As of version 0.3 GmaWebservice has the feature to stream your media files. It also supports on-the-fly transcoding (changing the video format and/or quality) using the open source tool ffmpeg.

Currently this streaming feature is used by aMPdroid to stream media to Android phones.

Transcoding

Transcoding means that the source material is converted into another format and/or the quality of the video is reduced. This way GmaWebservice can stream a wide variety of video types to clients in the same (supported) format and adapt the video quality to the available bandwidth.

Video conversion is a very cpu-heavy task (especially when the source material is HD quality) so you will need a PC with a fast enough CPU.

Using multiple cores

FFMpeg allows using multiple cores for transcoding, so if you have a Multi-Core system you can decide how many core should be used for transcoding. The default setting is to use only one core.

You can change this by editing the config.xml in the GmaWebservice directory (e.g. C:\Program Files (x86)\GmaWebService) and adding -threads x to the transcoding profile, where x is the number of cores you want to use.

Example

<transcoder>
      <name>Android HQ</name>
      <description>A high quality profile for fast connections and fast CPUs</description>
      <bandwidth>1400</bandwidth>
      <target>android</target>
      <useTranscoding>true</useTranscoding>
      <inputMethod>Path</inputMethod>
      <outputMethod>Path</outputMethod>
      <mime>video/MP2T</mime>
      <transcoder>FFMpeg\ffmpeg.exe</transcoder>
      <codecParameters>-vcodec libx264 -b 1024k -profile baseline -preset fast -acodec aac -ab 256k -ac 2 -strict experimental -threads 3 -f mpegts</codecParameters>
      <maxOutputWidth>800</maxOutputWidth>
      <maxOutputHeight>600</maxOutputHeight>
    </transcoder>