Use PC as a video recorder from another country

I am an Australian and live in Switzerland and one of the things I really miss is TV especially sport. I had what I think is a bright idea: why not set up a PC with a TV tuner card at my parents in Oz that I can access remotely via a Virtual Private Network. I could use the remote connection to program what I want to record and then access the recorded file (directly or through file sharing program). I have done this directly to the (crap) Swiss TV. But can anyone make any suggestions about problems I might have with this? Is it feasible?

 

hey! finally some tv tuner questions!

I've used an asus tv tuner for a year now and I'm telling you it's the best thing. You can record with amazing quality, time recordings, channel surfing (which means watching like 12 channels at the same time if your cpu can handle it) and a lot other amazing stuff. the best thing is you don't have to pay your television fee (if you have those, we do) coz no one will ever know wtf your computer contains

if you're gonna do this your way you're gonna need a very fast connection both in australia and at the place you're gonna watch, if you wanna watch in real-time. Don't know what you'd need but I guess at the very least 5mbit both ways but I'm not sure. it all depends on the quality of the strem which on my card is pretty high.

you can however, easily record what programs you want, save them to a default location (say C:\FTP) then install an ftp server (for example guildftpd) and just connect to your australia computer and download whatever you want. I'd recommend a large drive where you record though, coz even though the software does compress the file a little (to mpeg I belive) it still gets quite large. still recommend a fast connection if you're gonna download your programs often, or else you'll go crazy...

I really recommend this the ASUS TV-FM card: http://uk.asus.com/products/vga/tvfm_7135/overview.htm

good luck and shout if you need anything else

 

just a little edit:

you can always record what you want, then use for example Adobe Premiere to compress to any other format, preferrably divx in this case for smaller files. if you install premiere and the xvid codec you'll be able to code an average 1½ hour show to about 1 cd (700MB).

to be able to code and use your australia computer just use remote administrator or similar. if your connection is fast enough you'll be able to work with it as if you were there yourself.

another way around this (if you can't get a good connection) is to record then burn onto a dvd and have your parents send dvd's to you by mail. that'll work as well

 

No I wasn't thinking about real time, so it should work. Prime time in Oz is in the morning so by the time I was ready to watch it it would already have had a good long while to download.