VLC Video On Demand (IPTV Converter)

Converting IPTV Multicast to a rtsp unicast stream with VLC including Video On Demand (VOD) isn't hard if you happen to know the right syntax. The sparse VLC documentation makes it rather hard to achieve this, so maybe this will be of help to you. My vlm-file looks like this:

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new greattvchannel vod
setup greattvchannel output #transcode{vcodec=h264,vb=768,acodec=mpga,ab=192}
setup greattvchannel mux mp2t
setup greattvchannel input "udp://@1.2.3.4:5678"
setup greattvchannel enabled

This transcodes your IPTV multicast stream to the h264 video codec with a videobitrate of 768 kbit/s and audio to the mpeg audio codec with an audiobitrate of 192. The stream is grabbed from the multicast source 1.2.3.4 and the port number 5678. You can place multiple stanzas like this into your vlm-config-file and start vlc with this command-line:

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SUDO_UID=1000 vlc-wrapper -I telnet --telnet-password 1234 --vlm-conf=/path/to/your/vlm.conf -d

Assuming that UID 1000 is a valid unprivileged user. This is on debian linux, the vlc-wrapper is used for starting vlc as root, as rtsp is on the privileged port 554. Access the stream on any streaming client with: rtsp://your.media.server/greattvchannel

Last Update: 20.09.2013