Recently MediaCoder has been equipped with a built-in media server, which is able to stream out media files with real-time transcoding.

What is this feature be used for? There lots of applications for a streaming server, especially one with capability to transcode while streaming. Here I list some typical applications:

• Watch video and listen to music from another PC or any capable device, through LAN/WLAN/Internet etc.
• With real-time transcoding, we can even play all kinds of contents on a less-capable networked device, e.g. PDA and mobile phone, regardless of the audio/video format of the original content and without having to convert its format.
• Preview encoding effects without performing a complete file-to-file transcoding.

Since 0.6.1.4088, the media streaming server feature is usable. The realtime transcoding is still quite experimental though. There are several limitation for use of transcoding for streaming. Due to the special characterists of streaming (in general, streamed data is sequential, and without seeking back operation), only some container formats are supported, inclung MPEG-1/2, MPEG-2 TS, Matroska (only with FFmpeg as encoder) and most elementary streams. Multiplexers are not usable for streaming. I will publish a tutorial at a later time. Of course you are encouraged to explore it yourself. 😉

Coming up next:

How to use MediaCoder to stream out transcoded video