It says that the release date for 0.2.4.2 is April, 2008. Based on your comment should I be using the older stable release from October 2007?

[fizze]

Yes. 0.2.4.* is ancient, there were just some ancient security bugfixes applied to an ancient codebase.
You can get access to the recent sources thrugh trac @ http://trac.fireflymediaserver.org/

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