CC Video

A Computer Craft video platform supporting full colour video and streamed encoding.

Encoder written in Rust, Web Server written in Python, and decoder written in Lua.

javaw_czE7umoYHs.1.mp4

Features:

• Video Encoding
  • 320p resolution
  • 16 bit colour quantised blocks
• u8_pcm audio encoding
  • Properly mastered to ensure max quality
• Full colour support
• Youtube streaming
• Buffering Support

This project has been really fun for me, it started with the idea of pushing computer craft's displays to their limits and has ended up as a full youtube stream encoder pipeline. I learned a lot about stdout/in, pipes, and ffmpeg.

Monitors in computer craft are limited to 16 colours, but I had the idea to try and get around the limitation by breaking it down into multiple displays.

This was my first verison in 2023:

2023-06-14_20-43-52.1.1.mp4

A few months ago, I wanted to see if I could do it better with a much simpler encoder and decoder.

In about a day, I had a version re-made from scratch that was around 200 lines total, and performed way better:

javaw_Q1UX1jHLnM.mp4

Over the course of the next few weeks, I toiled away improving it and adding features such as audio playback, improving the resolution and quantisation, swapping to 2x2 monitors.

I eventually reworked my entire video and audio encoder pipeline into two different ffmpeg commands using a raw output, meaning I could also do processing with it.

# video
ffmpeg -i - -vf scale=854:480,fps=fps=20 -f rawvideo -pix_fmt rgb24 -

# audio
ffmpeg -i - -vn -ar 48000 -ac 1 -f s8 -y -

# audio (with filters)
ffmpeg -i - -vn -ar 48000 -ac 1 -filter:a lowpass=f=18000,compand=attacks=0.3:decays=0.8:soft-knee=1.2:points=-90/-100|-50/-80|-45/-15|-20/-12|-4/-4|0/0,loudnorm=I=-8:LRA=7:tp=-0.1 -f s8 -y -

Along with some other optimisations, this meant I had enough performance to encode video faster than playback, which meant I could stream video.

Steaming support meant I could support very long videos or live streams, since I didn't have to worry about storing everything in memory. Honestly the hardest part in doing this was figuring out how to tee stdout in python, I eventually figured out how using pipes and a queue, but it's suprisingly hard.

I hooked it up to yt-dlp, and now I have working youtube video streaming:

javaw_M0KzzaTEWb.mp4

This project is probably over for now, I've tidied it up the best I can and there may be some minor improvements I can do. But it's way better than I expected already, and I've learned so much from it, I'm very glad to have done it.

The one thing left to do is setup input streaming and hook it up to doom :)

Usage

Currently only tested on Windows, other platforms will probably work with some tinkering.

If your using this locally, make sure you remove the localhost restrcition in CC so you can access the servers locally.

Serve Script

In order to server the project, copy the contents of serve.lua onto your CC device using pastebin or copy and pasting.

Then run python serve.py, and this should start a HTTP server that allows your CC device to access the contents of the program folder.

If this is on a multiplayer server, you may need to tweak port forwarding and the SERVER option in the serve.lua to work correctly.

Encode Server

The project makes use of an encode server to stream video.

Again if this is in multiplayer, this also needs to be port forwarded and setup correctly.

cd server
python3.14 -m venv .venv
.venv/Scripts/Activate.ps1
pip install -r requirements.txt
python app.py

Python3.14 is recommended to improve performance, but earlier versions may work as well.

Monitor Setup

In order to setup the monitors create a grid of monitors like this:

If you ever need to recalibrate it, remove the monitors.json file.

Playing different videos

In order to play local files, you them in the data folder in the server folder and edit main.lua to request them instead.