Hi Dave, I was thinking along these lines quite a while ago. I setup a server pushing the video out from the computer to a radio-shack RF modulator (tunable, $60 for the modulator I believe) and piped back into my RG6 distribution tree.
I did have several issues. 1. Time Warner was pushing a very noisy signal into the house. I hand built a low-pass capacitor (cut off was around channel 84 or something like that. don't remember the frequency). That let in my el'cheapo cable and allowed me to pass my own signals on any channel > 84. 2. Video out quality varied by TV. For some reason I never could get it to work well, unless I rebooted /restarted X with a TV physically connected to the computer. Then I could swap RF modulator and TV and everything would work. If I didn't do that then I had a ton of problems. Also older TV's had some issues with the signal. I swear my old sony kept thinking it was getting B&W PAL and not color NTSC. 3. Sound volume was really low. This was soo annoying. I ended up trying to re-encode video files to up the vol., but got a lot of distortion. this was what broke my "back". 4. Used the ATI remote wonder (rf) for control. worked great, except when the microwave was on then I had to go through some gyrations to get something to happen. Did have occasional issues with sticking keys, etc... never did figure out why. The sound issue drove me to just dropping a front-end in on my living room. In your case you might be able to address the above issues. I'd think though you'd need a seperate video card for each "channel" you want to broadcast. You'd also need a seperate RF modulator for each of those channels. All in all probably fairly do-able. As far as the remote goes, I recall reading somewhere that you could tell the ATI remote-wonder to work broadcast on a different frequency. Perhaps you could setup something like that where you change the remote to a specific frequency to control your various channels. Let me know if you have any questions... I helped a buddy try a similar setup so I can dig up the part numbers. He cheated and bought some filter from one of the home automation companys to filter out the cable company noise. Not sure if he's still using it or broke down and just went with a front-end machine. -Chuck __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ mythtv-users mailing list mythtv-users@mythtv.org http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users