Slashdot Mirror
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.
We get 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.
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.
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,
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 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
From the FAQ:
Oh yeah, this is a real viable alternative.(2,3-Benzopyrrole)