Video streaming – how to get it working?

[mikei]

Hello,

I’m not sure if this shouldn’t be in the Nightlies board, but…

I’m using the svn-1523 build on a ubuntu 6.10 server box, installed from the .deb on the nightlies page. While music streaming works flawlessly so far, I’m not having much luck with video files, though.

I have tried using either .mov’s and .mp4’s (also tried renaming those to .m4v, to no avail), have added the respective suffices to the config, but the firefly admin page and the listing in the connected iTunes still list only my normal music files, not the videos (both under WinXP and OSX). Sharing the iTunes library with the videos works (both from/to the Mac and WinXP) – Am I missing something here? Do I need to enable video streaming somewhere? 😕

thanks, mike

[mikei]

ok, now I feel like an idiot…

firefly couldn’t find the files because my samba config made the directories created by itunes inaccessible for it… duh! (why couldn’t I think of this 10 minutes earlier…?)

But anyway, found another minor thing: .mov files are not listed as video files, but as audio (no video icon, only audio playback when playing). If I rename the file to .m4v, it plays nicely (just tried it with some HD trailers off Apples site). Also, I think I read in these forums somewhere that video streaming copies the complete file to the iTunes client before playing, but this seems not be the case with the Apple trailers – the video starts pretty much instantly.

thanks anyway, mike

[rpedde]

@mikei wrote:

ok, now I feel like an idiot…

firefly couldn’t find the files because my samba config made the directories created by itunes inaccessible for it… duh! (why couldn’t I think of this 10 minutes earlier…?)

But anyway, found another minor thing: .mov files are not listed as video files, but as audio (no video icon, only audio playback when playing). If I rename the file to .m4v, it plays nicely (just tried it with some HD trailers off Apples site). Also, I think I read in these forums somewhere that video streaming copies the complete file to the iTunes client before playing, but this seems not be the case with the Apple trailers – the video starts pretty much instantly.

thanks anyway, mike

Yeah, the parser for .mov and .m4v isn’t very smart. You can make audio only .mov files, so the parser should really be able to tell whether or not a file has video in it. Right now, it just uses the file extension to set the “has_video” flag.

I intend to work more on this.

As far as the streaming, it looks to me like the latest iTunes streams right now. Woo hoo.

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