Is this possible?

[Joe Powell]

Hello, I'm new to videoLAN. I've tried to use the program before without luck even after looking at the "how to." My question is simple: can I stream TV from my dell dimension w/ a non-hardware encoding tuner card to my powerbook g4? It wouldn't be in a LAN, though, it would be across a college campus. Is that possible?

[markfm]

Should be fine. Up on the VLC doc page is a little guide to UDP streaming:

http://videolan.org/doc/misc/VLC%20Streaming.pdf

Use the addressed (point-to-point) version, not multicasting -- your campus switches may block multicast, sp plug in the specific Mac IP address that you want the stream to go to.

Since it's a non-hardware-compression card, the Dell should use transcoding -- the default VLC choices should be fine, just select the Video and Audio codec checkboxes on the Stream Output window.

[Joe Powell]

It works like a charm - all I have to do now is figure out how to change the channel remotely. I can't do it w/ remote desktop, so I'm going to try some other ways. Thanks again!

[markfm]

If VLC is opening the tuner application, the one that lets you select channels, when you create the stream, try using VNC. The latest VNC has a 64-color mode, pretty "light" on bandwidth (fast).

Install VNC as a service on the Dell, use the VNC client on the Mac (VNC also supports a Java client, so you can connect from a Java-equipped browser).
-Connect via VNC to tthe Dell desktop.
-With the VLC instance that is already streaming, "live", select File -- Open Capture Device
-Make sure you have the "Device properties" box selected, then just press OK. That'll close the window, VLC will open the tuner card's control applet. Make your channel change and then OK (or wjhatever) to exit that. The current VLC stream will stop, and a new one will start, same streaming settings.