Formerly "djfusion"
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Okay, here's the situation. I currently have PC with a TV Tuner PCI card in it. I'm getting a Powerbook (lord only knows when it'll get here, they've changed the shipping date twice now I think.) I don't want to shell out the extra bucks, right away, for a FW or USB TV Tuner for the Mac, so here's what I'm looking to do:
Using VLC or something else, can I stream the video output from the TV card to my Mac over my local wireless network? I figured that, if nothing else, I could use VNC to change channels and whatnot, but I'm guessing that it'd be too laggy to use VLC to watch TV, or would it? If it helps any, I have an old Dell (1.6Ghz P4, I think) with an AVerTV Studio TV PCI Tuner card, and a 1.5Ghz 15" PB on the way. Thanks. Last edited by pkatzman : 2006-01-17 at 23:30. Reason: Clarify title |
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Subdued and Medicated
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Yea. VNC is not good with video. You can still operate the GUI though. Save the streaming for VLC.
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owner for sale by house
Join Date: Apr 2005
Location: Charlotte, NC
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The problem is not the lag, but the throughput. NTSC is 648x486 pixels. Multiply that by three bytes (RGB) and 30 frames/sec, and you get about 28 MegaBYTES of data, or over 200 Mbit/s. So you would need to encode the data in realtime to get it through a network - especially a wireless one. Your PC is probably able to do that using the right software and codec. When I was young and stupid, we played around with real-time recording of TV to harddisk on much slower hardware. But I think we scaled the image down to 320x240 or so. So this may take some fooling around with the likes of mplayer and other software to get going. But it should be possible.
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Subdued and Medicated
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Yea, uncompressed video won't work. But there are plenty of compression techniques out there like MPEG2, Divx, MPEG4, h.264, or the 20 something codecs that come with Quicktime. The one that uses the most CPU is h.264 and I don't think my G5 can keep up with that.
A MPEG4 stream used keyframes every second or so (divide by 30) and b or i frames in between which are hardly anything at all. I streamed 640x480 at 300K/s from my G5 to my 400Mhz Pismo and it looked just fine. |
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Subdued and Medicated
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damn double post.
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Formerly "djfusion"
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I'll check out CyTV, and Mplayer. Thanks, all. |
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Subdued and Medicated
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Formerly "djfusion"
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