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Streaming Your Cable TV Over the Net?

Posted by Cliff on from the taking-your-TV-shows-with-you dept.

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?"

7 of 61 comments (clear)

  1. SnapStream by kalidasa · · Score: 4, Informative

    I'm pretty sure this does it, depending on what video card you have. Look for "Home Video Server".

    1. Re:SnapStream by sycotic · · Score: 4, Informative


      Might do, lots look like they merely record for later viewing...

      http://www.google.com/search?q=%22Home+Video+Serve r%22

      The fifth and sixth results look like something you would want to investigate for sure!

      Most, however, appear to be geared towards serving a local network. This makes alot of sense considering the bandwidth problems over the public internet as opposed to a slick local connection ala 100Mbit switch.

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      -- If I were a fish, I'd be wet
  2. You want VideoLan by samjam · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

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    blog.sam.liddicott.com
  3. Is it Legal? by afriguru · · Score: 3, Informative

    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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    internet, productivity blog
    1. Re:Is it Legal? by Tom7 · · Score: 3, Informative

      Incidental copies made in transit are not covered by copyright law. If his stream is private, I don't see why there would be any issue. (And I definitely think he'd want to make it private, since it would otherwise pull some serious bandwidth!)

  4. Is it legal? by taylortbb · · Score: 3, Informative

    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).

  5. Clarifying my intentions by johnrob · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.