sharing a tv-card ?

[jef0113]

hi all , i have a pinnacle tv card , is it possible to share the card over my network ? i googled for it , buth can t find anything to get me started , anyone out there who has more info about this or can help me get started ? if possible ofcourse


thanks in advance , jef

[Shan]

This MIGHT be possible via nfs, but its going to drain your network bandwith significantly, and both machines (shared and reciever) will likely need to be quite powerful.

if you can find a tut on how to share a cdrom / hdd, et al via nfs, you should be able to modify it for the proper device used by your tv tuner card.
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[jef0113]

thank you now i know where to start , gone give it a try later ...


thanks for your help

[dna42]

i'm perfectly sure, that sharing the device file won't work...

however, there are some other ways. the easiest way, as mentioned before, is making use of X's network transparency. i.e. just tell your tv application to start on a remote display. for me, this works pretty well with mplayer if i tell it to not grab the tv input at full size (512x384 works fine, and i can hardly note any difference, since the video is scaled via xv output).

using the above mentioned method, you can only watch tv on a single box, of course. if you want to be able to watch tv on several stations at the same time you should consider using videolan client/server. have a look at http://videolan.org/doc/videolan-howto/en/softencoding.html. it allows you to live-encode your v4l input and stream it to one or more clients (regardless of their operating system).

[Shan]

Wont this require the 'server' to be quite powerful though? I mean its not something you can obviously do on your old Pent II Klamath right (moderately hopeful)?

And on further rethinking, I realize how foolish I was at suggesting using nfs. While you can share hard drives, you can't share devices since you can't really 'mount' devices, lol
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[dna42]

while a pentium II might indeed be a little bit underpowered, it works fine on my old pIII-600mhz.

but lower quality settings greatly improve encoding speed, so you never know...

[SavageMindz]

I had this same issue. I found that if I just exported the display with say xawtv, the picture was perfect however this doesnt take care of the sound. I tried videolan but didint get on with it. I also tried the free evaluation srever from helixserver (realplayer server). This had the best picture quality of all the encoded things I tried and a 512k(i think ) stream was more than ok to watch. But it didnt go throught my employers firewall (yes i was trying to watch telly at work )

Eventually the thing that worked ofr me was ffserver. Its free and seems to be up to the job although its realplayer codec ( have to use realplayer, its lthe only network video player on the works systems) was not as good as the realserver one it worked none the less.

Hope this helps

Savage

[jef0113]

thanks alot for the info guys ,
gone work on it this week , i'l let ye know how it worked out


Thanks , Jef

[rubicon]

I though about using videolan to stream, I have a pvr250, but wasn't sure how to tell it whihc channel to stream.

[chammel]

You could try MythTV there is an ebuild for it in portage. Check out http://mythtv.org basicly Myth has 2 parts a server backend for recording and streaming video. Then a frontend part that connects to the server you could have as many frontends as your network can handle.

[rubicon]

I found out how to do it with videolan. I did a direct unicast to a connected network over a T1(point to point). But crappy connection. I was also thinking about multicast but firewall doesn't support any multicast routing protocols. I was looking at the mythtv, I was basically to lazy to RTFM. I hope it works out better.