How many viewers

[miromaco]

How many viewers can watch liveTV from 1 tuner ? It is possible to use BTV and BTVlink like platform to campusTV for cca 500 students over 100M ethernet or IEE802.11a/g ? And what about some additional live cameras ? If exist MedusaPVR, come somethig like MedusaLiveTV ?

Does BTV support multicast ?

[merrypig]

Since each btv link is capable of independant rewind/fwd/play/pause, I would be very surprised if btv server is using multicast. It would get way too complicated to manage the streams; and while possible, I doubt it's being done. (SS hasn't historical proven themselves motivated to do the complex special cases, only the common ones).

So, that would mean each viewer is eating up the bandwidth of one program stream. For good quality video you'd be talking 6-9Mbps . So assuming no other network traffic, and the usual efficiency of ethernet, you're only likely to ever support maybe 6-10 streams over 100Mbit ethernet. Due to collisions/retries/interference, I would say much less over a wireless scheme (even the newer turbo modes).

So; no, I don't think you will be supporting a campus of students with btv/link. You will be wanting something that can broadcast/multicast. VideoLan being one option where you could configure channels. It would need a lot of work to put into a tidy, simple application that let you choose channels and such though, but you could have btv recording the video and video lan streaming it out ...

You're better off with a proper solution though if you want to do something this large scale.

Oh.. and you'd better get your copyrights in order. I think you'd definitely be violating the 'no rebroadcast' rules...

[dragin33]

The quicker answer would be no you cant do it because you would need to buy a different BTVLink licence for each user (reguardless of bandwidth) So you would proabably be out quite a lot of money before even getting to the problems involving streaming.

[flexx]

Regardless if you are using BeyondTV and/or BTV Link, you can ONLY watch as many Live TV feeds (not previously recorded shows) as you have tuners.

Therefore you could have 1 BTV and 5 BTV Link viewers on a network, but if there is only 1 tuner installed, then only 1 live TV feed at a time.

The nice thing about Beyond TV, it come with 2 tuner licenses - but you need to have 2 tuners installed - 2 x PVR250 or 1 PVR500 (it has 2 tuners).

I home this make things a bit more clear.

Chris