As promised I wanted to get back after I was able to play with the new streaming feature in the latest release of MakeMKV. To my surprise this was actually in the last release (v1.4.9) but I was unaware of it. Basically after you scan a disc you can choose which title you want to stream.
Something that I found out that I didn’t know about before is MakeMKVCon. As the name indicates this is a binary that lets you run everything from the console. So with the simple command ./makemkvcon stream disc:0 you can stream your movie over an http server. Just point our browser to http://localhost:51000 to find the right vob or .ts file you are looking for and launch it in vlc or another application that can stream over http.
The advantages of running it from the console is it makes it able for your to integrate it with a script. So that brings me to the second part of this post. Getting the blu-ray player to stream directly to plex without having to copy it to your hard drive first. Which in my opinion is great since I have a small hard drive. Unfortunately I don’t have a working script yet. It’s about 50% there. just have to finish learning the other parts of the plex plug-in api. Once when its done I’ll be posting back here so keep checking back.
One thing I found interesting and didn’t understand why at first is why the MakeMKV people would want to use an HTTP server to stream the files. seemed like a lot of added complexity when there are other ways to stream the output just as easily. Looking at the HTTP headers it mentioned UPnP. So that was a nice surprise. Once when all the UPnP stuff is completed you should be able to play these files in plex or xbmc a lot easier.
So you have a mac and you have a Blu-Ray drive. But you can’t figure out how to get them to work with each other. Well unfortunately for us sad folks Apple has not been very supportive of the Blu-Ray platform for what ever reason. Fortunately for us though we have people out there in the open source and hacking community that are really smart and have made it possible. Unfortunately it’s not as easy as inserting your disc and pressing play. But it can be done and it isn’t all that hard.
