ipTV

[deerwood]

Can somebody give me an idiots' (I know my place) guide to ipTV, Television across an intranet? What does it involve hardware and software wise, and how easy is it to get up and running?

[Geoff]

What are you trying to achieve exactly?

[ChrisC]

Obviously wants everyone watching world cup @ school over the network

Chris

[Joedetic]

I think there's a way to do it with a WinTV card and windows media server.

I've not tried it myself, but seeing as you can publish to the server using windows media encoder and a webcam, i dont see why you cant tell WME to use the winTV card instead.

Do you need a special license to "re-broadcast" tv?

[Geoff]

Ah well. I have a MythTV setup at home. That works rather well. You can have multiple 'slave' units too. So you'd basically have one MythTV box with one (or more) tuner cards in it. Then it would broadcast (preferably multicast) the live tv (or pre-recorded ones, or DVDs, or whatever) to your other boxes over the lan.

http://www.mythtv.org/
http://www.wifi.com.ar/english/pvr.html (LiveCD)

[ChrisC]

I believe you do, but then again, technically speaking (and stop me if i'm wrong) but when you broadcast with windows media server, doesn't it infact save the data as it goes, then sends out again, so technically you're copying and then broadcasting your copy of it.

I think that made sence, and is probably all wrong.

Chris

[Joedetic]

This is probably the wrong place to ask but is kind of related.

My Hauppage WinTV usb thingy never really gave me a good picture...any ideas why?

Are there any tv cards out there that you know of that give a decent picture (without graining etc)

[Geoff]

USB v1 perhaps? PCI is the way to go with TV Tuners anyway..

I have a Hauupage PVR-350. Works great (especially with MythTV).

http://www.hauppauge.co.uk/pages/pro...ta_pvr350.html

[Joedetic]

Yh USB v1...that's probably the reason anyway.

I got fed up with it so i took it apart to see whether the USB connections to the circuit were loose, they were, so they got a resoldering and the case wouldnt go back together (i think i snapped something) so it's currently held together with self amalgamating tape

So MythTV...what distro are you running it on?

Any guides on setting it up out there?

[webman]

Just to get you started

http://www.abarbaccia.com/

http://www.quietglow.com/docs/ubuntumythtv.html

http://www.ubuntu-mythtv.blogspot.com/

[Joedetic]

Ooooh nice,

*fires up a virtual machine*

Cheers webman

[webman]

No problem. There's a good howto site for running it on Fedora, however... I find it very cumbersome and bloated.

[Joedetic]

Fedora...i'm most used to that and ubuntu (having had very little to do wtih linux, but what has been has been to do with them).

I think Ubuntu is the way forward for this particular cunundrum

[Geoff]

Running it on a Debian box here. It can be a little slow if you don't have a hardware mpeg decoder/encoder. But the Hauppage card I mentioned has one.