[NTLUG:Discuss] Power of Linux brings TV to invalid without a TV (cable) connection.

[Kevin E. Ivey]

Chris Cox wrote:
> Yes... I'm the invalid.
> 
> So... here I am stuck in the upstairs, I'm not supposed to put any
> weight on my foot.  I wanted to watch some TV.
> 
> As some recall, my main server (downstairs in the study) uses
> a Hauppauge WinTV PVR USB2... well I recently upgraded to the
> HVR-1950 (also a USB device, the upgrade for the older unit
> which adds atsc support).
> 
> I could mount the files from the PVR across NFS, but that's
> way too slow for effective movie watching on a plain G wireless.
> 
> A couple of years ago I did a presentation showing how kaffeine
> could be used to serve up streaming to multiple client hosts for
> multimedia.
> 
> Ah ha moment.
> 
> However, my pvr setup used xine (no kaffeine) since you can
> do remote control operations via xine from a separate process
> (and via the command line... simple telnet like). 
> 
> Hmmm...  So... still, I could use kaffeine, but the pvr setup
> is used to using xine....  well... wouldn't ya know it, xine
> supports the remove slave setup as well!!  This should be easy!
> 
> So I use nomachine to get to my desktop in the study, bring
> up TV Titan's web site, hit watch and that brings up a copy
> of xine... which works ok over nomachine, but with audio video
> sync issues (I already knew that).  I changed my software to
> add the --broadcast-port 8080 option (kaffeine uses 8080 by
> default, so I thought I'd match).  I also turned off the
> video windows (with xine you can disable that easily using
> the 'h' key). Then on my laptop I invoked xine:
> 
> xine slave://addy-of-my-pvr-host:8080
> 
> And presto!  I have TV on my laptop.  I change channels by
> hitting the links off tvtitan from my nomachine, or I can
> simply issue my pvrcmd2 commands (my own script) to an ssh to
> the pvr box.
> 
> Just thought I'd share...
> 
> Let's see a Windows user do that in a few minutes!!

Kaffeine is a frontend for Xine, by the way...

My laptop allows me to switch the Kaffeine engine between Xine and MPlayer.

FYI FWIW,

Kevin