Watching Sky on a laptop
We have covered this topic before, but I thought I would revisit the subject, because there is still not enough written about this subject on the internet and it needs raising.
Like many people the idea of being able to watch telvision on a laptop is very useful and more importantly because of wi-fi technology like 54g a and the vlc player a viable option. My system consists of the following and allows streaming of television in MPEG2 quality:-
- Streaming media PC(server) and HP laptop(client)
- Standard Sky Plus Box
- WinTV USB PVR2 [Link]
- VLC Software [Link]
- Tight VNC [Link]
- Elecard Streamg SDK [Link]
- Optional USB Sky Plus Controller [Link]
The WinTV card is an ideal choice as a capture card because it has an excellent built in real time MPEG2 hardware encoder. Unfortunately the drivers supplied with the card as not as good and a workaround to get the right output from the card to work with VLC is required. There is a lot of information about this card's capture inability with VLC which until now does not appeared to have been answered. The only way I can see of using this card with VLC is to construct a graph in graph edit (see below) that sends the pin 656 output of WinTV capture card to VLC using the Elecard NWRender direct show filter. In this way you can send a UDP signal to either a local copy of VLC (by configuring the NWrenderer to send to 127.0.0.1) or another instance of the program running on the network.
Normally WinTV outputs MPEG2 as a program stream and generally to send MPEG2 over a network, a transport strem is required which is why sending a local UDP stream to a local copy VLC may be necessary so that the VLC server can convert the program stream to a transport stream before broadcast. On my network, providing the WinTV encoder outputs audio and video at about 3,000 kbs, I can stream the program stream directly over the network with very minimal stream drop-out. Obviously quality of signal and network traffic will greatly affect how well this solution works. The VLC conversion stage is also useful if you want to transpose the signal (e.g broadcast to the internet).
Finally the USB sky controller is used to change channels, by opening the remote control program on the streaming server and then using Tight VNC to control the server desktop/sky remote program in a terminal window. This way may seem a bit complicated but providing a shortcut to the graph is saved to the server desktop, all the settings should be saved and all that is required to stream is to play the graph. More importantly picture and audio quality is excellent and VLC is a very stable streaming platform to use.
This entry was posted on Sunday October 19th, 2008 at 11:30 AM and is filed under Home Cinema. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response.
Leave a Reply
Hi-Fi-Insight News and Reviews
