User Name
Password
AppleNova Forums » Third-Party Products »

Stream TV from PC to Mac?


Register Members List Calendar Search FAQ Posting Guidelines
Stream TV from PC to Mac?
Thread Tools
pkatzman
Formerly "djfusion"
 
Join Date: Jan 2005
Location: Atlanta
Send a message via AIM to pkatzman Send a message via Yahoo to pkatzman Send a message via Skype™ to pkatzman 
2006-01-17, 23:23

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
  quote
Ebby
Subdued and Medicated
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Over Yander
Send a message via AIM to Ebby  
2006-01-17, 23:30

Yea. VNC is not good with video. You can still operate the GUI though. Save the streaming for VLC.
  quote
ghoti
owner for sale by house
 
Join Date: Apr 2005
Location: Charlotte, NC
 
2006-01-17, 23:56

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.
  quote
Ebby
Subdued and Medicated
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Over Yander
Send a message via AIM to Ebby  
2006-01-18, 01:12

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.

^^ One more quality post from the desk of Ebby. ^^
SSBA | SmockBogger | SporkNET
  quote
Ebby
Subdued and Medicated
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Over Yander
Send a message via AIM to Ebby  
2006-01-18, 01:14

damn double post.
  quote
Franz Josef
Passing by
 
Join Date: Jan 2005
Location: London, Europe
 
2006-01-18, 02:57

CyTV streams Mac to Mac using VLC - works a treat. The website may have some detail on PeeCee fucntionality.
  quote
pkatzman
Formerly "djfusion"
 
Join Date: Jan 2005
Location: Atlanta
Send a message via AIM to pkatzman Send a message via Yahoo to pkatzman Send a message via Skype™ to pkatzman 
2006-01-18, 07:13

Quote:
Originally Posted by Ebby
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.
Am I wrong in thinking that VLC can't compress to different codecs? I was poking around in the settings, and it looked like it gave me the choices of mpeg 1, 2, 4, h.263, h.264, etc.

I'll check out CyTV, and Mplayer. Thanks, all.
  quote
Ebby
Subdued and Medicated
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Over Yander
Send a message via AIM to Ebby  
2006-01-18, 15:16

Quote:
Originally Posted by djfusion
Am I wrong in thinking that VLC can't compress to different codecs? I was poking around in the settings, and it looked like it gave me the choices of mpeg 1, 2, 4, h.263, h.264, etc.
Those are codecs. Different ones than I gave you but they should work.
  quote
pkatzman
Formerly "djfusion"
 
Join Date: Jan 2005
Location: Atlanta
Send a message via AIM to pkatzman Send a message via Yahoo to pkatzman Send a message via Skype™ to pkatzman 
2006-01-18, 17:37

Quote:
Originally Posted by Ebby
Those are codecs. Different ones than I gave you but they should work.
I know they're codecs. I wasn't completely sure that VLC could compress them on the fly, but at this point that's what I'm going to assume. I actually figured out that in Skype, I can stream what I'm watching at the moment to a friend in a video chat...awesome...
  quote
Posting Rules Navigation
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts

vB code is On
Smilies are On
[IMG] code is On
HTML code is Off

Post Reply

Forum Jump
Thread Tools

« Previous Thread | Next Thread »

All times are GMT -5. The time now is 05:03.


Powered by vBulletin®
Copyright ©2000 - 2024, Jelsoft Enterprises Ltd.
Copyright ©2004 - 2024, AppleNova