Sunshine and moonlight

VNC and RDP are great and all, and for so many purposes, they are the goto solution for remoting into a machine.

Now, another solution which is great (And much better if you have the bandwidth) is to broadcast your screen video and do all the work on the server rather than the client

The solution used to be nvidia’s game stream, which was abandoned by nvidia, the new solution based on nvidia would be the sunshine (Server) and moonlight client

The sunshine+moonlight duo work on almost every platform I need, Windows, Mac, Android, iOS, Even LG TVs running web OS… in short, it is a more universal solution. You can even create a virtual non existent monitor under linux and stream that to a different device !

So, let us start with the server (Sunshine)

Sunshine on debian

Installing sunshine on debian is very easy as a .deb installation file is provided, sunshine is not yet in the debian repositories, but if i understand the license correctly, it can be some time in the future

Now, go to the sunshine website, and download the deb file., in my case, I visit this webpage, and download the sunshine-debian-bookworm-amd64.deb file

Now, from the command prompt, su (to run as root), then cd to the directory where your deb file resides, then “sudo apt install ./sunshine-debian-bookworm-amd64.deb”, We should now have the server running and waiting to be opened in the web browser, Now, on the command line , type “sunshine”

Point a web browser to https://localhost:47990/, ignore the problem with self signed certificates, and set your username and password

Now, your debian computer is running a sunshine server, go to any other machine where you want to install the client (moonlight) from here , and connect to your server by its IP address.

You are done !

Sunshine on Windows

Download sunshine on windows from the latest release (As of today, you will fine it here)

Install it like you would any other application, once done, the official help page will show up (this)

once you click finish, a page at https://localhost:47990/welcome will open, asking you to create a password, create one, the default username is sunshine, but you can use whatever you want (In my case, it is my default RDP password)

you are done, you can now access the windows PC from any device with moonlight

Moonlight on Windows

you can download moonlight ether from github (Here) or from the official website (https://moonlight-stream.org/),

Downloading video from youtube

This might sound complicated, but youtube videos come in many shapes, many of them have either video only, or audio only !

the best way to get a full resolution video is to download then combine video and audio !

But before we go there, youtube throttles the speed you download videos at ! so youtube-dl needs patching, an alternative would be yt-dlp (See here)

The easier way to install would be

apt install yt-dlp

Now, if you insist on pip, you can do the following

apt install python3-pip

python3 -m pip install --force-reinstall https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/archive/master.tar.gz

Now, let us try downloading a video/audio

youtube-dl -F https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUvrLxaSolc

The line above will show you a bunch of options and their IDs, what you need to do now is to download the ones you need with a command such as

youtube-dl -f 270 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUvrLxaSolc

Now, to combine them (Audio and video) without re-encoding…

ffmpeg -i ao.webm -i vo.webm -c:v copy -c:a copy output.webm

But remember when you download,

Only VP8 or VP9 or AV1 video and Vorbis or Opus audio and WebVTT subtitles are supported for WebM.

If you have installed via pip3

/usr/local/bin/yt-dlp ...

Extracting Audio from youtube files without loss of quality

To not get you confused with terminology, let’s create our own with the simple words we know.

For those who have been here before and want the lowdown to remind them of the commands, just scroll to the bottom of this post.

this bit of theory i am starting with is not needed for you to extract your audio, but simply to introduce you to what we are doing

The video file has 2 sub files, one for video and one for audio, and they are synchronized together so that the people’s lips movement in the video appear to be speaking what the audio file is playing.

If we do not want to lose any of the audio’s quality by decoding then re-encoding again, we will want to extract the “Inner audio file” without modifying it, and to put it into a separate file (container).

Separating the audio from the video is easy with a free tool called ffmpeg, and here are the exact instructions

1- Make sure ffmpeg is installed on your computer and is added to the system path, if not see the article (installing ffmpeg)
2- Download the youtube or any other video file to c:downloadvideo, assuming we have 2 tutorial files one is tutorial.flv and the other is tutorial.mp4, both were downloaded from youtube.com (if you don’t know how to download a youtube video, see this article).
3- open the command line (Command prompt can be opened from your start menu, look in accessories).
4- Enter the following command into your command prompt to change active directory to where you have your files, in our example we enter the following into the command prompt

cd c:downloadvideo

5-Then, for my first file, i will execute the command

ffmpeg -i tutorial.flv

You should now see, on your command prompt window, what sub files (streams) are inside your container file (the file you downloaded from youtube or anywhere else).

--------------------------------------------------------------
  Duration: 00:02:06.59, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 64 kb/s
    Stream #0.0: Video: flv, yuv420p, 320x240, 29.97 tbr, 1k tbn, 1k tbc
    Stream #0.1: Audio: mp3, 22050 Hz, mono, s16, 64 kb/s
--------------------------------------------------------------

if you don’t see the word mp3 like this example, don’t panic, just move on to step 7.

In our first example file, the audio stream turned out to be an MP3 stream as you can see below, if that was not the case and we had a different format (As i will explain next), we would have had different choices in extracting, but for this example, we have MP3, meaning we do not need to re-encode anything, just copy the stream from the container we downloaded into a new container that will be created

6- Extract the MP3 file without re-encoding and while keeping full quality like in the video

ffmpeg.exe -i tutorial.flv -acodec copy tutorial.mp3

But for some reason, copeying the OGG ogg vorbis from a webm file without reencoding did not work untill i added the -vn switch

ffmpeg -i Bir_G_zellik_Yap_Murat_Dalk_l.webm -vn -acodec copy test1.ogg

So, now i have the file tutorial.mp3 that simply has the same clarity as my video file. the -acodec copy parameter told ffmpeg to just copy into new file, and not to re-encode

7- If it does not say mp3 anywhere in your results, you have a different audio format. that we will deal with now.

so let us deal with our second file tutorial.mp4 that turned out not to have MP3 in it, but rather AAC.

So executing the command

ffmpeg.exe -i tutorial.mp4

Returned the result

--------------------------------------------------------------
Duration: 00:05:02.44, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 281 kb/s
  Stream #0.0(und): Audio: aac, 44100 Hz, mono, s16
  Stream #0.1(und): Video: h264, yuv420p, 320x240 [PAR 1:1 DAR 4:3], 25 tbr, 25 tbn, 50 tbc
--------------------------------------------------------------

In this case, we do NOT have the option that will allow us to get an MP3 without re-encoding, we can re-encode it into MP3 as i will show you in a bit, or we can extract and use an AAC audio file.

An AAC file is not at all bad, sometimes it is better than an MP3. Why ? The AAC file is a newer format and it will still play on many devices, on most computers, relatively new IPODs, Most modern mobile phones and many other MP3 players.

AAC file streams are mostly put into m4a containers, but can also be .m4b, .m4p, .m4v, .m4r, .3gp, .mp4, .aac. (OF YOUR CHOICE, the most common is m4a, but some older mobiles use 3GP)

So, let us first try to extract the AAC stream without re-encoding (next step we will re-encode to MP3 for those who want an MP3)

ffmpeg.exe -i tutorial.mp4 -acodec copy tutorial.m4a

Now, the device you want to use does not support AAC files, so what we can do is ask ffmpeg to convert it to MP3 for us

ffmpeg -i tutorial.mp4 tutorial.mp

—————————————————–

The Lowdown

1- Find out what streams exist

ffmpeg -i tutorial.mp4

2- Copy MP3 stream without re-encoding

ffmpeg.exe -i tutorial.mp4 -acodec copy tutorial.mp3

3- Copy AAC stream without re-encoding

ffmpeg.exe -i tutorial.mp4 -acodec copy tutorial.m4a

4- Re-encode audio to MP3 file fromat

ffmpeg -i tutorial.mp4 tutorial.mp3

 

To encode any file into a DVD compatible file (Best when used with DVD players that have a USB input or with USB TV)

ffmpeg -i 9.mp4 -threads 2 -filter:v "scale='if(gt(a,720/480),720,-1)':'if(gt(a,720/480),-1,480)',pad=w=720:h=480:x=(ow-iw)/2:y=(oh-ih)/2" -target pal-dvd 9.mpg

Sometimes, you might want to replace pal-dvd with ntsc-dvd