Reply To: iTunes internals

#14969
rpedde
Participant

@turbo wrote:

Got a command line for that? Downloaded AtomicParsley, but I don’t know which atom to modify/check…

-T I think shows the metadata tree. You’re checking if the mdat atom is at the end, not at the beginning.

Or whatever atom it is. Point is, all the metadata has be be before the huge atom that has all the movie data. If it doesn’t, won’t stream.

@rpedde wrote:

If the metadata is right, and it plays from a seekable file system, but not streamed, then I don’t really have a good answer. Something about the headers that iTunes still doesn’t like? Not sure.

The file converted with MP4Box (MP4Box -hint filename.mov ) don’t play from FS at all – neither from iTunes nor QuickTime.

That’s your first test. If it wont’ play off the fs, it will never stream.

The changed testing phase is to set mp4v files to be SSC transcoded, make sure the script simply cat’s the file to STDOUT. This works when clicking on the actual file I want streamed.. But if clicking the AVI file (still cat’ing the streamable – working – MPEG4IP converted/fixed file though!) will (still!) make iTunes to hang up.. This is how I’ve been testing this previously, so apparently iTunes notices that it isn’t getting the file requested… ?!?

probably from a different codec type.

What’s going on here!?

Nary a clue. But as mentioned before, you aren’t going to get this work with simple shell scripts. You’re going to *have* to have something to synthesize headers, like wavstreamer does only with m4v. That’s why wavstreamer is there (well, in addition to doing block reads — most transcoders output as they reach the ends of an encoding block, which might be pretty small — a few bytes in the case of some audio formats, which kills performance).

Also, I’m not sure you are going to be able to stream anything but m4v (or something transcoded to m4v), since most of the quicktime plugins require seekable streams. All the ogg stuff does, flac does, and I don’t know for sure, but I bet the perian stuff does too.

The only think I *know* will stream with quicktime is m4v.

I think you can get most of the way with shell scripts and small patches to the daap server, but I don’t think you can avoid an “m4vstreamer” type application.

– Ron