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Streaming Your Cable TV Over the Net?
johnrob asks: "I have a TV tuner card, and would like to run a daemon on my computer which will stream the tv signal (reduced resolution) over the network. The idea is to poke a hole in my home firewall, and be able to connect to my static IP from any wired place in the world and watch my cable/satellite tv. Here is my question: does anyone know of any software that will take a tv card as an input and serve streaming content to connected clients (i.e. real media, windows media, or some other client)? Or, perhaps there is a specific TV tuner card which comes with this software?"
I'm pretty sure this does it, depending on what video card you have. Look for "Home Video Server".
ffmpeg was originally designed for exactly this kind of thing. The only problem with it is that it's pretty much under permanent development, but it's generally considered very high quality. Will support any video card supported by a Video4Linux interface, IIRC.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Freshmeat.net is your friend.
VideoLan
VLC (VideoLAN Client) is a multimedia player for Unix, Windows, MacOS X, BeOS, and QNX. It can play most audio and video formats (MPEG 1/2/4, DivX, WMV, DV, Ogg/Vorbis, AAC, etc.), has support for VCD and DVD (with menus), and can read streams from a network source (HTTP, UDP, DVB, etc.). It can also act as a server and send streams through the network, with optional support for transcoding.
blog.sam.liddicott.com
MythTV has a client/server architecture.
I do essentially what you're asking, but inside my local net. One machine has a TV card and does all the recording. I also have a MythTV client on a laptop with a wireless card that can be used to watch anywhere (including "Live TV").
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
Windows Media Encoder also acts as a server. One version or another runs under just about all windows post 95. Its also free-as-in-beer and very easy to install and configure. Had it up and running in about 5 minutes.
I reject your reality
This sort of thing requires a lot of juice
However, there are things that mitigate that
I would like to see this done well
Have you considered the legality of what you want to do here, since by default such a stream will be visible by anyone, not just you? this story mentions some of the pertinent issues. Though you are allowed to record a copy for personal use, doesn't real-time streaming count as re-broadcasting?
___
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1. Post "MPAA/DirecTV please come sue me" question on Slashdot
... then you are doomed.
2. Get sued
3. ???
4. Jail Time!
Let's hope that you are not in Australia, Great Britain or the United States when you try this. If the RIAA can get away with charging a radio station more money per song simply because they are now webcasting the exact same stuff they are broadcasting over the radio
Better still, let's hope that you are not physically in Saudi Arabia when you access that R-rated (AS, N, GV) movie that you so carefully set up before you were deployed to the Persian Gulf. They EXECUTE people for things like that.
Bad idea johnrob. Just say no.
I think my old roommate did this with Icecast. From his comp in CA to me in MN at the time (I was using DSL) it wasn't bad but the audio lagged a bit.
Everytime you look at porn a devil gets their horns.
I would watch what you do, people who have done this before have been charged/sued. www.icravetv.com has been shut down, the used to pick signals from the airwaves and broadcast it on the internet for free, they lost the lawsuit. If you're going to do this I reccomend being very careful and making sure its just for you (i.e. password protect it).
I have done this before, with great results. I used windows server 2003, with the media server. I then used my tv card, and windows used that info to "stream" live from the tv tuner card. This would work very well inside a network, and also works very well outside (ports open on firewall of course) and you can watch tv at work! I did find a way to change the channel, but I dont remember how i did it. I might have built a custom asp script for changing the chan. I dont remember. But this worked very well for me, and I plan to use this service for my next project, and I hope that will turn out as well as the rest of mine have. Good luck, you should have no problem. -Shane
lucky fucker.
I watched some S/VCD mpegs via ssh tunnel using AAlib, more of a gimmick, but neat. I do have problems with sound, and havn't found a perfect solution. Piping sound doesnt always works. But I suspect a mp3 server would fix the problem.
Strange how streaming, capturing, or even using Video over a network is overlooked on retail software. I'd love a retail version of xbox media player that can capture (timeshift)video.
I took an ATI All-In-Wonder Pro 8MB AGP, running on a Windows 98 machine. Setup Netmeeting with a channel I wanted to watch while somewhere else. Then dialed my netmeeting which auto accepted calls. Had good audio and ok video though not perfect, and it worked through many firewalls.
I think I even use to connect to my desktop with terminal services as I moved on in life and OSes and used video editing software to tune the station and watch the video and listen.
Silly things we come up with, no?!?
Regards,
Ryan Pritchard
Fun Extends All Basic Life Expectancies
I had one of these, it worked pretty good... To bad it I use my Mac for everything now.
TV capture + Streaming software: MSI TV@nywhere
for the Mac...
k fa ctor/
http://www.macworld.com/2004/06/secrets/junegee
--- gr8s-n-ppppp
This would be especially great for sports, like various national soccer league games. Real soccer junkies want to watch, for example, Dutch league games, but they don't tend to be broadcast outside of the Netherlands. (Of course, I'm thinking about this because I'm trapped in the USA without pay-per-view during Euro 2004, and I'd love some prompt online posting.)
Geez, why can't these lazy buggers do a google for themselves (hell, he has a GMail account after all), took me all of 2 minutes effort to find this out for myself when I wanted the same thing for my home network... It was quicker than filling out an Ask Slashdot and waiting for it to be accepted:-) And why do these lame-o's NEVER say what OS and or hardware they have??? Or if they want free stuff vs being willing to pay???
Anyway, to answer the question, if you have Linux, try MythTV with all it's nice features, otherwise go for VideoLAN.
The motivation behind this question is that I would like to watch my tv when I am not at home. I don't intend for anyone beside myself to use my feed, thus I have ~ 128K of dsl upstream bandwidth to work with. Why is this a good use of my ISP's bandwidth? The most important reason is that I am paying for it. Beyond that, I want to watch my channels, my local news, my Oakland A's games when on the road - there may be tv where I'm going, but not necessarily the content I want to watch.
Microsoft's very own freely-downloadable Windows Media Encoder will do this, and it'll take about five minutes to get set up and working. Of course, something tells me you're running Linux.
There is always Darwin Streaming Server http://developer.apple.com/darwin/projects/streami ng/
This is a sorta new thing introduced with winamp5. Streaming video with audio. I use it to run a dj tv station were we do live dj broadcasts a couple times a week, http://sastv.cubeness.com . Its fairly simple, just setup a shoutcast server, download the streaming tools and just select your tv tuner as input and stream, you can make the stream private and not broadcast the address. The only problem with this is that you will not be able to change stations so you better know what channel you wanna watch ahead of time, but it works great. People even used this to stream the super bowl mainly for the viewing of those overseas who could not recieve it on their local cable/sattelite company.
They come packaged together and can stream live video over the net quite easily.
To get US TV in Kuwait, I hooked my tivo to my linux box in the US. Use RealServer to encode the stream. And run Tivowebserver on the tivo. I can change the channel and watch TV in Kuwait from the states.. :)
Using a BTTV card in the linux box to do it.
works well
ChiefArcher
One of the programs in ffmpeg package is dedicated to streaming video over the net. And the sources can be static files or different video sources, such as tuner cards.
Bastard Operator From 193.219.28.162
Put up a VideoLAN Server (VLS) and stream away. I have a box set up here at home to stream a mulicast feed so that I can watch TV in every room (with a computer). Works like a charm.
See http://www.videolan.org/streaming/ for more info.
Check out SageTV. It's pretty much a Tivo wanna-be, but it has both a client and server. I have the server running with two Hauppage WinTV 250s and clients running on various computers at home. I'm able to watch both any channel/program either on live TV or recorded. Connecting to the server from outside isn't a problem. When I'm bored at work I'll set up recording schedules or check on what shows have been recorded for the day.
The hard part is going to be bandwidth. At "good" quality the stream is 2 gigs per hour, which isn't too bad but I sometimes have problems watching TV on my laptop when the signal gets degraded. I'm unable to watch shows from the office, however -- my DSL line isn't brawny enough.
The shows are written to the hard drive as standard mpeg2 files, however. I'd imagine it wouldn't be too hard to run some sort of script to re-encode them at lower quality and bitrate and stream to the outside world. I'm too lazy to tinker with that, and prefer copying shows from the last few nights to my laptop. That way I get full quality, despite the 24-48 hour "latency".
I had one, but never used the streaming part, and I found bad reviews about the card, although I never had a problem with it. Check it here
Coincidentally, I just set this (Beyond TV 3) up last night. I haven't opened the port to access it outside my home, but I can watch TV anywhere in the house on my laptop via the wireless LAN.
The software is fairly user-friendly (as in "non-technical user"), but you have to dig around a lot to get to the technical settings (directories, ports, video and audio quality settings, etc.).
It has decent PVR functions (which is actually why I bought it). It doesn't do TiVo like prediction, but you can easily set it to record any program in the next two weeks, search TV listings, record all new episodes of shows, record all episodes of shows, pause and rewind live TV, and a lot of other neat functions.
I intend on using it with a 802.11 receiver hooked to my downstairs TV so I can watch the PVR'ed shows without sitting in my computer room, but I haven't bought that part yet. Any suggestions on good ones?
-- stream of did I lock the front door consciousness