Serviio

I'm utterly convinced Serviio is the best DNLA server after trying about 5-6 others.

Now if only it could present non MP4 video files (MKV, AVI, etc) to my iPhone/iPad/iPod as MP4 and transcode (if necessary) to mp4-h264-aac then we'd be laughing.

How can I help develop a profile to do this? My limited understanding of the profile XML description is that Serviio will not advertise a .AVI file as .MP4 so my IOS device will never get to request transcoding ... is this correct?

Edit: Links to DNLA IOS clients:
8player - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3JepvlYy_A - http://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/8player/id375860275?mt=8
Media Link Player Lite - http://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/media-link-player-lite/id313455652?mt=8

Edit 2: Never mind - I see 8player can .AVI files from Serviio. No need for this feature - it already "just works"

The iPad isn't a very good target system to have as a media client. It will only allow access to its video decode API using MP4 files, or mpegts containing H.264 + 2 channel AAC, streamed using AppleHTTP. Due to the MP4 container's design, it cannot be played while being written (so it's useless for realtime transcoding). The problem with AppleHTTP is that FFmpeg only contains a demuxer for that format, not a muxer.

Apps that play AVI will be using the CPU to do it, which will use the battery a lot. The only 3rd party app that has proper unfettered access to the video decode API (using the GPU) is XBMC, but you need to jailbreak.

Or you can just use Plugplayer on your IOS device which support serviio aswell

www.plugplayer.com

Does it handle mkvs these days? (I no longer have either iPhone or iPad). And ac3 audio?

It does but Goodplayer like all iOS media players is a software decoder, so everything is going through the CPU on the iPad which depending on circumstances may or may not work out. You can only access Apples H.264 decoder for media outside of MP4 if the device is jailbroken, which is how XBMC does it.

This is why I sold my iPad. My four year old 450 gramme VAIO P continues to be my movie player of choice on the go. Its 1600x768 screen is the perfect aspect for movies, it decodes 1080p content in hardware (H.264 and VC-1), it has an SSD, passive cooling and WiFi N, and even better - it's a real computer that runs real software, with workable keyboard (unlike even most netbooks). It had 'retina display' pixel density before Apple had even 'invented' it. Cost me a total of £500 including the SSD added later.

I'm not sure exactly how it does it but AirVideo is what you need. This will transcode video on the fly to a format an iOS device can play in hardware. It works perfectly and I can stream a 1080p video which it can transcode down so I can play it over 3G away from my house.

I'm pretty sure it just uses ffmpeg because it needs that installed so ffmpeg must do whats required.

Air Video uses a customised FFmpeg in fact, which has an AppleHTTP muxer grafted on. It hasn't been back merged into the FFmpeg sources though.

Try the 8player. Works great on iPhone & iPad! Subtitles, seeking & diacritics. LAN & WAN too.