Streaming Live TV has been a dream of mine. I’d love to have access to streaming TV from anywhere – wouldn’t you? Well, last week I redeemed 170,000 Sony points to get a Sony VAIO RA920G PC running Microsoft’s Media Center Edition 2005 operating system. I was rummy if I could figure out a way to “stream” my home PC’s multimedia branch of knowledge, including My Videos (.AVI, .Divx, etc), as well as stream live TV to my PC at work by accessing the TV tuner capture card. Imagine being able to remotely control your home television, change channels, and view the content at work! Now that would be cool… And so I began my probe and research.
First, let me point out that apparently, I am not the only one desiring the ability to stream MCE 2005′s content. I’ve read several forum posts stating the same issue. The general consensus is that Microsoft didn’t put streaming capabilities into MCE 2005 as to avoid running afoul of the DMCA/RIAA/MPAA and getting intricate up in copyright issues. Why does Hollywood always have to ruin all the fun? It’s not like my home broadband connection has the bandwidth to stream to hundreds of users. In fact, I had issues having enough upstream bandwidth on my home electrify connection to stream to just ONE PC – I will get into that bandwidth issue in a minute.
In my initial research, I could not find any software that would stream video files or access a TV tuner card and stream that. I wanted something that could also transcode on the fly so I could cut back the video quality if need be for slower Internet connections. I was close to to give up and all seemed lost when I came upon VideoLAN, which has a multimedia player that also acts as a streaming server with transcoding capabilities. Best of all, this streaming software is open-source and runs on Linux, Mac, Windows, and more! Could this be it? I frantically read the home page, quickly searched for the download link and installed the software. I first tried streaming a file on the LAN rather than the Internet (WAN). From VLC media player I opened an episode of Smallville that I had recorded and encoded as an .AVI file.
UpdateIt’s been awhile since I posted about VLC’s streaming capabilities and I wanted to update this post to point out two other good streaming solutions. The first streaming solution is from Orb Networks, a free software download that installs on a Windows PC and can stream your music (mp3) files, your video files (.avi, DivX, .wmv, etc.), as well as view your Pictures remotely. If you have Windows Media Center Edition it can even stream your recorded TV programs to your laptop, PDA, or even some smart phones. You can also use their web interface to schedule a recording of a TV show. Another solution is from SlingMedia named the Slingbox. It’s a standalone box that resembles a Toblerone candy bar and has video and audio inputs/outputs to connect to your TV cable or artificial satellite set-top box as well as an Ethernet connection to stream your video content over the Internet using their Sling Media Player.
Download VLC Player to compare and see all its features and the media playable.
