There has been a lot of hype out there about Slingbox, which allow one to stream their cable TV over network. People are able to watch their own cable TV from mobile.

Being a 1/4 geek, I like to play around to see how it works. On the other hand, I am a guy likes to re-invent the wheel (but cheap). So, I often like to try out cool open source alternatives.

I finally get around to find some time to try out TV streaming over network like what Slingbox does.

My Linux server at home already equipped with 2 TV capture cards. I use one of them for TV recording, which leave the other one for streaming TV.

As for software, there seem to be many choices out there; ffmpeg, VLC, Flumotion, and Helix DNA server. From this list, I picked ffmpeg. It has the complete solution to stream from TV capture card to asp/flv/mpg and other formats. However, I found its document is somewhat lacking. Fortunately, with some help form the mailing list I was able to get a basic setup working.



Even with the streaming working, I am still ironing out some issues; Audio/video is not in sync; Stream is not reliable over Wifi; Unable to stream outside my home LAN as the stream seem to consume too much bandwidth. (??)

Hopefully, I can eventually able to stream it to work and my cellphone over GPRS (or EDGE). Also, I might try out other solutions as well in the future.