Distributed Video Systems Under Linux?

Second_Derivative asks: "One of the projects that I've undertaken in our new home is installing a LAN, and in turn this has spawned a whole slew of subprojects, one of them being apparently trivial but one that I can find no existing solutions for. I have a server up in my loft which does all the usual stuff (NAT, 40Gb hard disk, etc). I've installed a WinTV (Linux BTTV compatible) card in this and wired our cable TV into it. The idea is as follows: from any computer in the house you can just connect to the server and view whatever channel you want or view a previously recorded program off the hard disk. However, despite doing plenty of searching all I could find was this which fits my needs perfectly except for one little detail: it's only a research proposal. Anyone know of a ready-made solution for this? I'm sure I'm not the only one who's after it; it needs to stream TV with some minor compression (my LAN is 100MBps) but the client also needs to be able to control the tuner and tell the server to record to disk."

Couple of ideas

[JediTrainer]

One thing you can try is RealServer [real.com]. I know that it's not a favourite around here, but they do provide a free 25-stream server which you can download and use on your Linux box. Have your RealServer configured to do realtime streaming from your card (you might need RealProducer too, I'm not sure - a "light" version is available for free as well), and you'll get very acceptable picture/sound with the bandwidth you're talking about.

All that's left is to control the tuner. For that, I'd recommend writing a small CGI script which accepts form input (channel number). That script can just call the appropriate command-line tool with the channel number, thereby changing the channel. The form field can be either in a secure area of a web server you're running, or just on the same page which has the RealPlayer embedded in it. Doesn't matter which, but I suspect that the CGI script is pretty trivial to write.

The only problem with this setup is, of course, that you can only watch one channel at a time. AFAIK your single tuner can't watch several channels, so people sitting on your computers would have to agree what to watch.

Damn. Great idea. Now I want to go ahead and do it myself!

Good Luck

[4of12]

What you're asking for is definitely something that a *lot* of people would want. I, for one, would like to be able to integrate home webcams with my PC, my satellite TV and with my web server, for example. Imagine programming your softVCR over the web, etc.

The TiVo [9thtee.com] meets this need part way. Previous discussion [slashdot.org] on /. indicated a crying need for the TiVo to have an Ethernet port so that easy up/down loading of recorded media could take place, as well as enable the development of Web based controllability. There was talk of the next official version of the TiVo having such a port, but I haven't about such a product yet, despite its technical feasibility. [linuxcare.com.au]

All that said, I think there's a great deal of apprehension over the legal ramifications since most publicly broadcast programs have specific prohibitions against rebroadcast.

I presume that's rebroadcast (a) to others, going beyond a typical definition of personal use; (b) for profit to others (definitely a no-no).

Certainly there's nothing illegal with taping or disk recording for later use by you in your own home or anywhere else you happen to be (eg, recording your personal CD collection on MP3 to take in your car.)

But a lot of video content producers would get very jittery if you provided that recorded content to others beside yourself. There, even though I can invite friends over to my house to watch a rented movie or to listen to a CD, I cannot charge them admission. And, if I run a business as, for example, a daycare center, then I can get into trouble for public exhibition of copyrighted videos to toddlers in my charge (though providing books does not seem to be so dangerous to my legal health). Clearly, the legal definitions have been strongly influenced by parties with a vested interests in the existing revenue models associated with media distribution.

Once you have such a video system, a P2P network that enables trading favorite TV programs, pr0n, etc. is only a short step away, with all the hullabaloo that has accompanied trading of music files over the past several years.

Perhaps the Java Media API provides a good framework, but it would be nice to have some open source standard API for the control and activation functions of the next generation of consumer electronic equipment: network-enabled video and audio jukeboxes.

Starting point

[bluelip]

try videolan.org I was going to try their setup before , but never got around to it so I can't tell you how it works

Here's a solution

[imagi]

I remember reading that Alan Cox had done something similar and asked him about it:

"Right now Im using netcat, mp1e to encode off a bttv card and mpegtv to play it (the free player wont handle the non .VOB format yet)"

I haven't tried this yet but would be interested in anyone's feedback.

Re:

[account_deleted]

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