The system is very simple:
The video and audio are fed into the capture card.
They are captured in real-time by the Broadcaster, which splits and encapsultates the frames
into a basic tagged UDP-based protocol I designed to enable robust operation.
The packets are sent over the network to the Receiver, which buffers the packets
and reconstructs the frames to then push them through the decoder.
And, presto, you have TV on your computer!
The design of the protocol means that it will detect lost/incomplete frames and
maintain synchronisation between the audio and video.
Additionally, the Receiver can rebuffer the stream if it encounters excessive loss.
At full quality, it will use up all the available bandwidth on my network (~7Mb/s).
Apart from just watching the stream, you can capture video and/or audio at the click of a button!
The next item on the list is to enable remote control of the TV to change channels!
I'm going to connect an InfraRed transceiver to the Broadcaster and train it using the various remotes.
My friend Ashley "Mac-Man" Butterworth is porting it to Mac OS X.
This is the NetVideo Receiver that presents the video & audio:
This is the capture box that runs the NetVideo Broadcaster:
(It's only an old Dell running Win98 at 450MHz. Too slow for Windows Media Encoder...)
