The Slingbox challenge: Place-shift my media but with a better CODEC

I have had a Slingbox for a long time and now that Sling Media has the new Slingbox Pro with an HD input, I'm thinking of upgrading. I was hoping that the maximum resolution would have increased to something above the 640x240 (originally 320x240) maximum, and it did but only to 640x480. 640x480 is about acceptable for Internet video, but the CODEC they went with can be improved upon. For reasons I don't totally understand Sling Media decided to stick with the Microsoft VC1 CODEC for streaming. I can get much better results with h.264 or even On2's VP7!

My challenge to myself and our readers is to come up with something that acts like a Slingbox, a place-shifting live and recorded TV solution with cable box control that looks better than what Sling Media has to offer at the same bitrates or lower. An added advantage is being able to stream in true 720p content if the bitrate is available. At first I would like to just be able to stream over the Internet with a better CODEC, but it would be nice to eventually get mobile device support such as a Treo 700p/w and be cross platform with Windows, Macintosh and Linux support. Any platform is allowed, but integrating into a MacMini that can pull pre-recorded content, Microsoft Media Center that ties directly to the interface or MythTV that does the same would be amazingly cool.

If anyone knows of a product that does this today with a better CODEC than VC1 or if they have ideas where I should start, please let me know. The prize for winning this challenge? One kick-butt (hopefully open-source) place-shifting solution based on open-standards and a warm, fuzzy feeling inside.

That article is what prompted this one, actually. I think it's a load of bull and don't buy it for a moment. If the hardware they are using to compress is so weak that it can't deal with an h.264 real-time stream, then I question the choices they made to create the box in the first place. Using weak hardware as an excuse to compromise and use a lesser CODEC is silly in my opinion.

If Sling Media is unable to figure out how to improve video quality, then maybe someone else can, which is the point of the article.

Even the On2 VP6 codec can equal or better the quality of VC-1 and is less hardware intensive. It's probably cheaper to license as well.

AGREED! Although I would like to see a better CODEC than VP6 such as VP7 or h.264 if possible. I'm not so foolish to think that every device had a huge processor designed for decoding video on it. A Treo 700wx only has a 312Mhz processor, so I'm not sure that h.264 will fly, but VP7 may.

Of course, I can play MPEG4 files in Kinoma player on a 700p, so maybe it can decompress h.264 in real time... Sure would be cool to see if someone has a better option that can do HD. Orb maybe?

I've caressed the idea of something similar until Slingmedia did the job.
My best bet would be x264 which is a free implementation of the h.264 codec. It is a pretty good one , that, in my opinion, beats apple's implementation when it comes to live encoding.
You can play with it using the videolan client VLC (free cross platform software). http://www.videolan.org
The results in live streaming are amazing. In fact, believe this is what the people from TV2Me actually use in their 5000$ box !
However, there is a problem with bitrate control. There is no proper CBR implementation for live streaming, and the bitrate is unpredictable. The codec was basically devised to offer the best picture quality while ripping DVDs...
The developpers on doom9's forums don't even want to hear about a vfw version of the codec anymore.
So proper programming skills are required to make that codec viable for live streaming.
Most important is trying to emulate the Slingstream function and come up with a birate control mode that adapts it to the available bandwith.
For channel changing, i used a web based interface (housing the player too) in conjunction with an IR blaster set to receive order from that very web page.

Unfortunately, this was a PC based solution. Not a dedicated box whatsoever. I had to use an Athlon XP 64 X2 3800+ (overclocked from dual 2000MHz to dual 2500 MHz) to get the encoding power i needed for 640x480 encoding.

Even so, i bumped into that bitrate management problem. My DSL upload bandwith outputs a max 1Mbps (closer to 800kbps). Although i set the encoder to 500 or 700kbps, the encoder kept jumping around at bitrates above 1mbps, thus making that solution unvialble. I finally used a tweaked version of real video 10 along with AAC+ audio instead.

On a more optimistic note, some clever people just opened a website providing new builds of x264 in its vfw form.
http://deaththesheep.uni.cc/
i'd like to use it with nullsoft's nsv tools to get AAC+ encoding.

Sony's newer LF-B20 location free TV do offer h.264 support this time. I couldn't test it.

eh ? VC-1 is well known to be a FAR more efficent codec than h.264 (hence bluray switched from h.264 to VC-1, and HD-DVD has always used it), the problem is that you arent comparing like for like in your comparison.

h.264 videos that you watch on your PC, have been encoded on a computer - computers can be left encoding for hours, even days, just to get the steam as clean as possible. Not to mention that they have far more raw processing power to start with.

Now, The slingbox has to encode video on-the-fly so the stream is live, this sacrifices alot of quality... even if they used h264, the results would be just as bad, if not worse (because h264 requires more processing power to encode than VC-1, and the encoder inside the slingbox will be incredibly cheap).

BluRay has not switched from h.264 to VC1 and HD-DVD doesn't just support VC1. Both formats support h.264 and VC1, although at this stage it looks like HD-DVD may be dying off soon.

Actually, the only studio I have found that is releasing in VC-1 seems to be Warner and there is talk that they will be moving to h.264 as well...

Keep in mind that there are chips designed to take the load of encoding. Actually, a computer is very inefficient at encoding any video since it does not have these specialized DSPs. The Slingbox has used an encoding chip since the beginning, and now, fortunately their latest model has even moved to h.264.

Now that Sling is moving to h.264 and even stated in this interview that the quality should surpass their other sling players, it may be time to put this thread to rest.

Sling is no longer on MS CODECS, it looks like they are moving to h.264, and I for one am very excited about this!

Firstly, VC-1 is an open standard (SMPTE). Its not really a microsoft codec at all. With 15 companies in the VC-1 patent pool. All the documentation is available *freely* to anyone who should wish to implement it. No royalties.

Bear in mind, the old VC-1 based slingbox launched in 2005. Obviously the new box will have superior quality to the old one, the encoder chipsets are just far more powerful than they were then.

Had the latest slingbox used VC-1. I'm pretty convinced the quality would be better than h.264, the evidence speaks for itself:

DV Magazine found VC-1 to be superior to both MPEG-2 and MPEG-4.
C'T Magazine, Germany's premiere audio-video magazine, compared various codecs, including VC-1, H.264, and MPEG-2, and selected VC-1 as producing the best subjective and objective quality for high-definition (HD) video.
The European Broadcasting Union (EBU) found VC-1 had the most consistent quality in tests that compared Microsoft VC-1, RealMedia V9, the Envivio MPEG-4 encoder, and the Apple MPEG-4 encoder.

Btw, You are very wrong about hardware encoders. Multi-CPU software encoders have been the standard for professional encoding of this generation of codecs. Hardware encoders have been left trailing for years, (decoding is an entirely different story though).

As for blu-ray / HD DVD, well, its very clear how that "war" turned out. However if you read the head to head comparisons of titles that had releases on both formats: http://www.highdefdigest.com/feature_blurayvshddvd_firstcomparison.html This is as close you are going to get to an objective H.264/VC-1 comparison.

Oh if only Real had the marketing power. The Real 10 codec, although 4 years old now, still leaves vc-1 and mpeg-4 (part2) sucking arse.

264 is the only thing close to RV10, and I hope that more development goes that way.

Standards based - sure. Whatever you think. MPEG-4 has been around for what, 10 years now? Still no 'Standard'. What a corporate fiasco..

Hardware DSP's are the only way to go for on the fly encoding, and Christian, although yes we have all been using multi-core/multi processor software based encoders for years, it is obviously more efficient for on the fly encoding to use a dedicated chip that doesn't have to go to software to do the work. It's simple physics. keep the process on the DSP.. then its simply a question of if the DSP processing speed is as advanced.

Comments

1. Posted by: JD on November 10, 2006 10:14 AM:

If you don't understand the reasons, wouldn't it be best to learn about them before proposing such a challenge? A recent Sling Community article touched on why Sling Media stuck with VC-1, and the reason provided is pretty understandable to me.

http://www.slingcommunity.com/article/15266/

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