Internet TV Streaming?

[belozeroff]

Hi everyone!
Did anyone think about a possibility to add a capability to play .asf files (streams), since there is a great number of high quality tv channels out there.
http://www.webantenne.com/index.php -- This is one good example.
BTW, Media Portal front end DOES HAVE this functionality.

Would be interesting to hear an opinion of those masters of plugins like mlbdude and the rest.

Regards

[Cayars]

You can do this now with a few of the STVs but your going to be using an external media player like Windows Media Player (same way Media Portal does it).

[k1114]

I'd like to see this in cayar's stv

I suppose there would be some work to it though The only thing I could think of is to write a seperate driver of sorts so that you could setup internet TV streams as channels from a seperate capture source.

[Cayars]

I'd like to see this in Cayars.stv also but I wish somebody else would do it!

[sleonard]

Couldn't Nielms webserver be set up to use the Windows Media Encoder to serve recorded shows? Probably would need some coding from Nielm though but would be better than putting this in an STV.

[Cayars]

I'm not sure what that would accomplish.

[sleonard]

I'm not sure what that would accomplish.

Windows Media Encoder can encode and stream content on the fly from a web server. I'm looking at it now to see what is involved in setting it up to do this.

[Cayars]

Yep, I done a bunch of stuff with it but I still don't know what this is going to do for SageTV if it were hooked into Nielm's webserver stuff.

[sleonard]

Never mind. That's the 2nd time tonight I didn't read the origianl post close enough. For some strange reason I thought he was asking to be able to stream Sage recordings over the internet.

[Cayars]

Now to stream the content out this could be a viable method.

[belozeroff]

I think I caused whole bunch of confusion with my question.
My original post was about watching Internet video streams (live tv) on a TV in the living room without any extra applications envolved (ms media player, etc.)
Sure you can put bookmarks in ie, minimize sage and run mplayer fullscreen, but I was dreaming about something more integrated into sage/skin/etc.

In MediaPortal it was done in very nice manner, but I like Sage much better then anything else.

Since mediaportal is open source, it should not be very hard to mimic the similar feature.

I would be glad to participate in all kinds of testing if neccessary.

Thank you all, and sorry about the confusion I caused.

[zubblwump]

Originally Posted by belozeroff

I think I caused whole bunch of confusion with my question.

While it may not have been the intention of your post, I rather liked the way this discussion was heading, although I don't know enough about the Windows Media Encoder to know if this is feasible. I know I personally would love to be able to stream my Sage recordings (even live TV?) over the net so I could watch them when away from home. Wouldn't it be great to be able to catch up on your shows on your laptop when sitting around the hotel room when away on business? Sure the quality might be poor, but I'd still use it.

[Hector]

Tivoweb does this. On the web view of the 'Now Showing' list you can click an icon and it will launch WMP playing the show using the .ty file Directshow filter.

peace . . .

[seamonkey420]

Originally Posted by zubblwump

While it may not have been the intention of your post, I rather liked the way this discussion was heading, although I don't know enough about the Windows Media Encoder to know if this is feasible. I know I personally would love to be able to stream my Sage recordings (even live TV?) over the net so I could watch them when away from home. Wouldn't it be great to be able to catch up on your shows on your laptop when sitting around the hotel room when away on business? Sure the quality might be poor, but I'd still use it.

wassup..

i just started getting into using the Windows Media Encoder for streaming.. it works great over a network, but i'm trying to use it differently..

what i want to do is to have a batch file that will check my recordings folder for any mpg files older than 3 hours, if it finds any, i want the batch file to then copy the mpg files into a new folder, then have it call my windows media encoder script/profile and re-encode the mpgs into wmv suitable for web playback.

Then after thats done, hehe.., i want my script to then generate a web page that then will embed the new wmv file into...

so far i have the cmd line stuff for calling my windows media encoder profile, and know how to move my files around, now i just gotta digg into some ms-dos batch file programming info on for loops for testing the date and so on...

if i get this baby working, i'll try to post my results...

my end goal was to be able to access my archived tv shows anywhere and not have to have my capture card in use by using the sagetv server and it cuts down on my disk usuage... i am not too concerned about commercials, since i can skip them when watching....


i guess any ideas on how to do "FOR" statement checks on teh date/time of a file would be so excellent.... and also if anyone else has/is doing a similar thing and their approach..

peace
seamonkey420

[rickw]

I was looking at encoder over the weekend. It has vbscript (wmcmd.vbs if memory serves) that enables easily converting mpg files to wmv files. I planned to create a simple vbscript that would do the following.

1) Check videos folder for new files.
2) Copy mpg file to working folder
3) convert mpg to wmv (probably 15fps 320x240)
4) delete mpg from working folder

In testing my 1.6G files was converted to about 70M.

Where I got stuck was trying to figure out how to actually stream the file across the internet. I wasn't sure if the encoder had to be involved or if a simple link would be enough.

Rick...

[Crashless]

You could easily add a line to Neilm's web server that would open up a directory listing of files. I think you add it to the realms.properties file. Look in the wiki for instructions.

This would be especially cool if you could trigger it from the web interface - IE: choose a file in the details then start the encoding. Check back X minutes later and watch the show.

That would be awesome!

How long did it take for your 1.6gb file conversion? (also what processor did it...) Thanks!

[rickw]

Originally Posted by Crashless

How long did it take for your 1.6gb file conversion? (also what processor did it...) Thanks!

I started the encoding and left, so I'm not sure of the time. But I believe it was less than an hour. I'll do another test tonight and report my results.

My processor is 3GHz Pentium 4 with 512Mb RAM.

Rick...

[seamonkey420]

FIGURED IT OUT!!!

i have a batch file that will check for new shows i've watched, then will encode them with virtualdub to divx and archive them in a new folder and then cleanup..

see my other posts for more info!!

http://forums.freytechnologies.com/f...ad.php?t=10612


on a side note..
i do think implementing windows media encoder into cayars would be pretty cool and useful.. could prob use it to archive movies in a more compressed format and prob make it very flexible by using batch type file to call windows media encoder..

peace
seamonkey420

[rickw]

In testing last night it took 34 minutes to convert a 1.6G (1 hour) mpg to wmv. Using the Windows Media Encoder 9.

[Crashless]

Originally Posted by rickw

In testing last night it took 34 minutes to convert a 1.6G (1 hour) mpg to wmv. Using the Windows Media Encoder 9.

Very interesting....did you try opening the wmv file before it was done encoding?

I wonder if it's possible to trigger the encoding and start watching the file immediately. This would be a great first step to getting TRUE streaming out of Sage.