Uncategorized admin on 26 Apr 2005 02:23 am
Because I Can
This kicks butt.
click for a bigger picture
I just got my IRTrans (from Germany!) so now my desktop Mac has an infrared transmitter/receiver. The Mac version comes with a license for the iRed virtual remote control software — which let me crank out a quickie virtual TiVo remote, and a remote TiVo remote. The “remote remote” on one computer controls the virtual remote on the other computer… umm, remotely. The virtual remote actually controls a real TiVo connected to the desktop Mac via a Formac Studio TVR video encoder.
Here’s the fun part: iChat treats the video encoder as a regular camera so I can do a (wireless) one-way video chat from that Mac to my Powerbook. I control the TiVo with the remote remote which sends AppleScript commands to the other Mac, which sends IR codes to the TiVo. The video coming back is at about 26 frames per second which is good enough to let me scan through shows at 18x normal speed without missing too many frames.
It works alarmingly well.
The lag time on sending remote commands from the second machine is still only a fraction of a second. The quality of the video and sound isn’t terribly great, but it’s pretty decent. The video looks better in Tiger but they cut the frame rate to 15 fps. I suppose they only expect to be using iChat for video conferencing and not for broadcasting TV around the house — where a higher frame rate would be desirable. I’ll experiment with other streaming video solutions at some point in the future but using iChat works very nicely with virtually no setup.
Update, 04-30-05: I tried this today with QuickTime Streaming Server and the lag is horrendous. iChat kicks its ass but there aren’t any visible parameter settings in iChat other than a bandwidth throttle. Time to go diggin’.