Creating profiles

You can define custom streaming profiles for MPExtended in the StreamingProfiles.xml file in C:\ProgramData\MPExtended. This can be useful if none of the default profiles match your requirements.

Please note that custom profiles will currently be overwritten on an MPExtended upgrade. Always keep a backup of your changes to the StreamingProfiles.xml file.

Defining a profile

The configuration file is an XML file. All profiles consist of an TranscoderProfile node, with some child nodes that specify the settings for this profile.

MPExtended automatically resizes videos, to reduce bandwidth and CPU usage. Parameters for the resizing, respecting the aspect ratio of the video and weird input formats (such as non-square pixels), are automatically inserted into the command line of the transcoder. The only thing your profile has to define is the maximum output size.

You can specify the following settings for a profile:

• Name: The name of the profile
• Description: A short description of the profile
• Bandwidth: An indication of the bandwidth used by this profile, in kbit/s.
• Transport: The intended network transport for the output stream. Currently supported values are 'http', 'httplive' and 'rtsp'.
• Target: the intended player for this profile:
  • android: Android (used by aMPdroid)
  • ios: iOS (currently unused)
  • pc-flash-video: WebMediaPortal with the Flash video player
  • pc-flash-audio: WebMediaPortal with the Flash audio player
  • pc-vlc-video: WebMediaPortal with the VLC video player
  • pc-vlc-audio: WebMediaPortal with the VLC audio player
  • mobile-hls-video: WebMediaPortal with an HTML5 player for HTTP Live Streaming (only supported by iOS at the moment)
• MIME: MIME-type of the output stream.
• HasVideoStream: Set to 'true' if the profile has a video stream, 'false' if there is no video stream.
• MaxOuputWidth: The maximum width of the video stream.
• MaxOutputHeight: The maximum height of the video stream.
• Transcoder: The full class name of the MPExtended support for the used transcoder.
  • MPExtended.Services.StreamingService.Transcoders.Direct: Stream without transcoding
  • MPExtended.Services.StreamingService.Transcoders.Generic: Generic transcoder
  • MPExtended.Services.StreamingService.Transcoders.FFMpeg: ffmpeg transcoder
  • MPExtended.Services.StreamingService.Transcoders.VLCWrapper: VLC transcoder, using our wrapper executable.
  • MPExtended.Services.StreamingService.Transcoders.VLCWrapperHTTPLiveStreaming: VLC 2 transcoder with support for HTTP Live Streaming
• TranscoderParameters: Parameters for the transcoder. See the reference below.

Transcoder options reference

The FFmpeg transcoder has these options:

• noResize: Set this option to yes to disable the automatic injection of resizing parameters into the command line.
• codecParameters (mandatory): The ffmpeg parameters that set the codec settings.

The Generic transcoder has these options:

• transcoder (mandatory): Path to the transcoder executable.
• arguments (mandatory): Arguments of the transcoder.  You can use the following placeholders:
  • #IN#: Path to the input file.
  • #OUT#: Path to the output file.
  • #WIDTH#: Width of the output.
  • #HEIGHT#: Height of the output.
  • #AUDIOSTREAMID#: ID of the selected audio stream
  • #STARTPOSITION#: Start position in seconds (to support seeking).

The VLC and VLCWrapper transcoders have these options:

• path (mandatory): Path to the vlc or VLCWrapper executable.
• encoder (mandatory): The transcoder parameters, put into the #transcode{} part of the VLC command line. Leave this empty to avoid generating an transcode section (i.e. only remux the stream).
• muxer (mandatory): The muxer parameters, as appended to the #transcode{} part of the VLC command line.
• options: Additional command line options for VLC.
• tsOptions: Additional command line options for VLC, only added when the source is an MPEG-TS stream (live TV or recordings).
• noResize: Set this option to yes to disable the automatic injection of resizing parameters into the encoder options.
• disableSeeking: Set this option to yes to disable seeking in the stream (only useful for debugging).
• flvMetadataInjection: Set this option to yes to enable the injection of FLV-metadata into the stream. This allows WebMediaPortal to seek in the stream. Please make sure the output is an FLV stream.
• rtspOutput: Set this option to yes to enable preliminary RTSP support. Use #ADDRESs# for the sdp argument in the muxer.

The VLCWrapperHTTPLiveStreaming transcoder has these additional options:

• httpLiveOptions (mandatory): The options for HTTP Live Streaming, put into the access=livehttp{} part of the VLC command line.
• httpLiveRemoveOld: Keep this many segments that have already been played. This deletes segments after they have been sent to the client, to reduce disk usage. Segments will always be deleted when the stream is stopped.