How do you get TV into a Gadget?

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Let me start by bumming everyone out, I have NOT found a reliable way to do this yet. I know...downer. But that isn't for sake of trying, and there are a lot of options that sort of work, but they just aren't good enough.

I wanted to share everything I have tried so far, in the hopes that another user out there has tried something I haven't come across yet, and had greater success. Let's hear it!

Before we go into what I have tried, there are 3 must have's for TV into a Gadget:
1. Has to be able to play in both Windows and Linux Player (and Mac when that arrives)
2. Has to be good to HD quality.
3. Has to be relatively easy to implement.

These were on the nice to have list:
1. Free
2. Local broadcast, meaning it did not need to go out to the web for TV.

Here's a rundown of options I have tried:

1. Veetle, Justin TV, UStream, UBroadcast

Same problem with all of these guys, ADS! Nothing worse than ad's in your TV stream. Justin.tv can get rid of the ads for 10 bucks a month, however the "Justin.tv" logo still shows up the entire time, same with UStream and uBroadcast, so that makes these a no go.

2. TikiLive

These guys have EVERYTHING you need, HD quality, you can create your own company ads, have multiple channels, etc., however to get rid of ads and their logo, you need at least the 200/month plan. So that is not happening for me, but if you got the money, you definitely may want to check these guys out.

3. UBroadcast and 1AVStreamer

UBroadcast and 1AVStreamer both work only on Windows, and they are really easy to get running, in fact we recommend UBroadcast to people using the existing Rise Display Network if they have an unsupported TV Tuner card here. The two biggest problems when putting TV into a Gadget with either of these programs, was I got a border around the edges for some reason that I tried to get rid of but had no luck, AND both rely on the Windows Media Player plugin, so no chance of running on Linux.

4. VLC

I'm still not done with this bad boy. VLC boasts to be able to do everything we need, and its free. The problem was I could never get the darned thing to work, ever. It was beyond
frustrating. I noticed that just this week they changed their site all around and are offering some new software, so I will be trying it out in the near future.

5. Flash Media Live Encoder & Flash Media Server & Flash CS5

Oy...this one was a real ordeal, but can be really powerful. However it's not too easy to get running, and it's EXPENSIVE. To start testing, I used the Flash Media Server trial. You can follow the steps exactly as they are listed here in the Beginner's Guide for Flash Media Server, and you will be up and running in no time. The beginners' guide shows you how to get it up and running to stream on the local computer, but there are other guides that show you how to stream the TV signal being broadcasted from the Flash Media Server to all computers in the local network, or even outside of the network. This option may be a good idea if you can designate a Flash Media Server, and several Displays that get TV from it in the same network. Basically the idea is you stream using the Flash Media Live Encoder, which is dead easy, it gets encoded by the Flash Media Server, and is delivered to a small swf file that you would put into your Presentation via the Flash Gadget. Problem is, the Flash Media Server is 1000 dollars, and sort of complicated to get running. Not for the faint of heart :). The example they offer in the beginners guide works for one machine, so you don't need to do any Flash editing, however if you want to get a bit more intricate, you will need someone with a working knowledge of Flash to make the edits.

So there you have it, all my trial and error. If you have any ideas that you have tried, or you think may work, please let us know. We understand that TV in a Presentation is very important to some of our users, so we want to make sure that we can do it, but we want to do it right, and not recommend something half baked.

Still on my list to try, a new way with VLC.

Stay tuned!