[mythtv-users] Way out idea on watching same thing in multiple rooms

Matt Emmott memmott at gmail.com
Wed Jan 6 14:31:04 UTC 2010


On Mon, Jan 4, 2010 at 5:38 PM, Eric Sharkey <eric at lisaneric.org> wrote:

> On Mon, Jan 4, 2010 at 5:20 PM, Matt Emmott <memmott at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I have Charter Cable. When I first hooked up my TV and scanned for QAM
> > channels, I picked up a ton of blank channels. I'd occasionally see if
> > anything was on these channels and eventually realized that these were
> > 'open' channels for On Demand. I couldn't choose what show I was
> watching,
> > but if somebody else had rented, say, Cars, I could tune in to their
> session
> > for free. Eventually Charter encrypted these channels, but it was neat at
> > the time.
> >
> > The reason I'm bringing this up is, when whomever bought this content
> would
> > pause, rewind or fast forward, I was there with them. I can't say if I
> ever
> > lost sync with exactly what they were seeing, but I can say that the
> > experience was the equivalent of having my own feed off a splitter behind
> > their STB. So if it's possible over Cable TV Coax, I gotta think there's
> a
> > relatively easy way (in theory) to do the same with IPTV.
>
> I think people are underestimating the degree of precision required
> for a whole house jukebox type scenario.
>
> If you're watching your neighbor's PPV, you wouldn't have had any way
> of knowing if you were seeing it 500ms ahead or behind him.  If you
> want a whole-house jukebox, 500ms is an eternity.
>
>
500ms is not an eternity, if the rooms are far enough apart not to get the
'echo' effect that has been mentioned.

A couple weeks ago I had the Pats game on my main tv (remote FE) while
cleaning my house. I wanted to have it playing in all the rooms so I could
watch the game while cleaning. I hit the record button my my box to put it
into the recorded programs. I then played the recording from the bedroom FE
and the kitchen FE. The kitchen FE is 11g wireless so it's the most laggy,
so I used that as patient zero - I turned the volume up loud enough to hear
from the other rooms, and then paused the other rooms till they caught up. I
only did this one time. I then returned the kitchen box to normal volume and
left all three boxes on for the remainder of the game.

After 2 hours the kitchen machine was quite a bit behind but it also froze
up repeatedly due to the underpowered stream. But the point of this story
is, even though the TVs weren't perfectly in sync, they were close enough
where it wasn't a big deal as I moved room to room. I'm perfectly fine with
a 500ms lag if it means I can push one stream to all my boxes.

Hey, speaking of that, how do individual STBs do it? I can watch the same
show on 2 different cable boxes and those are perfectly in sync.
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