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.

Comments

Limited value?

[PhysicsGenius]

Why would I want live streaming video from Japan in France? If it was to watch episodes of a TV show I liked, why couldn't I just download them from gnutella or the equivalent? That saves me having to watch commercials.

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?

Re:Limited value?

[shadowcabbit]

Despite the obvious troll, there is a point nestled in there, and one which probably deserves a little attention (as well as a counterpoint). The above poster's comment asks whether or not this is a valid use of the technology when other methods of obtaining the shows exist-- as stated, gnutella, Kazaa, etc. The drawback comes when you consider the time factor. Rarely does a show get taped, digitized, and distributed within hours of its release-- there are, of course, exceptions, but not many. This makes things like, say, the 6 o'clock news a bit less timely when it comes three days later. The idea behind the brick (as far as I can tell without having read the article) is streaming, live video. (While "streaming" and "live" could potentially be used to describe tentacle rape porn, let's keep this academic discussion marginally professional, shall we?) Thus, a Japanese family in Versailles with relatives (say, a brother-in-law's family) in Sendai could keep track of the news, and/or hear about the Angels obliterating Tokyo, etc. without having to wait for someone to digitize it out of the goodness of their hearts.
Incidentally, I give the whole project about 3 weeks before the MPAA, RIAA, and USDA all jump on it as "copyright infringement". Just another case of complacent corporations losing out because they didn't bother to develop the technology first.

Been there, done that

[sosume]

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..

That is a great idea

[JazFresh]

especially for expatriates. I've lived a few countries and I'm always miffed that I'm missing out on some TV shows I grew attached to in those countries. Now I'm moving from the US soon and so I'll miss out on HBO's The Wire. I'll have to wait for the season to end and for it to come out on DVD before I can see what happens!

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.

Working on this device

[.Bruce Perens]

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.

Two problems for average US consumer

[irving47]

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?

The magic of open brick

[mbone]

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.

I wonder how long it'll take before...

[Kjella]

...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

Re:silly muggle....

[Surak]

Yeah. Actually, I think that's a pretty apt way to describe it. A portal to another computer. I think I'll use that analogy next time someone asks what 'VNC' is. Thank you, kind sir!

3 Major Markets

[randomErr]

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!

Japanese people have enough bandwidth

[Anonymous Coward]

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.