Brief problem description
I have a Vista media center which I built a while ago. This machine sits in our lounge room and has performs wonderfully over the last year or so. Given that I had network access in another rooms, I decided to install a second media center simply to be able to watch shows that our main media center had recorded. Once again no problems. However there has always been an issue with live TV. The second media center did not have access to an antenna cable, I had looked at routing a cable to the required location, however this was going to be too difficult.
In researching an unrelated issue, I came across a hardware product the converted USB and streamed it over the network... given that I had a spare USB tuner, it occurred to me that I could simply use the hardware device to plug the USB tuner into, then access the tuner via the network... Well it seemed like a good idea, however from what information I found on the net, it appeared that this device would not support a USB tuner.
Solution
On the upside of this research however, I did find the USB over Network site and decided to download the trial. The idea being that I could plug the USB tuner into the lounge room media center, then have the second media center access this tuner via the network.
So after the brief installation of the client and server components, I simply plugged the USB tuner into the lounge room media center and then "shared" it via the server interface. On the second media center it showed up in the client interface. I simply connected to it and Vista went about installing the drivers for the USB tuner as if it were physically plugged into the machine. The next step was testing, I have to be honest here in that I didn't hold out much hope for all this working.
My main concerns were
- The load this would impose on the host media center and
- Whether there would be enough bandwidth for all this to work.
Well to my surprise, live TV worked on the second media center with a hitch... this even included HD broadcasts. Also the load imposed was (from what I could deem from task manager) nothing, and there was plenty of bandwidth for this and all the other network related activity. In all an excellent product.
Thanks.Anthony.