flippin’ sweet!
So I finally got a video capture box set up at work. It’s capturing the composite signal from one of our DirectTV recievers, throwing a 1Mbit mp2 compression on it, and then streaming it out multicast. So far, it’s working great. Since it’s multicast, as many clients can connect to the stream as we desire. Consequently, I’ve been able to keep tabs on the presidential inauguration throughout the day from my desk (the reciever and vid capture box are both up on third floor). So…now that this is done, I have two slight enhancements that I want to make to the system:
- Currently, it’s not using the hardware compression chip on the PVR250 card. This isn’t ideal. I need to figure out how to let vlc use the hw compression on the card.
- Now, if we want to change channels, we need to go up to the third floor. I figure it would be easy enough to throw an IR reciever/transmitter, lirc and a quick and dirty php web interface so that we can change channels remotely. I’ll have to price out what the IR transmitter would cost…
That’s it for now I guess.
/me goes back to watching foxnews :-)
It’d be interesting if the ReplayTV IR blaster worked… it’s only $6.95.
I was debating doing this for a certain recent satellite feed until they decided not to have it again. I never got to the point of seeing if VLC could read from the card, but I did not the open as a pipe option. With my PVR250 card I can just read in the compressed MPEG2 stream from the device like any other pipe and send it places or direct to a file. Is there some odd reason that VLC can’t do the same?
I dunno – I knew that you could pipe /dev/video0 to a file or whatever, but I’ve never tried doing anything else with it…I’m going to have to investigate that further. It would be great if I could hack together a command line script that grabs the mpeg stream from the pvr250 and then streams it out multicast udp…