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TV Brick - Open Source TV Streaming?
Anders Jacobsen writes "Nexedi has released the TV Brick - an open source-based box for TV capture and streaming over the Internet. Primarily targeted towards Japanese families living in France (seeing that popular Japanese channels like Yomiuri TV and NHK Sogo are unavailable outside Japan), the idea is that is you plug one of these boxes to a TV antenna and a broadband connection in Japan, and the other to a broadband plug and a TV in France; instant 'magic' happens and all the goodness of Japanese TV is in your living room." We also covered the OpenBrick project a few months back.
(see graphics on the site)
Now poached eggs everywhere can watch Pokemon!
We get signal!!
Japanese families living in France? How many of those are there?
Just get Direct Tv or Dish network. That will do it. Why pirate the signal?
Thats not a brick, its a tentacle!
Okay, now that is definitely what I call a niche market. Heck, why not go all-out and also market it towards Brazilian families living in Slovenia?
In Soviet Rush, today's Tom Sawyer gets high on you.
Also, what about bandwidth? Compression of a stream is considerably less than what is possible for a pre-existing file. If everyone starts doing this, soon all bandwidth will cease to exist. And for what? A cheap parlor trick.
But the worst problem of all is how to maintain community standards at a national level. Internet rebroadcasting from Japan to France is no big deal, since France is already very decadent and would probably even welcome some tentacle rape porn. But what if someone in either Japan or France tried to beam that kind of junk into the precious minds of the US's children?
What a concept.
Any sufficiently well-organized Government is indistinguishable from bullshit.
I hope that I don't open a VNC window with you around. You'll probally think that I opened a portal to the other computer.
Primarily targeted towards Japanese families living in France...
Is this really a significant market?
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Heck, if that sentence fragment isn't enough to send everyone running out to buy a Brick I don't know what is.
Trolling is a art,
"Turn on the Fun!"
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
Shouldn't it be Japanese people living anywhere in the world besides japan?
And the marketer is thinking far to small easy to use tech like that has far more many uses then that.
Technology, the cause of and solution to all of life's problems.
This is a great use for video capture.
Now people can view foreign programs, use their computer+tv at the same time, as well as a number of other things and the TV execs can't do much to morally sway users against it as it would have all the commercials intact.
The process is really easy. Get a TV tuner card that is supported under your favourite unix-like flavour, for instance a Hauppage BT 878. Open a remote X session and start the TV application. Voila. (maybe some reencoding should be done to get it all the way to france- 100 mbit works if you don't mind :)
In other news, I wonder what a beowulf cluster of these would take for bandwidth..
In A.D. 2003 Broadcast was beginning. ....
Captain: What happen ?
Mechanic: Somebody set up us the boob tube
Operator: We get signal
Captain: What !
Operator: Main screen turn on
Captain: It's You !!
CaTV: How are you gentlemen !!
CaTV: All your channel are belong to us
CaTV: You are on the way to destruction
Captain: What you say !!
CaTV: You have no chance to watch make your time
CaTV: HA HA HA HA
Captain: Take off every 'zignal'
Captain: You know what you doing
Captain: Move 'zignal'
Captain: For great reception
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Yup, next are the Eskimo in South Africa, followed shortly by all the aussies in Russia etc....
I didn't mean to laugh, but they can't be targeting a two-digit number of "clients", can they????
Otherwise, it's pretty cool idea, and we will definitely see more of it, the tool seems neat too and in the moment there's some real use of it, i'll get one....;o))
1. No sig. 2. ???? 3. Profit!!!
How long until they get sued by these guys:
VBrick Systems
Seems like it's essentially doing the same thing and, to me, the name seems awfully similar...
get nemulator
The alternative is to get friends to tape the shows and send them over/digitise them (an imposition on them) or waste hours of time trying to get net copies. And neither of those options are helpful if the show you like is esoteric.
I had thought about setting up a Tivo (esp. now that you can manage Tivo via the web) and pulling the data off it, but you need a big upstream link for that, plus a 'co-lo' in a friend's house. But at least it's not so much of an imposition.
I'm not entirely sure what that website sells but I know that I want to punch the crap out of it.
"Freedom of speech has always been the abstract red-headed stepchild of the Constitution"
-Suck
How long before this is ruled illegal in the US?
if(!cool) exit(-1);
Does this do the same thing as Cisco's IPTV product?
Sanity.html - Error 404 not found
I did some work on this device - although, admittedly, my involvement ended a few months ago. The article doesn't mention the biggest problem we had working on it - the lack of a real "tv standard" on the internet. Consider that the stream may have originated from either a PAL, NTSC, or even something else (though we concentrated on those two only) and on the fly conversion between those two to a PC codec of sorts is not something trivial. Basically frames need to be discarded dynmaically in order to sync with the given display unit. Unlike other conversion devices, we didn't have the luxury of selectively removing/doubling frames based on what looks the best, we had to do it on the fly with streaming data. Basically what we did was sacrifice a small amount of compression for the sake of image smoothness, allowing us the freedom to guess the appropriate frames to manipulate. I'd say I'm about 95% happy with the results, but if you know what to look for you can see the artifacts. But it is open source, so improvements will be implememnted over time.
Thanks,
Bruce
This page provides an overview of some typical Japanese TV shows:
* A game show in which a grandmother has to answer questions about pop culture in order to prevent her grandson from being catapulted into the air by a bungee machine.
* "Guess what's on your head!"- a game show in which contestants try to guess what type of insect or reptile is crawling around on the top of their heads.
* A show called Super Jockey in which people with products to promote (usually beautiful women) play a game where they have to change into a skimpy bikini before a curtain drops which will reveal them if they haven't finished changing, and then they have to sit in scalding hot water. For every second they manage to stay in the water, they are allowed to promote their product for one second
This strikes me much the same as groups of American students in Europe bee-lining towards the golden arches and huddling there until it's time to go back to the hotel/hostel.. it would be nice if people living in a foreign culture made an effort to integrate, rather than creating a mini-home from home. I can't imagine the expat community miss those wacky game shows too much.
"I am not bound to please thee with my answers" [William Shakespeare]
Yes, I wouldn't want to miss the latest in cruelty TV if I moved away...
;- )
Can you win this box in a contest?
You can't take the sky from me...
1. MPAA who?
2. A lot of cable modem users are getting bandwidth limits imposed on them. Some companies (like cox) are limiting home users to 3 GB per month down, 1 up... How many hours of this TV Brick thing would that be?
I had a sucky sig.
This is an application of open brick, a really cool Linux based appliance. I think that the tiny market (Japanese in France) is not such an issue - more that this has the potential of leading to the commoditification of Linux and open source - not on the desktop, but as cheap single use hardware apps.
"But first, you must fight the Bear!"
That link you provided doesn't seem to work, here is the correct link.
Things you think are in the Constitution, but are not.
Iron chef + Anime + Sumo Wrestling all @ the same frequency!
All your base are belong to us!
...some court finds that this is a circumvention device on the broadcasting rights that are limited to Japan, and declares this illegal. Any slashlaywers care to comment? ;)
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
When I think of "TV Brick" it's usually in a different context. (replace hammer with brick) Generally after watching yet another Laci Peterson segment on CNN.
sulli
RTFJ.
"Primarily targeted towards Japanese families living in France..."
Secondarily targeted towards slashdot readers with WAY too much time on their hands...
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
I can think of more fun things to do with TVs and bricks...
Read my keyboard review.
Primarily targeted towards Japanese families living in France
Yeah, reading and following the setup and assembly instructions is gonna be no problem.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
I can't imagine that the quality of a TV signal across a DSL connection could obtain reasonable enough framerates for cross-country viewing. What about censorship legalities of people receiving signals that are not allowed in their country. Networks are gonna have a field day with this one.
My mother never saw the irony in calling me a son-of-a-bitch.
Maybe you would like "Japanese people living outside of Japan BUT NOT IN THE U.S." better?!!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
So I get home from work, and load up /. Only 60 someodd visible replies on this topic, so I go to view the link...and the damned thing is ALREADY /.ed. ::bangs head on desk::
I got a +5, Troll
Thank you!
ET
I would love this!!
:(
I watch quite a bit of BBC America programming, but I would love to be able to see NEW episodes of shows, instead of the reruns I see now.
Unfortunately, there are probably waaay too many laws this technology would be breaking.
"These are not the trolls you are looking for..."
Everyone is carpin that this targeted for a narrow market. It could have some very large scale appeal. Here's 3 I came up with:
1. Home video at Work - Watch Opera on your home cable at work.
2. Video Survaliance - Watch what your wife and pets are doing while your at work.
3. Pr0n/Underground Video - Watch what your wife and pets are doing while your at work.
Enjoy cheap digital TV from the comfort of your couch, not scrunched over your computer.
You could also setup a video broadcasting station for less $2000 and no experince.
Keep LDTV alive! - Low Def TV for the underground!
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
Keep in mind that for a few years already Japan has straight-to-the-home 100MBit Optical Fiber Internet Access. And it's cheap. The initial installation fee is about $300. After that, it only costs 60$ per month.
And you thought DSL and cable modems were fast.
Wow, America is still so far behind. They've only just started trials for fiber-to-the-home(FTTH) in Silicon Valley recently. $2400 install fee + 75$ month I think.
... where are the free streaming TV channels on the 'net these days?
It makes no sense to me that I can't tune into CNN over the 'net. Or MTV. Or BBC One. Oh, wait, maybe I can tune into BBC One.
I really wanna watch TV, but I'm a computer geek and there is no way in hell (having just recently moved to Germany) that I want to buy a TV and set up a satellite receiver just for that.
I've already *got* broadband. How come I can't tune into any stations with it?
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Sure it is. Do you know how many Japanese in France are dying to watch the Iron Chef in the original tongue? You know that the French cannot stand those guys, since the French believe they produce the best food and chef's in all the world, but every time an Iron Chef goes against a French weenie, the Fenchie goes down hard. So, getting the content in the original Japenese is crucial for maximum effect and minimum Frenchie bias.
How long do you think it will be before the Cable Companies convince the govt to make this illegal??
Think about it. If you could set this up on one system, and have hundreds of people access it (which if it's not possible now, it soon will be) then why pay for cable?? Find a server somewhere that plays some shows that you like, and watch them from there.
I'd be willing to bet that within 6 months of the first one being sold in the US the Nexedi will be in court.
It's a shame though, I could have some fun with this!!
Does it drop frames and skew time or could i expect to get all the siezures that the anime creators intended?
From the FAQ:
Oh yeah, this is a real viable alternative.(2,3-Benzopyrrole)
There's no money in streaming over the Internet, it costs too much.
Check out my site it lets people submit interesting videos they've seen on the web. I recently added a playlist for Real Video so you can watch it like a channel.
The proxy server could not handle the request GET /.
Now that's just funny.
Can I get an on CD distro of OpenBrick like I can get Knoppix?
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
I wish someone would hook this up to a KU satellite and make it public. There's a lot of content that flows across there that's copyright clear. Heck there's even copyright clear stuff on DISH network satellite, a bunch of the stuff on Free Speech TV is available for noncommercial copying/viewing, like Democracy Now! and Indymedia Newsreal.
My wife is from Japan and she would LOVE to have this thing. Does it owrk outside france? Also, the sitre appears to be slashdotted, is there a mirror?>
http://www.ohlssonvox.com
It doesn't matter WHAT language you speak, the Silly Go Lucky Adventures of the Laughing Dog is totally wacky by any measure. Who WOULDN'T pay to have such bizarrenes inserted in their daily video stream? --
You rock. Lets make babies.
Oh, wait you're probably a dude. Never mind.
This is *exactly* what I've needed for the last 13 minutes. I'm so frickin' bored - so much bandwidth, nothing worth watching... until now!!!
Thanks. Feel free to plug away.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
It would seem whenever anyone (Frenchie, Alton Brown, etc..) goes up against an Iron Chef they lose. Somehow I suspect the "judges" are less than impartial.
"English side ruined. Must use French instructions. Le grille? what the hell is that?"
"If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice!" -Rush
I live in Denver which has pathetic (read: none) support for over the air HDTV from anywhere but downtown.
I use the Dish network for a few HD channels, but I think what I need is an HDTV brick that sits in LA or somewhere with decent broadcast HDTV, and then streams that back to my house on demand. I'm tired of fighting with Dish to get a CBS feed, and would love to just bypass them...
When people start selling shows on demand instead of channels, then we'll see some interesting changes in TV. In particular lots of people are getting TV;s now that are capable of supporting HDTV resolutions but have very little content to display on them, imagine the marker for a box that let you buy all HDTV programming!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Perfect! Then the Japanese living in France can watch "The Happy Smile Super Challenge Family Wish Show." Do you remember this episode? I wouldn't want to miss a show that punishes ignorance instead of rewarding knowledge!
Looks like they have correctly identified the source of their problem:
/.
Proxy Error
The proxy server received an invalid response from an upstream server.
The proxy server could not handle the request GET
While I worked at the Berkeley Multimedia Research Center, one of the graduate students there Matt Delco worked on RTPtv, which is basically TV-quality Motion-JPEG between two machines.
1. You needed a special encoder and decoder card to decode 30fps (60 fields per second) Motion-JPEG sent over RTP. This card costs $400.
2. You needed 20Mbps for a excellent video transmission, plus 1.4Mbps for excellent audio transmission.
3. This enabled you to receive TV-quality video and audio over the Internet. (That's what excellent refers to up there.)
4. You can buy two cheap Linux boxes (mini-ATX?micro-ATX) including the $400 card for a total of about $1500 each. $3000 total.
But you need to have that 21.4Mbps sustained data transfer. We used Internet2 and internal 100Mbps switched networks. That's the kicker.
Just ignore the flash if you can't view it
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
My PVR can record very watchable NTSC at 2 Mbps.
The problem is finding cheap MPEG encoders.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
I've always wanted something like this that "extended" a phone line. Something like this: You plug this magic box into your phone line & broadband at home. Then then take magic box #2, give it a broadband connection anywhere in the world and it's magically a phone jack from your house. Does anything of this sort exist?
So what they're saying is that, for EVERY "family" that wants to view, say, Japanese TV in france, you need a SEPARATE STREAM from a SEPARATE BRICK, from Japan to France, to send their SEPARATE COPY of the (re)digitized signal.
Do you have ANY IDEA what kind of bandwidth you're talking about here? This is a VIDEO signal we're talking about - 30ish pictures per second, and even a 640x480 image is worth almost eight million bits before compression. Potentially you can compress a lot. But even heroically compressed the streams are very large for any reasonable signal quality.
With every Japanese "family" member vacationing in France sending their own personal copy of a popular show, it doesn't take many "families" to completely saturate the fibers that can route signals from Japan to France. So you can bet that, if the described use isn't a violation of their carriers' terms-of-service now, it will be within a couple weeks after this usage pattern becomes established.
At that point, any use of the box will violate either copyright or the terms-of-service. Then (if they haven't already), the media conglomerates will go to court and say there's no legal use...
The only way to avoid the bandwidth crunch with multiple users is multicast - which explicitly violates the "family use" exception. This leads to the same situation that already lost in Canada (as already mentioned in a nearby post).
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
COOL! I was going to do the same. Now, I can just use it and debug it (if necessary). As an immigrant in the US, where it is impossible to get any decent foreign TV, and the quality of the news sucks (especially when it comes to heavy biasing , to promoting whatever government agenda and to the total lack of independence), it am very glad that I can access different programs. Not that the programs of my coutry be that incredibly better, but they are of reasonable quality and allow me to be part of my original culture. One of the worst things that happen to somebody who lives abroad is going back and not understanding what people are talking/laughing about. Really makes you feel bad. So, I AM ALL FOR IT. Just find a better name..
Cox once sent me a nastygram threatening to pull my service because I had exceeded their (then) limit of 500 MB upload in one day. As it turns out, I hadn't; they had instituted some sort of automated threat generator that was misprogrammed and sent out the message to anyone whose system didn't answer a ping. My firewall blocked it and I got the email. A whole bunch of other people got it too and must have burned down the cox tech support lines, because they later sent out a groveling message apologizing for the episode. But my point (and I do have one) is that if they have a email like that, they presumably monitor at least the upload limits. So, have you ever exceeded that limit with no consequence?
Despite the obvious comparison to the Harlen Globetrotters insane winning percentage, I don't think the Iron Chef is blatantly fixed. When you have the type of judges that they collect (actrors, psychics, politicians), the winning percentage is bound to be in favor of the famous Iron Chef's. If they wanted unbiased judging, they would use figure skating judges from France. :)
Anyhow, it doesn't matter if its fixed or not, the Frenchies still don't like losing, and will gladly piss on anything that isn't French.
"The problem is finding cheap MPEG encoders."
Isn't the opencore project working on that?
. . . I thought they meant Volvo.
This means I can watch the Cricket and Aussie Rules Footy in North America. This is soo cool it wull be sued out of existence.
Terebi-burikku ka? Anou...Well, TiVo does, doesn't it?
-uso.
Dreams, dreams, don't doubt dreams, dreaming children's dreaming dreams. Sailor Moon SS
This is Japan we're talking about. 24 or 25 frames per second. :)
-uso.
But France uses PAL, don't they? And Japan uses NTSC.
Dreams, dreams, don't doubt dreams, dreaming children's dreaming dreams. Sailor Moon SS
This is Japan we're talking about. 24 or 25 frames per second. :)
But France uses PAL, don't they? And Japan uses NTSC.
That's why I said "thirtyISH" frames per second. Different standards, different frame rates. But they all have to be in that ballpark, because much slower and they don't fuse, while much faster and you're wasting bandwidth.
(Broadcast standard frame rates tend to be a rational-number multiple of the local power supply frequency to prevent jiggle from bad power supply filtering in older design sets. Crawling distortion is less obnoxious than rapid shimmy.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
It's horrible, why would anybody want to watch it? Even though, I have to admit that "Rudolf and Ippaiattena" is pretty cool. Weekdays7:20 to 7:30.
Imagine if ALL the media companies in Japan somehow saw the light and not only tolerated swapping of media over the internet using this device, but encouraged it -- I would be enticed to buy the device myself and brush up on my Japanese just to watch interesting shows. My children would easily pick up the language by watching the tele, and eventually more people would know how to speak Japanese -- this would bring tremendous economic benefits to Japan as a whole. I'm telling you, the Japanese are planning world domination! ;-)
Linux at home
family as in Corleone family ???
Filk: Will the real Bruce Perens please stand up?
Will I retire or break 10K?
...by giles, the author of Peercast Click here to get peercast
You also need NSV video plugin for Winamp Click here to get Winamp
Except for the occasional special, Iron Chef has been off the Japanese airwaves for years. Only in the US, and other countries that get the Food Network, can you see it with any degree of regularity nowadays.
For more information, click here.
Those are at rental places dudes...
-- Leeeter than leet
The company is in France but if you take a look at the site (did you?) there are models for america, europe and africa (PAL, SECAM and NTSC).
-- Leeeter than leet
I remember, back in the 70's or 80's, seeing ads for a "TV Brick". It was a piece of foam the shape and color of a brick, that you could toss at the TV when it pissed you off, without breaking the TV.
In retrospect, I'm not absolutely certain this was a real product -- the ad might've been a parody. Then again, it was the era of Pet Rocks.
Share and Enjoy: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Well, at least you had the idea of doing the math but your intuition is way off. A good TV picture is easily compressed to 1 or 2 megabits per second. Do you have any idea how many such streams would be needed to saturate even one fiber optic cable? Of course it depends on modulation technique and other details but your scenario of the fibers being saturated is farfetched. What is even more important is that bandwidth needed by an individual is not outrageous. I have 250 kbits with my cheap DSL line and that is within a factor of 4 or 5. If telecom prices were anything like processors, memory or drive space the bandwidth for video would be routinely available either now or soon and always dropping in price.
There is of course the issue of copyright always looming. Let's say you have a house and you decide to install gigabit ethernet. From a standpoint of bandwidth you could easily send webcam, DVD, HDTV, digitized NTSC TV from anywhere on that network to anywhere else. Is there a legitimate case for considering copyright infringement is you want to watch a program in your bedroom rather than the media room?
Assuming you decided a family should be able to view in the room of its choice, what has essentially changed if that room is in France and both ends have sufficient bandwidth (bought and paid for by the individuals)? If the source individual is being paid by the receiving individual I can see where the copyright owner might feel something is wrong with that picture. If no money or other consideration is changing hands (e.g. in the case of a dispersed family) how it gets a chance of being anyone else's business (from a practical, technical standpoint).
Wait a minute... what's that sound? I hear a faint...
screaming in the distance...
Ah, the entertainment corporations are screaming like they are giving birth to a hairbrush. Anally.
The next sound you hear will be that of legislators passing laws outlawing repiping of TV signals over the Internet. It'll be mixed up with the sounds of broadcasters and cable/satellite companies firing fusilades of cash.
Hm, then you sposed to send the sound using esound or something and have it all out of sync??? X won't do the audio, the only real way would be some kind of mpeg encoding or something... think about the distances too, x would eat all the bandwidth
Analogue TV in France uses SECAM.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Ouch. Does any other country in the *world* use SECAM?
-uso.
Dreams, dreams, don't doubt dreams, dreaming children's dreaming dreams. Sailor Moon SS
Much of eastern Europe chose SECAM, supposedly so it would be difficult to receive Western TV broadcasts.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com