At the moment I have no TV aerial or cable TV - manage quite happily without until now.
Is it possible to take a Freeview aerial feed, say, and connect it to a home network (CAT6/NAS/8 port switch), and have the TV signal at each ethernet point throughout the house?
I think the closest you would get to that is a MythTV Linux box running a backend at the aerial location and a MythTV Linux box running a frontend at each TV. A very nice solution albeit complicated to set up and expensive!
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Probably easier to put tv points where you need them
It's not that simple. You can connect a device that takes a RF TV feed (Freeview or Freesat) and digitises the signal and then distributes the digital signal to computers over the network. You can't feed an RF signal into the network and just plug an ordinary TV into another port.
A linux box with MythTV and an adapter card is one way to do it. There are other ways too. A Raspberry Pi has just about enough horsepower to handle the digitisation job.
Digitalisation is done before transmission, all the mythtv end has to do is tune and extract streams.
You can get PCIe cards with 2x DVB-T2 and 2x DVB-S2 tuners, and can take multiple streams from each tuner, that should be enough TV for most people ...
7 in many places now, 8 soon. The principle still stands you can have multiple cards to get even more tuners, diminishing returns, and the interrupt rate gets quite scary, especially for tuners without hardware PID filtering.
I suspect the OP might be happy with a single card and stream over the LAN, retuning the card as required rather than trying to make all the channels available (most of which are a waste of didgits).
Thing is, every living room has an ethernet point, but no aerial. So I was wondering if one aerial feed could be piped into the ethernet network, and somehow magically be available at each point - thereby allowing TV in each room, with the ease of routing the cable into the cellar (where the network switch is).
Not that I have much/any interest in TV. But I'm told it's not all about me ;-)
Sounding complicated. So, I could take one of these:
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and plug the aerial in. I don't see how that could then 'serve' to the network though.
Another option I'd thought about was cable TV. I don't have cable ATM, but Virgin and BT is available in my street. Save on the aerial, but I didn't really want to get into a contract and pay for something that's free.
Yes, that would receive TV onto that PC (SD but not HD with that particular card)
That's where the mythTV* software comes in, it has a server back-end and a client front-end which can run on different PC(s) dotted around the house, it's not entirely straightforward ... choice of PC, tuners graphics card is important, some Linux knowledge required.
*other software available, some for windows obviously.
That may not be as dumb as it sounds actually. Cat 5 is pretty lossy but SHOULD do a gigahertz from a buffered distribution amp..stritcly it should have a balun at each end to match the 200 ohms of the cable, But I reckon it would be find to try it without..
So recommend OP gets a labgear type distribution amplifier and makes up belling lee to CAT 5 type patch leafs and simply tries it.
obviously the switch wont work thats what the distribution amp will do instead.
I got the impressions as with here, there are TVS everywhere.
I tried MythTV, but it was too much of a palaver to set it up for me.
I ended up using Argus TV
Though actually, in the end I've not really bothered with the TV across the network thing. No one really watches TV as broadcast in this house anymore. Except on the odd occasion it happens to be on just as we want to watch the program. It just gets used to record some things.
We'd all much rather watch something we choose at the time we want to. So it's iplayer/4OD etc. or downloads/recordings or DVD's.
The kids fail to see the attraction in a service where you have to watch what someone else has decided to broadcast at a particular time. They prefer to choose their dross :-)
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