TV Tuners and Remote Desktop

H

haon8

New Member
Hey all, I'm a student at college and am home for the holidays. I have a question regarding using a TV tuner with remote desktop software. I'd like to install the tuner on my desktop at home, then use any kind of remote desktop software to access it from my laptop at school. I'd mainly be using the software to watch games of my favorite baseball team (don't get their station where I go to school), and to play video games. I built my desktop and it's extremely powerful, though I can't really play anything on my laptop.

I know that this can be done (at least watching TV through remote desktop) because I've seen it, however it was fairly stuttery and not very high quality. Depending on what card I bought and which software I was using, could I achieve what I'm trying to with good quality (and sound), and could I also game with it?
 
I suspect the issue with the setup you saw was simply upload speed at the remote end. Your download speed is usually much higher than upload. I have a moderate speed DSL and the upload max through my ISP is 25% the download speed.

Sending movies/TV across the web works fine but those companies have servers and connections dedicated to upload only. The user gets good quality because their end is biased to high download speed.

An alternative is to have the remote PC record the game and then transfer the video file. Not live though!

There's going to be some time delay so gaming might result in sudden death as you strive to fire your weapon.

Audio is quite low bandwidth so that should not be a problem.
 
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Yeah, recording and then transferring the file would be kind of useless in my situation.

What I'm going to do is wait until my laptop gets back from the shop, then try a couple of different pieces of software to try gaming over the network before buying a tuner card, just to make sure that it works. I think that as long as gaming would work, TV shouldn't be an issue.

On that note, what would you recommend for good free remote desktop software, and do you know any good TV tuners (internal OR external, doesn't matter to me) at a price point of $50 or less? I could probably go over just a little bit if the quality is worth it.

I suspect that if there's any one problem with my setup, it's going to be upload speed. We have a fairly decent network at school, and paired with the new wireless card the shop is supposedly putting into my lappy I think I'll be fine with download. At home I only have a 3 megabit download speed, which results in a low 800 kilobit upload. Again though, if I test with the games and it works well I think I'll be ok.
 
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I can't help with the gaming or TV tuner. I'm not an online gamer but I assume the way that works with multi-player games is that the central server has a high upload bandwidth. Players receive the video but all they are sending back are mouse and keystrokes (or some compressed information package), which are minimal bandwidth. Not the case if you are transmitting a game from your PC - you are uploading video on a slow bandwidth.

Re the TV signal, what you need to do is keep the transmission as close as possible to the incoming video. Ideally streaming the video directly from the TV tuner. I've no idea how to do that. SDTV (NTSC) is 720x480 so that's all you really need. You can resize at the laptop end. If you cannot stream, if you can limit to only streaming from the TV window that is sized to 720x480 you will greatly reduce the bandwidth. You don't want to resize at the remote computer to say 1280x720 to fit its monitor. Then you have a lot more video to send.

I thought that remote desktops work by exception. Areas that are unchanged are not continuously transmitted. Only changes (something is added/deleted or moves onscreen) are transmitted. I have no confirmation on that. If that is the case then including your full screen as well as the 720x480 window will not increase bandwidth.

You may have to mess around with aspect ratios in your remote desktop and zoom in on the TV window.

I'm no expert on this so if anyone else has ideas.....
 
I'm not really sure exactly what you mean in your second paragraph, where you explain about the TV signal. If you could re-explain that I'd appreciate it.

Anybody else have opinions and suggestions for software and/or tuners?
 
NTSC format is what you get in North America. The standard digital TV signal is 720x480, the same as you get from DVDs.

If you could stream that straight from the home tuner to your remote location, it would be just like showing it on the monitor of your PC at home. I can't help with that so will not explain further. It's not much different to streaming a webcam or security camera so you could look into that. At worst you could point a webcam at your home PC monitor or TV!

Let's say you had an old PC monitor that is 1024x768 at home. If you were at home and the show was the old 4:3 ratio you would get the TV card to resize that 720x480 to 1024x768 (4:3) to fill the screen. If you are sending the video somewhere else, you want to send the 720x480 rather than the 1024x768, because it's less than half the bandwidth. Ideally you would have the TV picture in a window 720x480 at home and only transmit that window. If you have to send the full screen, you still want to keep that window 720x480.

I'll explain the "exception" scheme which may or may not be applicable to all remote desktop software. In the scheme above the 720x480 window will be surrounded by the same background (eg your desktop) no matter what is on TV. The software only has to send the background once because it never changes. Only the TV picture changes so that is all the information you have to continually send. You resize to fit your PC at the remote location. If you happen to start up an application in the background, then that will have to be updated as the background is no longer the same.

I'll repeat your request for suggestions for TV tuners or alternative methods from others.

Edit: I did some quick research. Try googling "stream tv tuner to internet" or similar. Here's a typical link regarding Skype
 
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