[mythtv-users] Taking MythTV on the road; neither SlingBox nor transcoding is ideal

Brad Templeton brad+myth at templetons.com
Mon Jul 17 22:06:33 UTC 2006


On Mon, Jul 17, 2006 at 02:47:17PM -0700, Yeechang Lee wrote:
> I then considered the SlingBox, which posters have mentioned a few
> times on the list. My video card has, in addition to the DVI output I
> normally use, S-Video output, which I could easily plug into the
> SlingBox. Unfortunately, there are problems here, too:

The slingbox is nice enough but such a kludge here -- converting
your compressed video to analog so the slingbox can re-compress it.
Of course you get goodies there, hardware recompress, dynamic bandwidth
handling etc.
> 
> Am I missing something really obvious here? (Besides "Forget about
> MythTV and just enjoy being a tourist," which is a
> perfectly-reasonable answer, except that no matter how many sights I
> see there will be times I want to watch television from home.)

I like watching foreign TV, even in languages I can't understand.

But in theory vlc's streaming options should be able to do what
you want.  Perhaps not to surf live tv (I will admit the slingbox
is pretty good at that) but you could still watch live tv by
starting a recording of a live program, then going with vlc to play
that file.

(I think mythstreamtv sits on top of vlc to do some of those things
a little easier.)

Generally though, "live" is going to cost you quality.   If you start
a "live transcoding" still streamed over TCP, you can get much more
quality and consistent quality, with a bit of viewing delay.

Of course, if you want to work on it, you can set up scripts to forward
your favourite shows to your laptop while you are out, to watch at
leisure.   If you have a _lot_ of bandwidth, your hotel will hate you
but you could even just rsync the relevant files on a regular basis.

For example, you could set up user jobs on the myth programs you want
to watch, to transcode them down to something smaller (500kbps) in
a special directory, and then just rsync that directory from time to
time.


More information about the mythtv-users mailing list