Just to be clear, you need a video feed from a tuner (for Over-The-Air
signals) or reciever box (cable or satellite).
Such a feed needs to be digitized in order to be sent over a computer
network. You can do this with a TV tuner card for your PC. Hauppauge
makes a line of such devices that range from $50 for a basic model to
$250 dollars for the top end HDTV decoders.
http://www.hauppauge.com/
It's problematic to actually stream video across the internet if the
connection is a contemporay dsl/cable internet connection. I do not
have the numbers handy, but a live video stream would definately have
to be downsampled (reduced in quality) and compressed heavily (using
MPEG-4, or H.264) to the point where it would be somewhere around
being a webcam-like feed - though you may wish to sample and tweak
compression settings to a comfortable level.
All caveats aside, given optimal bandwidth conditions, it's entirely
possible to have video be streamed across a network. VideoLAN was
designed by some French students for exactly this purpose. It's a
nontrivial program to work with, but that is why it is good (lots of
powerful features and room for tweaking). http://www.videolan.org
SnapStream media offers a commercial product called BeyondTV that costs $69.
http://store.snapstream.com/btv-3-both.html
All of the above are mean to be used within a LAN with bandwith
allocations in the 100Mbit (Fast Ethernet) range (though, given a
stable (low latency) stream of bandwidth, you could probably get
reasonable performance well below the max of Fast Ethernet with an
average video stream at 320x240 resolution).
Of course, having the ability to remote administer your systems would
probably help a great deal. Securing a Remote Desktop setup or a ssh
login for a Linux box will be very useful... |
