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

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?

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

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.