Stream Live TV to a DLNA Device? Is it Possible? (1 Viewer)

[spacemanc]

Hi, I'm a very happy user of mediaportal and I currently use it to serve TV around the home to various PC's and Laptops.

However in my bedroom I don't have a PC. I occasionally get around this by using a Laptop connected to the TV, but I wondered if there was a way around this using DLNA.

I want to be able to watch a single channel through DLNA on my TV without using any other devices. I've thought of a couple of solutions and done a little research, but I thought I'd ask here, before I spend a lot of time on what might be a dead end.

I found this, which uses VLC and TVersity, which looks like it might do what I want, but looks like it goes through more programs than might be really necessary:

http://alenblog.wordpress.com/2011/04/21/stream-computer-desktop-to-tv-using-dlna-tversity-and-vlc/

The other possibility is recording a program and then using something like Serviio to DLNA the recorded file to the TV, but I'm not sure if this is only possible once the recording is finished, which obviously would be useless for watching live TV.

Any help or advice would be very gratefully received!

 

[etsmc]

we are trying to do the same thing I think.
So far we have found serviio supports online sources. if we go in to the TV server and manually start a time shift of a channel we can put the stream address in to serviio and from our TV select this source and we can watch TV on the TV..
our next step is to have the TV server automatically start time shifting all the channels on start up.
if anyone know how to do this or a plugin that can time shift every channel on start up that would be great.

 

[spacemanc]

we are trying to do the same thing I think.
So far we have found serviio supports online sources. if we go in to the TV server and manually start a time shift of a channel we can put the stream address in to serviio and from our TV select this source and we can watch TV on the TV..
our next step is to have the TV server automatically start time shifting all the channels on start up.
if anyone know how to do this or a plugin that can time shift every channel on start up that would be great.

Time shift EVERY channel? I only have a dual channel DVB-S card, so I could only receive the channels of 2 transponders at once - but in some cases even this could be 20+ channels, so to timeshift that many channels at once would be alot of data when most of my channels are HD!

I just want to do it with one channel which is preset downstairs. eg I'm watching a program on the sofa and want to watch the rest of it upstairs in bed. I should be able to timesift the program and then see that file with the DNLA TV upstairs. I'm sure there's a way but I've not found it yet!

 

[nonam]

hey

i`m trying to do the same thing...
did u guys have made it? are u able to watch live-tv on an dlna-device?
the dvb recoridng service makes it possible but i would like to use a free ware...
so i hope u can help me

 

[receiverbox]

In my opinion, this is a question of fake functionality. As far as I know, DLNA doesn't know Live Streams, that is why they expect a kind of (recorded) file. But it should be possible to adapt a DLNA-Server to simulate a big file and streams on request the Live content. Maybe there are other disadvantage to overcome (how to re-act on widning fwd or backwards)...

That's only my two cents.

 

[Arnax]

As far as I know, DLNA doesn't know Live Streams, that is why they expect a kind of (recorded) file.

It's certainly possible...

With DLNA’s newly developed DLNA Premium Video guidelines, Intel can better enable its customers to enjoy live TV and movies across a variety of devices including tablets, set-top-boxes, PCs, and mobile phones.

 

[JoeSmith]

maybe it would be possible to create "fake" files with the channel names (i.e. channel1.avi channel2.avi bbc.avi whatever.avi) and if the file gets requested from the dlna server a channel switch to a channel with the same name could be done and timeshifting could be started. You would need a special dlna server that could interpret the wanted files as channels...

 

[spacemanc]

So is anyone doing this yet? It would be a great feature as I suspect that a good proportion of TV's which are sold nowadays have DLNA functionality - all the TV's in my home have it. This would mean there would be no need for several rather expensive clients.

I'm going to experiment with few things tomorrow - I saw this interesting page, which shows each channel on a TV tuner as a DLNA file which would be awesome:

http://www.homemultimedianetwork.co...d-Live-TV-to-an-Xbox-using-Nero-MediaHome.php (half way down)

Thats using Nero MediaHome and an Xbox, but it shows that it's possible. I will also test out Servio and TVersity.

EDIT: I got this to kind of work pretty easily but it's not perfect. I installed Servio (free) and simply entered the Mediaportal Stream url into the Library>Online section in the Servio console settings. I can then selected the stream on my TV's DLNA page. I've only tested it on one TV (people are sleeping in the rooms with the other TV's!) but the TV I have tested appeared to have no deinterlacing and also the picture was breaking up. I imagine that this TV has the slowest processor of all our TV's, so I'll test it again tomorrow on the more powerful TV's upstairs. It gives no options to select channels and when I open the stream, it starts from where the server was turned on, but it can be fast forwarded so that it's live.

 

[Arnax]

maybe this should be moved to MP2

Plugin: UPnP / DLNA Media Server for MediaPortal 2

 

[jhb]

Making live TV work with DLNA is not that hard - really.

Under Linux I would do that with the FUSE-filesystem (userspace filesystem), where I can easily make a filesystem that presents whatever I need to show. On Windows the solution is probably:
- Dokan, which is a Windows user mode file system that also has a FUSE APIfor it (Fuse4Win).

Another solution is to actually alter a DLNA server to understan Mediaportal TV-server files and data (maybe easier) and fake the file-sizes (and other needed information). Using the XBMC-plugin as a wrapper for such a solution would probably give a head start with all the needed APIs to MP. For the DLNA server there are many to choose from.

Still (as mentioned previously in the thread) fast forwarding is probably the biggest issue with both alternatives, but with our own filesystem (from DLNA or in Dokan) we can present the newest data we have independent of where we are in the file (perhaps with a small delay).

I've been looking into implementing DLNA support with FUSE and MythTV on Linux a couple of years ago, but I ended up in sticking with Mediaportal and Windows clients anyway due to the poor support for TV-cards on Linux...
...and I am no Windows developer either... :-(