Re: Streaming TV channels over network

On Sat, 1 Apr 2006 17:12:35 -0600, "James L Williams"
<Jim_L_Williams@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Hello,

I have fine PC's in my home and I would like to be able to watch my cable
channels on any of them at any given time. I have a Windows 2003 server
setup as my domain controller and I just purchased another Windows 2003
server to facilitate some resource issues.

My questions are these:

1. Can I configure the Windows Media Stream service so that it will buffer
just a short period of Live TV from a TV tuner that is located on this
server?


You don't want a TV card on a Server box. Put it on a client box with
good specification, and use windows media encoder to encode the video
stream, sending it to a publishing point on the single server for
rebroadcast.

Putting WME on a server is a waste of your licence because it doesn't
*need* a server licence. In addition, you're unlikely to get proper
drivers for the server OS but you probably will get the correct
drivers for 2000 or XP Pro.


2. What TV tuner cards or USB devices are available that will allow me to
stream the channels over my local network, giving the clients the ability to
change the channel. I will most likely only be two channels at most being
viewed at any given time. However I would like the ability to support up to
5 simultaneous channels.


In some ways I'm thinking it might be more apporpriate that you look
into XP Media Center edition for this. It's designed to support this
scenario, and can be used with media center extenders such as XBox
(and XBox 360 for HD encoded video)

MCE can be purchased with "some hardware" at discount prices, so for
example you could buy it with a DVD rewriter or TV card purchased frmo
the same vendor.

3. I would also like to be able to utilize a DMR so that I can hook a TV up
to it and be able to change the channels at the TV. Is this feasable? Is
so what and where can I get the required turners and DMR do do this?


Ahh this does get tricky, that's beyond what I know. I'd suggest
posting that request to the MCE newsgroups directly :

nntp://microsoft.public.windows.mediacenter

There are also a bunch of useful online articles about this setup :
http://www.microsoft.com/uk/athome/tvandmovies/mediacenterpc.aspx
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/expertzone/communities/mediacenter.mspx

The MSN remote record service might also be helpful for your uses -
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/mce/learnmore/harrison_remoterecord.mspx
though Orb is also worth looking into if this is something you could
see yourself doing : http://www.orb.com works well for remote viewing
on PDAs for example.

HTH
Cheers - Neil
.

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