I don't have a media computer set up to my TV, I don't like the sound of even quiet fans while watching my TV and I've yet to find a media computer that is quiet enough for me that also doesn't run too hot. But I do sometimes plugin my laptop video output to the TV (which is really just a fancy LCD monitor).
I do watch 720p mkv files of my favorite shows, which are h.264 for video and AC3 for audio. Since I don't have surround sound anyway, I decided to try my luck transcoding to mp4 and see if I could effectively stream it via flowplayer from my computer room (I have gigabit to the TV cabinet). I came up with this script -
There are probably other ways to do it, but using flowplayer is nice because it's cake to use php on web server to generate list of available vids and create the players, click a link to get the chosen file in flowplayer with a nice fullscreen option.
It may not be the best solution if you do have surround sound, as you lose the AC3 - but it works very well for me with a less sophisticated TV setup, and lets me neatly keep the large files elsewhere on the LAN.
I don't know how well it would work over wireless, but I suspect even 802.11g would be fast enough to start playing before it finishes buffering.
I do watch 720p mkv files of my favorite shows, which are h.264 for video and AC3 for audio. Since I don't have surround sound anyway, I decided to try my luck transcoding to mp4 and see if I could effectively stream it via flowplayer from my computer room (I have gigabit to the TV cabinet). I came up with this script -
#!/bin/bash
base=`echo $1 |sed -e s?".mkv$"?""?`
vidTrack=`mkvinfo ${base}.mkv |grep "Track type" |grep -n "video"
|cut -d":" -f1`
audTrack=`mkvinfo ${base}.mkv |grep "Track type" |grep -n "audio"
|cut -d":" -f1`
mkvextract tracks ${base}.mkv ${vidTrack}:${base}.h264
mkvextract tracks ${base}.mkv ${audTrack}:${base}.ac3
a52dec -o wavdolby ${base}.ac3 > ${base}.wav
rm -f ${base}.ac3
normalize-audio ${base}.wav
ffmpeg -i ${base}.h264 -i ${base}.wav -map 0:0 -map 1:0
-vcodec copy -acodec libfaac -ab 128k -y -f mp4 ${base}.tmp
qt-faststart ${base}.tmp ${base}.mp4
rm -f ${base}.h264 ${base}.wav ${base}.tmp
There are probably other ways to do it, but using flowplayer is nice because it's cake to use php on web server to generate list of available vids and create the players, click a link to get the chosen file in flowplayer with a nice fullscreen option.
It may not be the best solution if you do have surround sound, as you lose the AC3 - but it works very well for me with a less sophisticated TV setup, and lets me neatly keep the large files elsewhere on the LAN.
I don't know how well it would work over wireless, but I suspect even 802.11g would be fast enough to start playing before it finishes buffering.