In order to watch Live TV through MythTV you could install the MythTV Frontend to another machine as there is a Windows version of this (should you want to install it on Windows - link is here). I have not tried this route as I didn't feel it provided the kind of interface that staff would find easy to use should we distribute the system to them in order to watch Live TV. Instead I looked at MythTV Player for watching TV channels - the Official Release of the software does not support watching the TV streams, only the recordings but downloading the developmental version 0.7.0 DOES allow to watch Live TV and thus far I have had no problems with it at all. I got the files in zip format from sourceforge.net, didn't have to install it at all but put it on a share and ran it from there.
Opening the software, if there are any updates there is sometimes an error when looking for a particular database version. To workaround this, simply open the config.xml and change the integer value to the one the system is looking for.
The MythTV Player is limited to using the number of tuners available in the card. Say for example you were recording two different channels, there would be no tuners free for the MythTV Player to connect to in order to show Live TV. For us though this is not really an issue as it is us who set up the viewing of Live TV should it be necessary and should more tuners be required then staff would just be out of luck.
One thing we did find recently is if you start recording a program, it is then available to stream in the recordings section of MythWeb and so can be viewed in multiple classrooms at once with only the recording delay.
Stopping a recording stream does not work however, which is logical when thought about as stopping the stream breaks the connection with the server. Unlike having the film on your HDD, a stream would not know where to restart playback from.
So there you have it, our new Media Server capable of recording Live Television, playing channels via the network and having a Media Library of ripped Videos. Personally, I would also like to be able to stream Live TV but looking at solutions like MythStreamTV, they are no longer supported in newer versions of MythTV/MythWeb and I imagine they would suffer from similar tuner limitations as the MythTV Player.
The inspiration for getting this Media Server working in order to utilise it within Sharepoint came from examining Twynham School's usage of MOSS as a learning aid. Their public pages can be viewed at Sharepoint @ Twynham but their technical team have a blog about their developments at http://www.sharepointedutech.com/. They describe their utilisation of Windows Media Server to distribute videos, however I found MythTV to provide more features on the TV usage and after the Video MythTV Streaming Hack to be equally as useful with archived material.
Along the lines that Twynham do, I hope to make links in Sharepoint to the .asx streaming file in order to organise teaching resources. Uploading the asx file itself to Sharepoint did not work but simply linking to the URL works well internally. The next step is to extend this to staff, then external to the school but there is more organisational work to be done before we get to that stage.
I hope that this tutorial series has helped others and if it has then please feel free to let me know.
