TV Server (1 Viewer)

A

Anonymous

Guest
I've had this idea for sometime, and i think it would be extremely cool/useful. I have one TV in my house and about 16 computers... (including a car computer and laptops). I use a computer to watch tv etc however i think it woudl be great if i could utilize that tv tuner on any computer in my house. Having said that i think what would be involved is a web interface which would allow you to view the current channel or change the channel. This would allow multiple users to tune in and connect to view this same channel or with appropriate authentication credentials...change the channel. It would also be useful to be able to tune into this broadcast via windows media player (which would not allow you to change the channel but to view the current one)

What do you guys think? - hope it makes sense :)
 
A

Anonymous

Guest
I know exactly what you mean and It's really a great idea. Actually, this has been done already with the digital tv-card Nebula DVB-t from Nebula Electronics, u.k. They have it as a built-in feature in the software that comes with it. You set up the computer with the card as a server, and install just the software on the other computers. Then, you connect to the server over your network, and the dvb-t card will send the mpeg-2 stream to the client computer.

The method should be similar if you wanted to stream an analog signal over a network, since the only difference between that and digital television is that with dvb-cards, you are receiving a raw (well, almost) mpeg-2 signal from the start. With an analog card, you would first have to convert the signal into a digital video format.

Look at Shoutcast. It just sends kbytes of digital data from the server to the client. In our case, we want to stream video instead of music. Damn, I wish I knew how to code :oops:
 
A

Anonymous

Guest
Here is another example. At work we have a corporate satellite system used for training. What i've done is setup a windows xp box with Windows Media Encoder to encode the analog signal and broadcast it. We can then archive the broadcasts to dvd OR staff members can go to our 'training' webpage and view the broadcast within their browser. Its a pretty sweet system, but does not allow for the user to change channel's etc. I think this would just be taking that one step further.

I hate installing client side software - thats why a web interface is preferable.

Comments?
 
A

Anonymous

Guest
What I mean by client side software is simply a tool for viewing the stream. Call it Windows media player or VLC or whatever you want, but you'll still need one in order to watch TV.

An alternative would be to build the client side software as an ordinary web browser plug-in. You'd still need to install it, but it'd be cleaner...
 
A

Anonymous

Guest
Thats more what i'm thinking of. However, you really don't have to require it that way. Heres a scenerio

Server broadcasts video on port 2133
Server hosts small web server on port 80

User connects to website via port 80 which if authenticated will allow him to change the channel (ie through a submit option or something) This then changes teh chanel on teh server which will change the content it is broadcasting via port 80. A media player could be imbedded into the website.

That would be the easiest way to do it.

Comments?
 
A

Anonymous

Guest
ATI has this built into there stuff too. They call it EasyShare. The down side to there solution is that only PCs with Radeon cards can access the TV server.
 

samuel337

Portal Pro
August 25, 2004
772
0
Melbourne, Australia
frodo said something about how MP is not split into front-end and backend, and that most people don't need that type of configuration. Also, there is another thread where a guy is developing a web interface for MP, maybe you should talk to him about it...

see this thread: http://nolanparty.com/mediaportal.sourceforge.net/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=1702&start=15

However I think the guy, OB2 is busy working on software tv card support...

Sam
 

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