Can I skip transcoding and serve the online streams directly to my device?
A very common question! And according to many device manufacturers, their consoles can natively handle quite a few different media file formats and codecs. It would make sense if PlayOn could just shuttle online video streams, such as FLV or H.264, directly to the device, instead of converting it on the fly, right? Unfortunately, the theory is better than reality, mainly for two reasons. First, although the devices claim to handle these codecs, the actual support is often unreliable, especially when the media is streamed from a web server vs. coming from a flat file on disk. Second, and much more importantly, all of the core online content providers available in PlayOn have quirks associated with them that actually require transcoding. For example, it’s impossible for a DLNA client to incorporate separate advertisements interspersed within a main video. Also, many of the ads are in different media formats than the main show. DLNA clients require one single, contiguous video stream, and
