Streamed Video DIVX Codec issue

[Transentient]

I am very new to video streaming and am just experimenting to see what is possible.

My current setup is thus

Windows XP machine running UNREAL MEDIA's media server, streaming the video clips over a Hamachi vpn

Initially I used UNREAL's own player to view the streams, this worked fine. However to change streams I had to manually change the setting in the player. So I have moved onto using Windows Media player with the stream url's held in a playlist file which can be activated from a custom menu I created seperatly, again this works fine.

My problem arose when I decided to convert the files to DIVX, using the latest converter from DIVX, file size was reduced and quality seemed much better. I now get a message from Media player saying it cannot play the file as the correct codec may not be installed. The lastest DIVX codec is installed on both the server and client machines. If i tranfer the video clip onto the local machine it plays fine.

Is there some issue of how i am streaming it, I'm using the MMS protocol, the string for the links are:

mms://Hamachi Ip : Port 5119/DIVXTest/Test.wmv - works fine
mms://Hamachi Ip : Port 5119/DIVXTest/Test.divx - codec error (although codec is installed)

Have tried the Videolan player with not luck, seems to link to the streams but does nothing, no error messages or anything!

Any help would be greatly appreciated

[Baldrick]

Do you really have to stream with unreal? If you are using hamachi you can share/mount a network folder and load the files directly with wmp.

[Transentient]

Thanks for the quick response

You are quite correct about mounting the drive, have that already set up, this is purely an experimentation project just to see if an how the streaming can be done.

Have reached the point of being able to send and recieve a stream, swap to other streams etc, with video playback quality being ok, I happened to convert a file to DIVX and thought the quality seemed better so wanted to carry that through to the streaming.

[jagabo]

Try renaming the .Divx file .AVI. Are you using Divx's h.264 encoder or the old MPEG 4 part 2 ASP encoder? Must be the latter if you're getting .Divx files.

[Transentient]

Thanks Jagabo

Will try that, as far as the encoding I'm not sure, very much a newbie. I am using the latest version of the DIVX converter, and selecting the 1080HD option from the drop down.

[jagabo]

Use MediaInfo or GSpot to see details of the file you produced. That will tell you if it the video codec is h.264 (aka AVC, MPEG 4 part 10) or DIVX (aka Xvid, ASP, MPEG 4 part 2). I haven't played with Divx Converter for a while but I think 1080HD would give you h.264 in an MKV container.

[Transentient]

Would that mean i need an .MKV codec for Windows Media player?

Funny thing, as i said in my first post, file plays if it on the local machine, codec error only happens if i stream. Having read some today I believe Unreal doesn't transcode the stream?

[jagabo]

MKV is a container. You may need an MKV reader/splitter -- Halli, for example. It may just be some limitation of the streaming software. When streaming it's the streaming server that's responsible for determining how to handle the files.

[Transentient]

Thanks Jagabo

At work at moment, will try all you suggested later when at home, many thanks for your help so far