No worries, thanks for the comment!

High CPU usage is fairly normal – the 2.4GHz Core2Duo in my server jumps to ~175% during transcoding, meaning that one core is pulling 100% and the other is hitting 75%.

It’d be my guess that ffmpeg (the program which AirVideo uses to do the transcoding) is struggling for CPU cycles, and can’t keep the bitrate up. The stream cache (which is 512Kb) is getting emptied before ffmpeg can fill it again, your remote airvideo client is saying “hey, this is coming down too slowly, which is probably a slow network connection. Can you drop the quality/bitrate and try again?”

Airvideo server complies, and tells ffmpeg to cycle through the settings until it gets to something it can output at a reasonable rate – probably to the lowest preset available, which is no video and 64k audio, which is about the quality of a phone call.

You can hard set the maximum conversion rate by selecting “conversion settings” when you’re looking at a video, then selecting “global conversion settings” up the top. The CPU utilization of ffmpeg on my server looked like this:
256K: ~98%
512K: ~130%
1024K: ~165%
1536K: ~175%
The last setting looked like I was hitting the limit of what my system could handle. Give it a try and you might find something which your system can handle, but your mileage may vary.

The only other thing you could do is to perform a ‘convert’instead of ‘play with live conversion.’This will create a new file in the same directory as the target video with an m4v extension, a format your iphone can handle natively.

Once the file is converted, it can stream without using much CPU at all. You can use this to watch stuff via local wifi, but it won’t work over 3G. If you really need 3G streaming, or don’t want to have to convert everything before watching it, I’d say it’s time for an upgrade, I’m afraid.

Cheers,
Leigh.

Thank you so much for the easy guide! Very quick and painless to setup.

However I’m wondering if you can assist me in diagnosing an issue I’m having. I’m able to connect to my server fine, and can start up a video… however it only plays fine for about 25-30 seconds before the audio quality reduces dramatically, and the video cuts out entirely.

I’ve watched my server’s system monitor during this time and the CPU jumps up close to 95% as soon as I hit the play button… stays there while streaming… and then as soon as the video cuts out (audio continues at reduced quality) I can see the CPU going down to 50-65%.

Granted, my server’s CPU is quite pathetic (last gen 3Ghz P4 w/ HT), but does it sound to you like my computer is finding it can’t handle the stream, and it’s cutting it off or something? Is there a way I can simply force it to buffer instead of cutting off the video, or maybe even reducing the quality a bit so it can stream fine?

Considering some of the other things I do on my network, it’s safe to rule out network speeds.

Anyways, thanks for any input you can give me!