Monday, November 19, 2007

Live TV Streaming (SoftSled Anyone?)

My brother has been streaming live TV to his xbox 360 and I am jealous. I don't understand why Microsoft added this feature to extenders and not to full media centers. So to make a long story short, I started fiddling with VLC media player. Using VLC I was able to stream live tv from my bedroom's media center to my living room's media center machine. The best part is, I can stream the video and still use media center in my bedroom. VLC used about 32Mb or memory to perform the stream but the picture quality is outstanding IMO. I know about ORB and other software that does similar things, but I wanted High quality video, accessible through media center's interface without having to go through an outside server.

VLC was a bit of a pain to setup and I had some audio driver issues. But now that it's done and working I couldn't be happier. I'll post a full tutorial on how I accomplished this soon.