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.

5 comments:

Unknown said...

hey man i would love to get some info on how u used vlc to stream and still use media center. Can your second pc access the vlc stream from within media center too??

Treas0n said...

Hey dave,

Yea I was able to watch the same feed on both tv's with media center running. The down side was I couldn't change channels in room1 from room2,
So I scrapped it. From what I remember here's what i did:

File>Open Capture Device..
Choose the audio and video source (this varies on each pc / tuner card) I had a hard time finding my hauppauge audio driver...

Under Stream/Save choose http://youripaddress:port
(you have to open the port on your router as well)

Encapsulation ASF
Video codec: WMV2
Audio codec: mp3

Then on PC2 open windows Media player and Open URL: http://youripaddress:port

I make it sound easy in this example, but you need to be persistent and try different things. It took me a couple hours to setup mine. But in the end it streamed over my network very smooth.

Anonymous said...

hi. im a noob at streaming but have been using media centre for since 2004, and would love to be able to stream from a settop box downstairs via vlc and watch the stream from within mce on an upstairs pc. is this what you were trying to do? if so is it possible to open te stream in mce, instead of media player?
thanks for the great site

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