Telstra T-Box, Serviio and DTS

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The Telstra T-Box has a "My Media" function which allows playback of video files either via the connected USB port, or over the network via DLNA.

I've just setup Serviio (a DLNA media server) on my FreeBSD machine - a HP Microserver N36L which does not have a powerful CPU by any stretch of the imagination. There's no way it would handle on-the-fly video transcoding which Serviio supports.

Fortunately the T-Box supports a wide variety of video & audio codecs so transcoding is not necessary for the vast majority of common codecs in use today.

However the T-Box will not decode DTS audio -- it passes DTS straight through to its optical audio output. Thus if you have your T-Box plugged into a TV that doesn't have an optical audio in you get no sound on any media files using DTS or AC3.

Serviio profiles to the rescue!

I added this profile to my profiles.xml:

<Profile id="T-Box" name="T-Box" extendsProfileId="1">
  <Transcoding>
    <Video targetContainer="mpegts" targetACodec="mp3" aBitrate="384">
      <Matches container="*" aCodec="dca" />
    </Video>
  </Transcoding>
</Profile>

Which says "If the file has dca (DTS) audio then transcode the audio to MP3". And because the <Video> has no targetVCodec attribute the video stream is passed through untouched meaning my HP Microserver's lack of CPU is not an issue.

For everything else the extendsProfileId attribute tells it to inherit from the default Serviio profile which does not transcode anything so the end result is that only DTS audio is transcoded to MP3, everything else is passed through to the T-Box untouched.

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This page contains a single entry by goosmurf published on January 25, 2013 10:01 AM.

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