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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.
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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.
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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").
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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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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.
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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).
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.
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.
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
Sorry.