Creating your own TV channel.
Miscellaneous Forums/General Discussion/Creating your own TV channel.
I don't know of anyone that has done this before, but I'm thinking about using my PC and creating my own TV channel with season episodes. Which means filling a 250GB Western Digital HDD with AVI files then broadcasting them through a scart socket into the TV. Then I can watch any TV programs I have no the harddrive through AV channel.
I'm not sure what broadcasts the AV signal from my PC to the TV but I'll have to research into that unless someone knows what will work.
And is there any software like Winamp that will allow me to shuffle episodes or allow me to skip through episodes. Maybe making my own Playlist of my favourate programs.
PS: Each episode is about 20-30 minutes long using DivX compression and a resolution of 352 X 240, each episode is about 150MB in size. I'm also thinking about halfing the compression rate aswell, to 300MB per episode. Depends how many episodes I want to fit into 250GBs of space.
I thought you meant like broadcasting a pirate station.
Haha, no. I'm not intent on blackmailing the world like Dr. Evil.
Just wanna kick back and watch something worth watching. I'm starting to dislike TV, too many adverts, too many crap programs.
for a few reasons right :) the avi file thing, make sure you have the box sets on DVD or it is actually piracy.
ok with that covered, you need a tv out card, lots of graphics cards support TV out these days so thats not a big issue.
program like mythtv and freevo for linux, not really sure of any like that for windows besides windows media center, which is worth the purchase if yer plan is a media center. Also you could resort to just using Winamp of Mediaplayer :) any software that works with a monitor works with yer TV too.
Dont know where you are on the planet, but 352x240 is gonna look like crap even on a PAL tv.
Yes, I've got the originals to all my AVI files. 352x240 works fine on my 15" moniter, and I'm sure it'll work fine on a small portable TV.
Scart is basically a plug with wires for multiple signal types, you can send a composite and an SVHS signal into a scart socket, it's just a case of what wires you connect.
I dont recall the pinouts as it's been over 10 years since I last wired a scart cable, but I do remember converting an early MPEG board to output Scart which required me to solder a wire onto the board to take a 12v line from the bus to the output jack - but I cannot remember what the purpose of doing that was, I dont think Scart in itself requires a 12v line, so maybe that was something specific to the project I was on. If you'd asked this a decade ago I could be more clear :)
You can probably just buy a cable these days anyway, so it's just a case of seeing if your TV card has composite or SVHS output and buying the right cable. If you cannot get a cable then making one is a case of the RS catalogue and a soldering iron. The scart connector block is dead easy to solder even I can do it, and i'm a girl. (well ok - miserable old hag is closer to the truth).
If your PC doesnt have a TV output then you need to buy a TV-Out card which does (a video capture card will have one) and instsall it, I recommend staying away from Hauppage cards if you do as they are terribly unreliable.
Sounds like what you want is a program like Meedio or similar. Snapstream also has a sister product to their BeyondTV software called BeyondMedia or soemthing like that. Run any of those media jukebox programs with your computer hooked up to your tv through the tv out or dvi or vga->component and you are set.
You also have the option of getting a media lounge setup which is a settop box (from various companies) with a hard drive and network connection. Those will let you either copy the files to the internal hard drive or allow you to network to a shared location on a PC and play directly from there.
Option number three? There's quite a few dvd players out there now that will play avi/divx/xvid/mpeg4 files directly from a dvd or cd burnt on your PC. There's even a few now that will play Divx-HD format.
I use a couple of these option, having about 100 television series converted to divx and archived to DVD. I most often use my LG dvd player which plays nearly every xvid/divx file I've thrown at it. But occasionally I'll play files from my HTPC (home theatre pc) that I have set up to record shows directly from my satelite setup, hooked up to my 62" Mitsubishi DLP HDTV.
@Becky Rose: The 12v line is actually a trigger for the television set. When it senses it, it changes automatically to the AV channel the scart is connected to. Nice feature, don't you think? ^^
>>Nice feature, don't you think?
Well almost. On a slightly different but semi-related issue my folks PS2 doesnt stop broadcasting a signal when switched off (standby mode), it displays an off black slightly reddish screen and because of this it doesnt release the channel back to whatever was being watched before it was turned on. I find this highly annoying as sometimes the telly gets left on overnight by accident directly because of this - do Sony have shares in electric companies now?
Hehe.. well if it uses a scart cable, just clip the 12v line and it won't interfere :) Although, it will be manual again.
http://pinouts.ru/data/Scart_pinout.shtmlPin 8, function select.
Perfect!
What would you say was the perfect resolution to use?
640x480 in my opinion. most older tv's wont display this "high" resolution though, but thats the minimum if you'd rather the TV "downsample" your movies than "upsample" them :p
When I say older tv's wont display it, I mean that they draw less lines on the screen and a higher resolution is not likely to get you a better experience.
Personal preference though :)
512x384x16 is a pretty popular resolution... and I think it conforms to the divx home theatre specification which is what most dvd players will play.
Err, even cheap 14" portables display 720x576, with the center 640x512 (PAL) or 640x480 (NTSC) fully within the visible area of the screen.
Outputting 320x240 (or thereabouts) will result in a very visible loss of vertical resolution and you may also notice the loss of horizontal resolution on high-contrast images. Video-CD is this quality.
720x576 is widely accepted as the minimum resolution for PAL broadcast quality (720x480 for NTSC, I believe). DVD is usually this quality.
DVD resolution is apparently 720x480.
My TV is a portable PAL.
@vinyl: actually, a TV cannot display all those dots you mentioned. A rather good estimate would be around 500 pixels horizontally before they blur completely and blend together. A good read about this can be found at:
http://nickyguides.digital-digest.com/interlace.htmexcerpt:
So rather than me rattling on about the pro's 'n' cons again I will merely end this article by quoting what the Ligos corporation (the creators of the LSX Mpeg-2 encoder) say in regard to this subject:
"The resolution of computer video, however, doesn't generally equate to the video world of televisions, VCRs, and camcorders. These devices have standards for resolution that are generally focused on the horizontal resolution (the number of scan lines from top-to-bottom that make up the picture). Here are some numbers for comparison:
Video Format - Horizontal Resolution
Standard VHS - 210 Horizontal Lines
Hi8 - 400 Horizontal Lines
Laserdisc - 425 Horizontal Lines
DV - 500 Horizontal Lines
DVD - 540 Horizontal Lines
With these numbers in mind, it is important to remember this rule when bringing the worlds of computer and video together: the quality of an image will never be better than the quality of the original source material.
We suggest capturing at a resolution that most closely matches the resolution of the video source. For video sources from VHS, Hi8, or Laserdisc, SIF resolution of 352x240 will give good results. For better sources such as a direct broadcast feed, DV, or DVD video, Half D1 resolution of 352x480 is fine. There are other advantages to following these guidelines. Your files will be smaller, consuming less space on the hard drive or on recordable media like CD-R and DVD-RAM. You'll also be able to encode more quickly".
resolution can be anything you want obviously...
480i is standard DVD resolution (720x480), but and this is a big BUT... You can either have maximum resolution or maximum compatibility. I choose to make sure mine are compatible with the divx certified (home theatre) settings so that they will play on all dvd players that are divx certified.
If you can record transport streams from an HD source you could create divx-hd certified video... or keep the same resolution as the transport streams (720p or 1080i) and have the best picture available (assuming you have an hdtv to go with it.) But then they'll only be playable on a pc. I like to have my buddies be able to play them (I've actually bought them divx certified players in a couple of cases) on their settop boxes so I don't have to convert them to standard dvd format... That's a serious pain in the butt. You can only store a couple of episodes in GOOD quality of an hour long show per dvd... Whereas you can store 12 hour long shows in a very decent quality (350MB) on a standard dvd in divx certified home theatre format. That's well worth it for me.
So it's a tradeoff... Compatibility or quality. Up to you. Tweak your encodings and find out what the lowest quality you'll accept is and run with it.