Tvheadend transcoding

#1

Hi,
I am trying to use stream profiles to do some live tv transcoding on a KI pro running CE 9.0.2.
Unfortunately video transcoding does not work:

2019-05-29 17:53:05.480 transcode: 0012: **Unable to find libx264 encoder**
2019-05-29 17:53:05.480 transcode: 0012: 1:H264 ==> Passthrough
2019-05-29 17:53:05.481 transcode: 0012: 2:AC3 ==> AAC (aac)

2019-05-29 17:53:05.480 transcode: 0012: **Unable to find libvpx encoder**
2019-05-29 17:53:05.480 transcode: 0012: 1:H264 ==> Passthrough
2019-05-29 17:53:05.481 transcode: 0012: 2:AC3 ==> AAC (aac)

I thought to get at least libx264 transcoding working considering that libx264 is listed as an enabled codec in the “About” page of the frontend.

Any clues?

#2

The addon apparently isn’t compiled with transcoding support, but I guess your KI Pro is by far too weak anyway. I’m using a TVH server with transcoding on an i7 server, and even there the CPU usage is very high.

#3

Of course you are right, maybe I could try to transcode on a PC class tvheadend server configured as a Satip client of the KI pro. Do you think it will work?

#4

That could work, because your KI Pro just needs to transfer the DVB stream in this constellation.

#5

I think the more important question is why are you only transcoding the audio?
I think any PC can handle audio transcoding, possibly even the box could, given software support for it.

#6

I would like to do video transcoding but coreelec’s tvheadend apparently lacks libvpx and libx264 encoder support, that is why video falls back to passthrough.
Audio transcoding works flawlessly, though.

#7

I see, well then you can try using a PC. But why would you want to transcode H264? I don’t think there’s one device that doesn’t support this format today.

#8

Personally I understand the need for transcoding.
For example if you want to watch live tv “on the go” on your smartphone, then you don’t want to stream HD channels with their original bit rate, but transcode it to a much lower one.

#9

I see, ok :slight_smile:

#10

Indeed, this is exactly the reason why I went to try transcoding on coreelec.

#11

Amlogic processors do not have enough processing power to transcode, for this usually use AMD and Intel processors with much higher power consumption, operating noise and price. What tvheadend server can do very well is to clean audio languages, subtitles and any other unnecessary content in the output stream. With this the bandwidth becomes smaller. I use a CoreELEC with the tvheadend server in an Amlogic S912 processor and I have no problem to watch even 4K TV channels (approx 20 Mbps maintained) with 5 GHz WiFi receivers.