TV Tuner Card on PC - How to use it in SL??

[Jolene Merlin]

I have seen a lot of "TV's" available throughout Second Life...

Most of them advertise things like streaming YouTube videos, etc...

What I want to know though, is how can I use my TV Tuner Card that is installed into my computer which plays TV on my Windows Media Centerr; or use my DVD/BluRay Drive for that matter... to play on one of these In-world Televisions?

Does anyone know of any TV's out there, that will do this?  I think it could be fun to put a DVD into my Drive and play a movie that my friends in SL can watch with me...  or even link it with my Tuner Card when my computer is on.

[Peggy Paperdoll]

Do you have an old analog television in your house?  If so, go to Wal-Mart and purchase a length of RG-6 coaxial cable long enough to reach from your computer to that TV and hook it up to the RF output of the TV card on one end and the other end hook it up the RF input of the TV.  Sign up for Hulu TV on the Internet and subscribe to the TV package of your choice.  Now you can watch TV from your computer..........pretty nifty, huh?  And that is just about the full usefulness of that TV card in your computer.  It will not allow you to play a DVD on your computer and let someone you know on the Internet watch it with you........that is not what the card was designed for (far from it...........it was a gimmick in it's hayday and that hayday has passed at least 10 years ago).  If you want to host a video for your friends to watch with you, you will have to either set up a server at your location or rent from a hosting site (the price can be expensive depending on the quality you want to deliver and the number of people you want to allow to watch the video with you).  And if you have such a hosting site (or server) you can set it up to play in SL.........but, it's pretty technical and, from you question I'm going to say it's beyond your abilities).

 

The best thing I can think of for you to do with that card is remove it from your computer, put it in one of those static bags and try to sell it on Ebay.  Maybe some sucker will pay you 10 bucks for it............but I doubt it.

[Jolene Merlin]

Hmm..

Apparently you dont know anything about having TV Tuners Cards in a computer, nor their worth or value.

 

Welcome to the new digital broadband MULTIMEDIA Age!

I recieve full Digital Broadband Television from Comcast; over 200 channels, some in HD, on my Windows Media Center... on a large Widescreen LCD with full 300 watts of Dolby 5.1 Surround...all for free, as part of a package deal from bundling my services...

 

So why would I want to go buy an old analog TV, or RF cables or whatever... or "subscribe" to or pay for, something as useless as Hulu; when I get it for free already?

For that matter, why would I want my TV Tuner to play a DVD?

I have a DVD/Bluray Player to do that.

A 10 year old "gimmick" ?   Apparently you're not as well versed in the IT/PC industry.. because I build them for a living, and I assure you, that such is very much In-Demand on Multimedia based computers, and I suppose you don't realize that they are currently selling for upwards of $100 - $150, for a PCI-Express model, and not $10...

Here, go buy one on ebay yourself and check it out... I gaurantee you'll pay a whole lot more then $10 for it though!

Hauppauge Dual Hybrid PCI-E HVR 2250 TV Tuner

Sure, there are some cheaper ones, but the driver/software support on them is not great, and Windows Media Center will not work on all of them, especially not with Windows Vista or Windows 7... of course, when Windows 8 comes out sometime late next year to replace Windows 7, that will be a different matter...

What I want, is a TV within Second Life, that can use the signal from that Card the same way as my Windows Media Center uses it; but use it within Second Life.

Oh, and yes I know how to host a website, I am hosting several...

But I do not want to stream., from a hosted service...

Thats much too slow anyway compared to utilizing a signal right off your own hardware...

[Peggy Paperdoll]

I had a TV card 10 years ago...........I threw it away.  I do know what TV cards are and their worth.  I know what they are capable of and what they do.  I also know what it takes to stream video via a host site to SL (or anywhere else on the Internet) and the TV cards will not do any of that. 

 

You've bought into some sales hype............I hope you didn't spend much real money on a basic digital to analog converter.  You can get a stand alone for less than $30 USD at Wal-Mart............and the quality will be greater than that TV card.

 

With your technical knowledge you shoud be telling me how to play your Blue Ray DVD to SL direct.............but, you can't, can you?  I don't believe you one bit. 

[Jolene Merlin]

---

Peggy Paperdoll wrote:

I had a TV card 10 years ago...........I threw it away.  I do know what TV cards are and their worth.  I know what they are capable of and what they do.  I also know what it takes to stream video via a host site to SL (or anywhere else on the Internet)

and the TV cards will not do any of that.

---

Yes you are correct.  

Nor do I want a TV Card that will do that...

 

 

---

Peggy Paperdoll wrote:

You've bought into some sales hype...........

.I hope you didn't spend much real money on a basic digital to analog converter.  You can get a stand alone for less than $30 USD at Wal-Mart.

...........and the quality will be greater than that TV card.

---

Actually,, I got mine for FREE, from my ISP... and it hooks up directly to the Tuner Card.. which by the way gives me excellent crystal clear 1080p picture...

Sure beats buying a $500+ 720p LCD television at Walmart...

 

 

---

Peggy Paperdoll wrote:

With your technical knowledge you shoud be telling me how to play your Blue Ray DVD to SL direct.............but, you can't, can you?  I don't believe you one bit. 

---

Yes, you are correct. 

I do not know how to link my BLURAY Drive, to Second Life...

Specifically, because I DO NOT KNOW ENOUGH ABOUT SECOND LIFE ITSELF, to do it...nor can I find a Video Player within Second Life that will support it... I can build an entire sim, and in fact have built one...

But when it comes to multimedia within Second Life itself... I am very much a "newbie" on the matter...  as my personal RL business has little to do with Second Life and its technical aspects.  I spent my days dealing with sales from ASI Partner, Maxgroup, Eastern Data, Tech Data; and catering to Doctors and Lawyers who whip around town in their $60,000 Mercedes Benz's; and complain when their office LAN goes down for less then 30 seconds, making me go rush out and push the Rest Button, on their Router, and then charge them $100 to do it...

Hence, why I came here, looking for someone useful (which you are not) with some useful information on the matter that could help me learn more about what I can do with MY Second Life experience... 

I want to put a TV, in my House.. in my Sim, and have it play the LIVE BROADCAST, from MY Hardware, on my computer; the Live Signal from my Comcast ISP...

If you don't know how to do it, or don't know of anyone who actually sells a TV, In-world, that CAN do it...

Then please stop replying because you're just not helping...



[Tommi Waydelich]

Hi Peggy^^

well, there is a simple answer to your question: you CAN'T connect your tv-card to SL! Not even your DVD-player.

It's not possible to connect your own hardware to SL cause everything in SL is coming from the official LindenLab-

SL-servers and not from our own computers.

The only possibility would be to create a steam for it in www and then you can connect this stream to SL. But as you said before this would be to slow for you.

 

[Vladi Hazelnut]

 A tuner card in your computer just lets you use your pc monitor for a tv screen basically. Which is kind of handy if you don't have a tv near your computer. You can watch live television on your computer while you do other things, or just use it for a tv screen.

In order to use it for sl it would have to stream from a server. Just like being a DJ, you would have have to have a server or a stream in order to use your computer as a server. And I am not entirely sure it would work with video because it may have to be formated a certain way.

SL tvs basically work the same way the radios do, they are just fancy stream changers. You can add the stream manually if you want. So if you had a stream with your info on it you could stream it into sl. And then there is the media on a prim thing, but I have no idea how that works.

So in theory it could work, maybe. But I am not sure exactly how you would go about it. First you would have to figure out how to get your tv card to put out info sl could use, Then you would need to pay for a stream, or a server in order to get it into sl. This is how the dvd players inside sl work, all the movies are on a server somewhere and when you choose a movie it streams the movie into sl. And I am pretty sure they require quicktime to work. I am not exactly how it would work in your case though. Basically you would be doing the same thing Youtube is.

And I am also not sure how it would work with live tv. My thinking is it won't keep up and the stream will be lagged or not constant. It would work better with pre recorded material I think.

These are all just guesses on my part though. You need to find someone that hosts movies for sl and maybe they could give you a better explanation.

[Vladi Hazelnut]

straight from the sl wikki:

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Streaming_Video_in_Second_Life

 

[Paul Hexem]

You need a couple things. You need software to stream the signal to an Internet URL that software like Quicktime can read, send the metadata first, and get around possible copy protections.

 

Once you have that though, you just punch the URL into your parcel media info and make a prim on the parcel to recieve it.

 

The hard part is the conversion from the card to the Internet.

[Void Singer]

you could thoeretically do it, by setting up or renting a streaming server (outside of SL), then point the inworld stream at that server (or using MOAP to putt a web page on a prim). but you'd need to encode the tv stream on your end in a format that SL can read. it'd also be highly illegal.

in short, there is no easy way to do it, and not advisable to try.

[DogWomble Dollinger]

I've had video streaming work quite successfully by using hosting to store video fiels.  As to whether you could do this with a TV Tuner Card or not, I've not tried it.

One thing to remember though is to make sure you're covered for Copyright.  You need to make sure that in world you are displaying content that is either free or that you have appropriate permissions to use.

[Madelaine McMasters]

Hi Jolene,

I'm afraid your tuner card won't do the things you want. That card receives broadcast/cable TV signals from an external source (your antenna, cable or the video output of a VCR/DVD player) and digitizes them for use by your computer.

The video or web content you see in-world is sent digitally to your computer and then mapped onto surfaces in your SL world view. This requires that the video or web content be on a server somewhere out on the internet that's capable of being "read" by the SL viewer. In the case of video, this requires a server that can stream video content in a format understood by the viewer (such as Quicktime). The mapping of the video source onto surfaces in SL is done by your graphics card under control control of something called OpenGL, a library of nifty graphics routines your computer uses to render the entire SL experience. Your tuner card is unlikely to be recognized by OpenGL, and even if it were, the SL viewer would not make use of it.

To get video from a DVD in your possession onto a surface in your SL world view, you'd have to translate it into a suitable format, then upload it to a streaming server. YouTube is one freely available service for doing this, though you cannot upload copyrighted content and there are probably limitations on storage capacity. It's also likely that your internet connection upload speed is dramatically slower than your download speed, so uploading anything but the lowest resolution video will tax your patience.

It's also possible to run a program on your PC that turns it into a streaming web server, but that will run into the same bandwidth problem you'd have trying to upload a video to a streaming service like YouTube. It's also possible that you would have to route your stream through something that creates a persistent IP address that everybody can reach.

I know this sounds like a lot of mumbo-jumbo. There's a good reason for that... it IS a lot of mumbo-jumbo! Unfortunately it's not mumbo-jumbo that gets you where you want to go.