TV Tuners

[Duke5A]

Hi everyone, I'm need of a bit of advice regarding TV in the classroom. We've recently started outfitting our classrooms with short throw projectors, document cameras, and interactive boards of sorts in replacement of the aging TVs. The buildings all have video distribution equipment that takes a cable feed, reassigns channel numbers, adds a couple internal broadcast channels, and sends it back out analog to the classrooms over coax. The problems is we're still utilizing this setup and using separate TV tuners since the projectors don't have them built-in. These separate tuners are causing a host of problems on their own mainly because of the cheap build quality. From what I've been able to find nobody makes a quality analog tuner anymore. I'm sure there is other districts on here with the exact same problem I'm facing. What solutions and/or ideas have you guys come up with? Thanks!

[Norphy]

Wouldn't it make more sense to broadcast the transmissions over the network? We have a OneLan system which takes input from four tuners and aggregates all of the channels into a webpage. You click on the channel you want to view and it shows a live feed.

 

ONELAN IPTV Streaming // IPTV Omni-Servers. Single box, Network Delivery, Free-to-air, IPTV, Ethernet, Terrestial, DVB-T tuner cards, Analogue

 

I don't know if they have a US office or if they sell the product in the US but there must be something similar!

[Duke5A]

Wouldn't it make more sense to broadcast the transmissions over the network? We have a OneLan system which takes input from four tuners and aggregates all of the channels into a webpage. You click on the channel you want to view and it shows a live feed.

 

ONELAN IPTV Streaming // IPTV Omni-Servers. Single box, Network Delivery, Free-to-air, IPTV, Ethernet, Terrestial, DVB-T tuner cards, Analogue

 

I don't know if they have a US office or if they sell the product in the US but there must be something similar!

 

That is pretty slick. How is it as far as bandwidth usage? We have six sites in my district, each with their own video distribution racks. There is probably a dozen or so channels that they all have in common, along with four or five private internal broadcast channels. I'm wondering how hard this would be over a 1GB/s uplink between buildings.

[AngryTechnician]

1Gbps should be plenty. With decent compression you should be looking at no more than about 5Mbps per channel, and if it's sent over the network using multicast you should never be using more than 5Mbps per channel regardless of the number of viewers.

 

We have 58 TV and radio channels broadcast on our network (including 4x 1080p HD channels), and even if all of them were being viewed simultaneously on a single network segment, it would still only use about 90Mbps.

[CyberNerd]

We use a single installation of MythTV fitted with Mythweb.

Teachers request TV to be recorded by the librarian who sends them a link to the stream on the mythweb server.

 

MythWeb - MythTV Official Wiki

[Duke5A]

Thanks for the information guys. This is going to make things easier when presenting a solution to my boss. I appreciate it!