NoisyGecko

I just set up a streaming server for my Hauppauge WinTV USB2 TV tuner and it seems to work OK. I am using the Video Lan Client (VLC) to stream the video. It seems to work pretty well with the WinTV tuner. The open source and freeware VLC software is found here: http://www.videolan.org/

To make things work, I created a playlist containing all the channels I want to view -- which isn't much with basic cable -- and then I created a startup script to start things locally with the HTTP/web interface running. The playlist file, vlc playlist.m3u", looks a bit like this (I have only shown the first 2 channels, so remove the "..." to use):

#EXTM3U
#EXTINF:0,Cable  3 ABC
#EXTVLCOPT:dshow-vdev=WinTV USB2 Video
#EXTVLCOPT:dshow-adev=WinTV USB2 Audio Device
#EXTVLCOPT:dshow-size=320x240
#EXTVLCOPT:dshow-tuner-channel=3
#EXTVLCOPT:sout=#transcode{vcodec=mp4v,vb=512,scale=1,acodec=mpga,ab=96,channels=2}:duplicate{dst=display,dst=std{access=http,mux=ts,dst=:1234}}
dshow://
#EXTINF:0,Cable  4 FOX5
#EXTVLCOPT:dshow-vdev=WinTV USB2 Video
#EXTVLCOPT:dshow-adev=WinTV USB2 Audio Device
#EXTVLCOPT:dshow-size=320x240
#EXTVLCOPT:dshow-tuner-channel=4
#EXTVLCOPT:sout=#transcode{vcodec=mp4v,vb=1024,scale=1,acodec=mpga,ab=192,channels=2}:duplicate{dst=display,dst=std{access=http,mux=ts,dst=:1234}}
dshow://
...

And the startup file, vlc.bat is this:

"C:\Program Files\VideoLAN\VLC\vlc.exe" --extraintf=http "vlc playlist.m3u"

I start the bat file and the VLC GUI starts up showing the first channel in the playlist. Once it starts, I can open a browser to http://localhost:8080/ to control things. It shows of the list of channels from the playlist file, and I can change channels by clicking on the ones in the list. Obviously I needed to open up my firewall to be able to access the web control interface from another computer. The default port for VLC control is 8080 (It can be changed somehow...).

Once this is running I can watch the TV from another computer by accessing the computer running the server by opening a copy of VLC on the client computer and going to the "File", "Open Network Stream..." menu option. I use the HTTP option and enter the IP address for the server machine with the port number of 1234 following it. Something like this: http://192.168.1.3:1234

I am having a bit of a problem with the video and audio being choppy, but I think that is mostly because my system isn't the fastest, and Windows XP isn't so great when you need low latencies. The systme is about as not as bad as the Hauppage WinTV system gets when I try to have it save video to files in anything but the raw format. If I don't do anything else on the machine it seems to work OK.

I'll update this page if I figure out any ways to get things running any smoother.