TV tuner + video streaming over VNC

Question

I have a dell precision laptop, with Nvidia graphics card. I am able to watch TV on it using a TV tuner card.

I installed TightVNCserver on it, and am able to connect to it locally through a second PC at home.

Now, problem is, even if TV is playing fine on the laptop, on the VNC client screen, it does not show the video but a blank space (in the window where TV is playing).

How do I ensure the video gets streamed? As the laptop and PC are connected through a HUB, and I am using local IP address to connect, I don't thing bandwidth will be any problem.

Answer 1

As @Matt Jenkins pointed out, this doesn't work because of the way overlays are displayed.

In addition, you might not be able to get the full video frame rate over VNC as VNC is optimized to show images rather than full-motion video.

What you can do is stream the video from your TV capture card to the local network using several streaming technologies, for example with VLC Media Player. There are a couple of guides online, here's an older one, here seems to be a newer one, but the steps should roughly be the same. You can then connect with your laptop to the streaming server and watch the video with, for example, VLC.

Answer 2

The TV image is not being displayed by the computer as such, but is using what is known as an "overlay". This is where the TV card sends the data direct to the video card to be displayed in a specific location on the screen.

Different player software may be able to display it as actual graphics on the screen.

However - streaming raw video takes a huge amount of bandwidth. You would be far better off streaming the video separately from the desktop image using a compressed video codec. There are many types of software that can do this for you - Microsoft do a free one (I forget what it's called now - they renamed it recently - do a google for it).