video on my P4, smooth it, scale it up and stream it down the network to playback pc

[Arkay]

Hi all,

Long time no post but I've just come up with an idea and I'd like some thoughts from everyone.

I have a set up at home that consists of a fast "office pc", my main machine (P4 2.8Ghz, gig of ram, 260GB media space etc etc).

I watch video (divx etc) on a P3 733 in my lounge currently via Matrox G400 tv-out. I'm just about to go to a projector and have realised that you can get awesome almost HD-DVD quality by playing DVD via Zoomplayer pro and using ffdshow to tweak the image a little. (Not to mention other tools such as descaler etc). This requires a grunty PC. Obviously my playback machine is not grunty but I can't afford to dedicate my 2.8Ghz to HTPC status only.

The playback machine can handle DVD, divx etc etc no worries, even postprocessing, but nothing in the way of smoothers, scalers etc.

These machines are networked (100mbps).

Finally, here's my question:

Does anyone know of a way to process the video on the P4 2.8 machine, smooth it, scale it up and then stream it down the network to the playback machine for display only? (essentially frameserving to a remote playback device)

At present I can watch the dvd in my main office machine on my playback machine via Daemon tools through the network without problems. I would like to remove the grunt work and have the playback machine just display images and feed my audio receiver?

Thanks for any suggestions.

Cheers,
Arkay.

edit Wilbert: changed title a bit
Edit Arkay: Wilbert, good idea, thanks :)

[avih]

hmmm, UPsampling, and then transmit over a network as raw video?? doesn't sound a good solution actually. maybe videolan can do that (it re-encodes while streamming, but maybe it has a lossless encoder, didn't check it out).

you'll need a hell of a bandwidth though...

[Arkay]

avih,

Good point, didn't factor in that the bandwidth would be an issue.
Would also have to recompress on the fly making the stream something like:

demux -> upsample -> remux -> transmit -> view

Need a damn fast cpu and network for that.. Essentially it's re-
encoding on the fly then streaming to the playback machine, obvisouly I didn't put too much thought into it before I posted :rolleyes:

Maybe a long vga cable might be preferrable ;) I've seen people run 50 ft vga via cat5. Maybe I'll give that a go. Of course, then I don't have any remote control options unless I put in repeater infared... Too complicated.

Maybe I'll just have to automate an upsampling tool that does the whole movie to a set of vobs on the HD. Decide in the morning what I want to watch that night and when I get home it'll be sitting on the drive ready to watch in almost pristine 720p :)

Cheers,
Arkay.

[Tuesday]

hello, just my 2 peneth

After doing some quick test I dont see network bandwidth as being too much of a problem as there are several lossless codec which are fast enough (on a good spec machine) for real time such as HuffyYUY2 or VBLE:

720x576x25fps VBLE = 33848kbps = 33.8mbps....easy
1280x544x25fps VBLE = 49640kbps = 49.6mbps....not too bad

1280x544x25fps HUFFYUY2 = 68573kbps = 68.6mbps which aint too bad either

admittedly my PC did stuggle at around 20fps with the 1280 samples, but i have an encode of two running in the background and my disks are fragemnted beyond belief.

Failing that you can get gigabit NIC's for less than £20 GBP, and to a man who can afford a projector, thats nothing ;) http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/products/index.html?action=c2hvd19wcm9kdWN0X292ZXJ2aWV3&product_uid=58040

[Arkay]

Heya tuesday,

Can you elaborate a little on how you were doing that testing? :) Were you just playing a file via the network or were you frameserving to the playback machine. Audio also needs to go into the stream at some point too.

The maximum amount of scaling I'd be doing is to 1024x768 so it looks like those figures are very promising.

By the way. I can't afford a projector. I'm building one.

I can't remember the policy on doom9 for passing out urls to other sites so I won't do it here. Just type lumenlab into your favourite search engine or put the www. and the .com around it and check it out. I think this is something that may be useful to any doom9 regular :)

If anyone is interested in further information regarding DIY projectors maybe we should start a new thread in the General Section.

Cheers,
Arkay.

[Tuesday]

Hello again Arkay,

I havn't tried streaming these files across my network, which is also 100mbit, I just quicky generated some test files from some vobs i have on my drive at the moment and used the video info tab in Vdub to find out the resulting bitrate of the file.

I just did a test at 1024x768 and again VBLE comes out with a data rate of about 46mbit/sec.

Unless your LAN has very heavy traffic it should be able to handle this traffic, and adding the audio should make very little difference unless your using 6 channel uncompressed .wav of something silly like that.

the major problem i can see is that filtering and compresing the video stream take a fair bit of CPU power.

also, you would have to see if your HDTV pc has the power to uncompress a VBLE stream at full speed....

[The Belgain]

Presumably VBLE isn't a lossless encoder then (judging by the bitrates you're giving. Uncompressed video would be 720x576x3(bytes per pixel)x25 = 30 MegaBytes per second (approx) for DVD res. Upscaled to 720p would be about 65 MegaBytes per second. I thought lossless compression only gave you about 2-3 times reduction? So you'd really be pushing DVDres on a 100 MBit network, and would need Gigabit for upscaled video (but you don't really need to bother with doing any compression on it.

[Tuesday]

Weeeeel, i suppose its not *entrily* lossless of your talking in the RGB32 sense of the word, but it is a lossless YV12 codec. ie: the only loss is in the colourspace conversion to YV12 which is rather small.

I belive the codec was developed by Doom9's very own Marc FD as a video capture codec a while ago when avisynth went YV12, its on point 17 of this here FAQ (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=37276&highlight=vble)

There might well be faste/better lossless codecs out there aswell, but VBLE is the best solution ive found as yet.

If your using avisynth to do the filtering and resizing of the video stream then its probably YV12 anyhow, in which case VBLE would be entirly lossless.