I once built a system that pulled multiple TV channels, encoded them on the fly and rebroadcast via multicast over the office LAN to reporter's desks. This was for a newsroom and would have otherwise required dozens of DVB cable drops (and subscriptions). The DirecTV guy was mighty suspicious that I had a pile of Linux boxes set up next to the receivers, and no TVs in sight.
I've heard a similar setup is similar in hotels. The hotel gets a box per channel, re-broadcasts them onto coax (same as VCRs used to put eveything on channel 3, but with more channels), and then the hotel TVs can use their built-in tuners.
It's even moving past that: the last hotel I was at used the TV as a thin client that transmitted incoming IR signals back to its box in the server room.
Needless to say, the latency was atrocious. I even saw a Windows desktop flicker during a channel change.
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I once built a system that pulled multiple TV channels, encoded them on the fly and rebroadcast via multicast over the office LAN to reporter's desks. This was for a newsroom and would have otherwise required dozens of DVB cable drops (and subscriptions). The DirecTV guy was mighty suspicious that I had a pile of Linux boxes set up next to the receivers, and no TVs in sight.
I've heard a similar setup is similar in hotels. The hotel gets a box per channel, re-broadcasts them onto coax (same as VCRs used to put eveything on channel 3, but with more channels), and then the hotel TVs can use their built-in tuners.
It's even moving past that: the last hotel I was at used the TV as a thin client that transmitted incoming IR signals back to its box in the server room.
Needless to say, the latency was atrocious. I even saw a Windows desktop flicker during a channel change.
So that's why hotel TVs always take so long to change channels. I thought they were just really cheaply made tuners.
It's infuriating when you just want to channel surf before bed and ever button press takes 5 seconds to register.
Were you just using HDMI capture cards on each receiver and tuning each to the channel you wanted to capture?