How to watch TV on your ppc broadcasted from your home computer

this is a how to for watching a specific channel on your ppc. you must have a tv tuner card installed on you home computer, and the process described below is how I personally set this up using my home computer and its built in tv tuner card (ati all in wonder, radeon 7500).

to do this, you need windows media encoder (WME) installed on your home computer. after this, set it up (which is fairly quick):

when you first start it up, it will automatically start the "new session" wizard. select "Broadcast a Live Event", and select OK.

in the next window, select your video and audio devices to use. for myself, i select ATI Rage Theater Video Capture. then i selected Configure, located to the right of this. in the configure box i selected the channel i want to broadcast and the input (for myself i have three to choose from, but selected "Video Tuner"). after selecting OK from the "properties" screen, i can already hear the TV in the background.

i now need to configure the audio device (which is displaying audio device "C-Media Wave Device"). in the configure screen for my audio, i selected Pin Line as "Line In", and selected the "enabled" checkbox. Line In is the input on my sound card that the sound from my TV card is plugged into. when setting up your TV card, you should have noted what input you plugged your TV audio into. this is the "pin line" you should select. after setting up the audio, click OK to go back to the audio/video setup window, and select next...

on the next window, you are asked if you are broadcasting directly from this pc, or if you are sending it to another server to broadcast from there. you want to select "pull from the encoder", and select next...

the next window wants you to set the port number you will listen for connections on. it defaults to 8080, but i personally changed it to a not so "well known port". i really just want me and me only watching my TV.

the next window is VERY IMPORTANT. here is where you set the bit rate that you broadcast the TV audio/video with. on the "bit rate" part of the window, select something 58kps or less. this will garenttee that your video will skip minimally. i selected 58kps, for myself. if any other bit rates are selected, deselect them.

the remaining windows are not nessisary, but i will describe them, anyhow. the next window you will get when you click on next is an archive file. it will store anything WME sees (whether or not you actually view them).

the next window allows you to add a welcome/closing video. these are there for a greeting to callers when they connect to your server, or disconnect. not nessisary, since this is for private viewing only.

the next screen allows you to put a title to your connection. for me, my title is "comedy central", since this is the only channel i will broadcast.

the final screen is a review of your settings. just click on finish... this should setup your server properly.

now to test it. open up media player on the ppc, and input your address:port (example: myaddress.dyndns.org:8080). the ppc will auto connect to the internet, and should show you your broadcast images/audio. you are done!