Some questions about Transcoding (Linux)

[Gargravarr]

Hi all,

First off, I have to say TwonkyServer is a fantastic product. One of few cases where I've bought the product instead of going with freeware because it *works*. And generally, Twonky works VERY well. Even on my slow server, it installs in five seconds, never crashes and makes my entire library available to the network. I've been using it since 2009, when I first installed it on a modified Xbox running an old version of Debian - surprisingly it worked perfectly, with very low demands on the limited CPU and RAM, and served media to my Xbox 360, giving me a full-HD media player.

The clients don't always hold up their end of the deal, and this is where I start having issues. Predominantly, I've found that the 360 will not play (or even recognise) MKV video containers. I've taken to extracting the MP4 streams out of the containers, but this is not always successful - in several instances I've unwrapped the video and the 360 protests that the video is wrong. So, I've looked at transcoding, but it's not very well documented.

I run TS 6.0.37 on a Debian server (v6 as of now, but generally Debian Stable x86). The packages listed in the Wiki for transcoding to work do not exist in Debian, nor in the unofficial Debian Multimedia repositories. I found a blog that detailed a simple process that involved installing FFMPEG and symlinking it into the cgi-bin folder, which made the Transcoding options available. I also removed the -D flag from the init script as per the Wiki, and things began to happen, but I'm still not sure I've done it right.

When I restarted the server, it seemed to start going through my library and transcode random things. For example, I got a tonne of messages plastered over my shell about FFMPEG working on series 3 of The IT Crowd; strangely, these are AVI files and there are no rules for converting AVIs to MP4, but this is what FFMPEG was doing. I thought Transcoding was supposed to be on-the-fly, and there were no users accessing the server at the time.

Then, I went back to the 360 and discovered that the MKVs were still not listed in the Video menu, despite me adding the rules as per the wiki. I think I've gotten confused with the whole thing, as it's not making a lot of sense (sorry to say guys, but documentation is poor here!). Can someone walk me through getting MKVs to transcode on Linux?

Also, while we're at it, do you think the machine is powerful enough to handle on-the-fly transcoding? It's a Celeron 1.2GHz with 512MB RAM, but it runs headless (non-graphical) Linux that is configured to be somewhat lightweight. If this incarnation isn't up to it, I'd still like to know how to set things up as I'm going to upgrade the machine (dual-core Atom HT with 4GB RAM), or possibly replace it with a dual-CPU PowerEdge.

Thanks in advance,
Gargravarr