Windows Media Encoder - How to pause a live stream?

[dsDoan]

While streaming (encoding) an avi from my hard drive, I would like to be able to pause and unpause at will, as well as jump around the video. If it's possible, I can't figure out how.

An alternative, I know, would be to play the video through virtual cam software and feed that into WME, but all of the one's I've tried greatly lower the quality of the video. After seeing how great the quality is loading the file directly (which keeps the native resolution of the video), it'd pain me to have to sacrifice that, in order to gain control of my video.

Any ideas?

[guns1inger]

Jump around while streaming the video - i.e. affecting the video as it streams out of your computer, and therefore altering the stream - or jumping around the video on a client machine that is receiving the stream ?

I don't quite understand what you are trying to achieve. If it is the former, which seems to be what you are asking, then perhaps some fort of VJ software that can feed it's output to WME might do the trick. I don't know of any normal video players that could anything like this.

The other possibility might be to not stream the video directly, but you stream a screen capture of the video being played in another player that does do the things you need. WME can stream live screen captures as well. Just make sure the area being streamed is only the video playback area. Note : you may have to turn off the overlay in your video player to get WME to see it during capture. This is something you will have play around with.

[dsDoan]

Jump around while streaming the video - i.e. affecting the video as it streams out of your computer, and therefore altering the stream

This.

I considered using screen capture, but I'd like to leave that as a last resort. I'd like to maintain full use of my desktop while streaming.

I've looked around for software that would feed into WME, but I can't find any that will accept and output the native resolution of the video. They all seem to have preset resolutions to choose from.


Not that I'm well-versed on this kind of thing, but this seems like an option that should be built in to WME.

[guns1inger]

Why ? What you are asking for is not live streaming, which is essentially pass-through encoding, but buffering and recording capabilities, where the recording happens prior to the streaming.

You could look WME's replacement, Expression Encoder, and see if it offers anything that helps

[dsDoan]

Not using WME anymore, VLC does exactly what I want, but when I pause my stream, it cuts off anyone who is connected. If I unpause my stream, they won't know unless they manually reconnect. Any ideas to stop them from disconnecting when I pause?

[guns1inger]

You need to divorce the playback from the streaming. I don't know any streaming software that does that.

[Bjs]

Bit like the old tv test pattern between daily broadcasts ... their there but gone home for now ... but you can see the station is still broadcasting

Might look into linux media web server box ... stream pass through with "keep alive" client side connections ... its possible but they all have issues.

[Cornucopia]

2pcs sould do it.

1 to playback/pause. output through hdmi.
1 to capture ""live" encoding via hdmi input (must have card that takes hdmi in).

Haven't tried this, so I don't know if there might be a hdmi handshake problem. Would work with analog out+in (like composite, s-video), but this is a little less quality.

Scott

[dsDoan]

I figured out a solution. I have the clients connect to the server using Winamp. When Winamp loses connection, it repeatedly attempts to reconnect unless it is manually stopped. So when I unpause the stream, Winamp automatically reconnects the clients within a couple seconds.