How to Watch TV on your Laptop (wireless)?

[phizzz]

Hi,

I don't know if there is a solution (hardward/software) for my problem/inquiry.

I want to watch TV on my laptop and was wondering if there is a wireless TV sender that sends signals to my laptop (instead of a TV).

I have a TV tuner card in my computer and don't know if there's any software where I can "stream" live TV to my laptop, channel surf etc.

Bottom line, I'm looking for a solution where I can watch live TV on my laptop anywhere in my house.

[Ironballs]

I'm pretty sure a while back I did exactly what you want to do. I have a PC with a TV tuner, the PC also has a wireless card. My laptop had a wireless card and I used XP terminal services to watch the PC screen on my laptop screen.

I say I'm sure because I can't remember if I was playing DIVX films on my PC and watching them.

I'll have another go and let you know.

I did notice though the video was jerky, but this may be a combination of using 11Mhz wireless cards. and the laptop wasn't exactly the fastest cat around.

Anyway I did have fun tinkering, have a go!

[phizzz]

I'm looking for a slightly different solution.

I'm looking to watch live tv on the laptop. I can do what you suggested, but i wouldn't be able to change channels.

Any other suggestions?

[Gazorgan]

Can't do it on a 11 Mbps wireless. You would need to be 54 or 100 Mbps minimum.

Most TV capture cards use overlay to display the picture. This means it goes directly from the card to the display adapter (it's unprocessed by the CPU). This means it's low on CPU power. However, it's HUGE on bandwidth over the bus.

PCAnywhere and/or terminal services are one way to do it. A very poor way. There is no good way to do this. Sorry.

Now, for a particular show, you can capture to you main PC in MPEG2 (there's a reason for not doing AVI, think about it). You can then access the MPEG over the LAN and view it. Think of it as time shifting, you can watch it 'live' (albeit 1-3 seconds delayed), or pause for bathroom breaks or FF through commercials.

I have done this before, and it did work fine. You have to have some serious horsepower on your main PC, and lots of disk space. I typically capped in 640x480 MPEG2 at 6000 CBR and 128 K sound (laptop speakers suck). 4000 can also be good, depends on how good your LCD display is.

[phizzz]

That's what I thought. My laptop has a TV tuner card and I guess the best solution would be to get a wireless video sender and get the cable sent through that way.

Thanks for the input

[Viking R1]

Actually you can use a product called www.snapstream.com to do this. I am able to watch live TV over an 8011.b network just fine. Occasionally if I change the channel too much the audio will not be in sync with the video, but it's a cool piece of software nevertheless. It also allows you to record TV shows (like TIVO) and will automatically recompress the files to a specified format for streaming across the network to even a Pocket PC.