Watch TV on your Sun Ray

We often hear the following request, particularly from finance customers who are interested in Sun Ray or who are already using Sun Ray:

"We want to watch TV on the Sun Ray. CNN and Bloomberg and the Cartoon Channel. Is this possible?"

Anyone who's involved with any kind of thin client technology knows that video can cause a problem, regardless of which vendor you're using. If you have a number of users connected to one server, all of whom are watching a videostream, the load on the network and the server can quickly rise to a level where the user's experience becomes unacceptable.

The odd person watching a clip here and there is fine - this is what we have internally at Sun, for example. Lots of users requiring a TV feed either requires a huge network and huge servers, or a slightly different approach.

We have customers who need a TV feed using LCD monitors with a so-called 'Picture-in-Picture' feature. EIZO, Samsung and other make them. These displays basically show the TV feed in a small box over the video signal of the Sun Ray. This is a good compromise - static 'computer' content can be delivered in a practical manner and TV content can be delivered in a practical manner.

And everyone can watch the Cartoon Channel.

Comments:

how about some releasing some real secrets, like how to use the video-in port on my sunray, either as a video recorder or perhaps just teleconferencing, all I can find on the web is stuff that says refer to applications manual and even that was in the SunRay server 1.x manual. No clue is given to what appliaction that might be. Can I record full motion video 24 frames or 30 frames per second? Full color? This is the type of information that lots of people would find quite useful.

Posted by James Dickens on February 21, 2006 at 08:09 AM PST #

James,
The only app that ever used the video in was SunForum. There was a demo app out there called VIT (Video In Terminal?) but I can't seem to find it anywhere, nor the source.
The video in port was dropped and is not found on any of the the new Sun Ray's (1g or 170).

I believe it was just an overlay and you couldn't actually record anything off it.

Posted by ThinGuy on February 21, 2006 at 08:15 AM PST #

I use a Samsung SyncMaster 170MP monitor with my Sun Ray @Home set-up to deliver the capability that Christopher suggests in his original post. The SyncMaster does both PIP and fullscreen video. It does this through a direct video feed (e.g. cable TV), not through any video connection with the Sun Ray itself.

Posted by Joe Ferrill on February 21, 2006 at 02:50 PM PST #

What would be really great would be if the sunray (or a new sunray) could support all the fantastic exstensions to the x protocol (like GL XVideo etc) then things like mythtv could be run on a sunray with ease. Imagin having a tivo with a smart card that you could pop into any sunray. Add tv out on a sunray and you have teh perfect set top box that you can pause tv and carry on watching it in the kitchen or in the bedroom (auto pause on card removal) and have the same thing happen for radio.

Posted by david Hunnisett on February 24, 2006 at 02:48 AM PST #

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