HOWTO: Transcoding from serviio to Freebox Player [France]

[ne0zone75]

Hi folks,

Today i will discuss about enabling serviio transcoding to the Freebox Player (AKA Freebox v6) because i think it may be usefull to some serviio users. There will be 2 parts for this HOWTO : PART I => short version & PART II => long version (this one will be available for Windows & Linux users only ... i do not know much about Mac ...) in order to have subtitles support

PART I :

Available for every operating system supported by serviio (except NAS's) : Windows, Mac & Linux

-> STEP 1 :
* LAUNCH serviio server if not running; configure the metadata tab of the serviio console exactly like that (except for the descriptive metadata part, you can turn it on or off as you like) => UNCHECK every checkbox in video, audio & image tab (i did not provide a screenshot for the third one because it's the same than the audio one ...) => DELETE every thumbnail from the database because at this time, thumbnails prevent not the transcoding part (STEP 2) but they prevent from playing the transcoded files on the Freebox, if there are thumbs then your transcoded movies will be identified as pictures ... in the future there will maybe be a "per profile" thumbnails tag to disable them for a specificic device like the Freebox Player



* STOP serviio server now and detete carefully the cache directory from the library one (do not delete the db directory) located in the serviio home folder.
* RELAUNCH serviio server and click with your mouse on "rescan video metadata" from the metadata tab and on "force refresh" from the shared folders tab from the library one and then on "show status" to see what's going on => when lights comes from red to green then to red, at this point you can go to STEP 2 <=> NO THUMBS LEFT

-> STEP 2 :
Simply do a "copy/paste" from this profile below to profiles.xml located in the config directory of serviio home one, and this just above the last line of this xml file (which is "</Profiles>") -> it' more convenient but your can paste the profile everywhere between two others in profiles.xml

  Code:

       <Profile id="freeboxv6" name="Freebox Player" extendsProfileId="1">
          <ProtocolInfo>simple</ProtocolInfo>
          <Detection>
             <HttpHeaders>
                <User-Agent>.*fbxupnpav.*</User-Agent>
             </HttpHeaders>
          </Detection>
          <Transcoding>
             <!-- Transcode MKV's -->
             <Video targetContainer="mpegts" targetVCodec="mpeg2video" targetACodec="ac3" forceInheritance="true">
                <Matches container="matroska" />
             </Video>
          </Transcoding>
          <!-- OnlineTranscoding>
          </OnlineTranscoding -->
       </Profile>


Of course this example enable transcoding for MKV's just create some more lines for every filetype you want to be transcoded to the Freebox by replacing "matroska" with some other container in this line : <Matches container="matroska" /> ...

One important thing here : if audio is DTS in some your MKV (for example ... could be MP4, etc ...) then you must transcode audio also in addition to the video part (because if not the transcoded file will not have sound) : that's the purpose of this line "<Video targetContainer="mpegts" targetVCodec="mpeg2video" targetACodec="ac3" forceInheritance="true">; you can replace ac3 by aac in this line it works too

-> STEP 3 :

-> Ckeck that your subtitles are supported by serviio here : http://www.serviio.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=33
-> Configure the subtitles tab from the delivery one following your needs
-> Enable transcoding in the transcoding tab of the delivery one AND ...

Voilà => the subtitles feature of serviio 1.2 is available to your Freebox Player

@ Bientôt



PS : PART II : will come later ... or not at all ...

It works !!! Thnak you so much !
After a lot of weeks of troubleshooting, trying to find an adapted solution, your post is a real solution
Your "Freebox Player" profile should be included in the base profiles installed by default, for the sake of french users

Thank you very much !

[ne0zone75]

Mais de rien , ça fait plaisir d'avoir des retours positifs

Bon film

[Illico]

Your "Freebox Player" profile should be included in the base profiles installed by default, for the sake of french users

Zip, could you include it on next 1.2.1 version ?

[ne0zone75]

PART II would be an extension to PART I but would not be especially for the Freebox Player, i am thinking about the usefulness of it ... you'll tell me ...

It's goal is to hardcode any picture based subtitles (not supported by serviio at this time) embedded into a video file to the serviio transcode output and then stream it to any renderer :

It has few but important limitations :
-> using a wrapper is mandatory : Linux OK, Mac probably ... & Windows i really don't know if this will work (because i could also propose a wrapper but it's written in Linux bash)
-> using a compiled version of FFmpeg from altered sources (latest stable version [11.3] or git version work) => discussed here : http://forum.serviio.org/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=9442, the resulting binary is 100% functional (that's because the modifications of the FFmpeg source code is very small BUT mandatory.

There are few but important drawbacks also; if using my wrapper you'll have few but breaking of some serviio features :
-> breaking of some plugins which work great if you do not follow the content of PART II
-> breaking of every thumbnail creation (from local or remote material) but it does not matter if you followed PART I

Voilà

[moltra]

Can you add this to the serviio wiki?

Sent from my DROID RAZR using Tapatalk 2

[ne0zone75]

Can you add this to the serviio wiki?

Yes, sure, i'll do it : which part -> PART I ?

Regards

[moltra]

What ever you think will help otheers

Sent from my DROID RAZR using Tapatalk 2

[zip]

I'll add the profile once I've added the disableThumbnails flag. https://bitbucket.org/xnejp03/serviio/i ... es-serving

Also, bitmap-based thumbnails are coming in future too: https://bitbucket.org/xnejp03/serviio/i ... -subtitles

[ne0zone75]

I'll add the profile once I've added the disableThumbnails flag. https://bitbucket.org/xnejp03/serviio/i ... es-serving

Good evening and thanks a lot for this Petr, French Freebox Player users will be glad to learn that I agree with you to do this in that order, soon PART I of this HOWTO will be useless and that was the point So i'll wait before adding something about in the serviio Wiki ... maybe PART II ...

Also, bitmap-based thumbnails are coming in future too: https://bitbucket.org/xnejp03/serviio/i ... -subtitles

... the fact of altering slightly the FFmpeg sources and compiling it is mandatory because of the current stock "sub2video_prepare" function in ffmpeg_filter.c (11.3 and git versions have a bug) which need a little fix for setting correctly the subs canvas size otherwise no overlay will be possible most of the time (except if the resolution of the video track equals 720x576 for DVD's and 1920x1080 for Blu-Rays; this is not a frequent situation because of the "black bars" cropping which is used very often when transcoding a movie) but you probably already know that ... In addition the FFmpeg team will fix that in the future but without any roadmap

Bonne nuit @ tous

PS 1 : it will remain the problem of thumbnails creation with online sources plugins isn't it ? -> i disabled them one by one otherwise online resources are presented as pictures

PS 2 : Here is a good link for the Freebox Player specifications if you want to tune the profile before adding it to upcoming serviio releases : http://www.freebox-v6.fr/wiki/index.php?title=Freebox_Player, there is everything about but it's written in french ...

[ne0zone75]

... the fact of altering slightly the FFmpeg sources and compiling it is mandatory because of the current stock "sub2video_prepare" function in ffmpeg_filter.c (11.3 and git versions have a bug) which need a little fix for setting correctly the subs canvas size otherwise no overlay will be possible most of the time (except if the resolution of the video track equals 720x576 for DVD's and 1920x1080 for Blu-Rays; this is not a frequent situation because of the "black bars" cropping which is used very often when transcoding a movie) but you probably already know that ... In addition the FFmpeg team will fix that in the future but without any roadmap

An example of user feedback here : http://ffmpeg-users.933282.n4.nabble.com/Converting-MPEG-TS-to-MKV-with-hard-coded-subtitles-produces-error-message-td4657313.html

Have a nice day