Election night viewing

So we're having a few folks round on election night to get drunk and play Dimblebingo. While BBC One will obviously be on the main telly, I'll have two more on the go.

Annoyingly, it turns out that while my house has an RF socket in each room, there isn't actually an aerial on the roof, so they don't appear to be connected to anything. The living room does have two feeds from a Sky dish, plus also a Virgin Media feed (though that may be disconnected).

The plan is to have TVs 1 & 2 connected to a Sky box each, just taking a single feed from the dish.

TV 3, on the other hand, is where things get interesting: I've got some cheapo USB DVB dongles, which are connected to an old netbook in the loft (fed from an indoor aerial). TVHeadend is then streaming these over the network to another machine downstairs, to display a quad-split on an external monitor, a bit like this:

(obviously they'll be lined up a bit better, and I'm going to try to find a way to remove the window borders - it may be another Linux box doing this anyway)

I've nearly got another tuner card on the go, in which case I'll be able to add either Sky News or RT and Al Jazeera, but that's going to mess up my layout. Might fill a column or row with a browser looking at twitterfall.

One of the cards does DVB-C, but I've not had a lot of luck getting anything on it yet. Does anyone know if I'm likely to find a useful combination of channels on one unencrypted multiplex?

And is anyone else attempting anything quite so grand and/or ridiculous?

Whenever I've plugged my Virgin Media cable into my DVB-C capable TV, it has picked up all the channels but only the BBC channels can be viewed unencrypted.

I'll probably hook up my spare TV to the aerial splitter so I can get ITV on the go as well as BBC One. I'll probably start at 9pm with Channel 4 and Sky News, and start flicking to BBC One and ITV before 9:55pm.

I'll use the main tv to stream Sky Arts's behind the scenes coverage of Sky News on NOW TV, with the DTT tuner on my PC for the BBC/ITV and C4's. I'll also record some of RT UK's People not Polls.

Come to think of it, I could get either Sky News or Sky Arts on a tablet using Sky Go...

I was just going to watch BBC One HD, but you've got me thinking of putting my 24" monitor next to the TV to do similar to what you're doing. Maybe add my tablet in as well for Sky Go.

And of course, Sky News streams live on YouTube with a four hour rewind facility.

I didn't realise that, thanks, I thought it was locked down to those with Now TV or Sky Go only.

Just in case you don't know VLC can stream YouTube videos (including live) by using the network option then pasting the YouTube URL in.

Oh, so it is. And in HD, too. Now which is best: SD from a Sky box or HD via a Chromecast with occasional 50Hz > 60Hz jitter...

I use my Smart TV browser with no judder with 1080i HD.

The issue is with the Chromecast and other similar hardware which only displays content at 60Hz - which when you're trying to play 25p or 50i content - like most of the world produces it - you get judder where some frames are shown twice as long as others.

What's your source of 1080i in your Smart TV browser - and what deinterlacing is it doing?

I'm not aware of many sources of 1080i content that a Smart TV can access (iPlayer is usually 720/25p on Smart TVs in their "Smart" mode - though non-Connected Red Button iPlayer on some platforms is 1080i - but that is outside the browser and tied to the home channel's frame rate usually)

I guess if you are using a Sat>IP server that might be 1080i in a browser, as would a TV Headend stream if you are accessing that. The stuff that is produced by broadcasters for online streaming (Netflix, ITV Player, iPlayer etc.) is usually 720p or 1080p, not 1080i.