Become your own IPTV Provider in 15 Minutes!
IPTV is something you hear a lot about recently. Telco providers start bundling TV over IP with to push their multi megabit broadband lines. And obviously IPTV has some very compelling properties… Basically you can watch TV wherever you have internet access. Recently while preparing a lab assignment when I came accross some opensource project that allows you to become your own IP TV provider. At least within your own network! All you need on the “Provider-side” is a DVB receiver attached to your Linux box and a piece of software called mumudvb. At the “customer-side” VLC is all you need.
What this software does is pretty smart. It gets the data stream of a complete transponder and feeds it to a set multicast addresses in your network. Usually 4-5 channels are distributed via a single transponder.This means also if you want to simultaneously stream channels which are not on the same transponder you have to have several TV receivers.
Mumudvb uses the Session Announcement Protocol to inform clients about the available channels, VLC will detect them automatically. Using multicast is pretty smart, that way the sender only has to send out the data once for all receivers in a network. So there is no difference whether you connect a single or 15 receivers simultaneously.
It took me about 10 minutes to get it up and running on a Ubuntu 10.04 box with a Hauppauge HVR-900 DVB-T receveiver connected to it. Mumudvb is available through the repositories. All that has to be done is to change the configuration file. There is a sample config file for full autoconfiguration that can be used. I commented all things related to DVB-S out, got a channel list for my region, and changed the frequency according to the transponder I wanted to receive.
After that I did a:
mumudvb -d -s -t -c myconfile.conf
and it immediately started the streaming.
Then I set up multiple receivers. If you use VLC this is the way to go:
- Go to Media / Files (Whatever the first Menuentry might be) -> Service Discovery (Diensterkennung) and check SAP Announcements
- Open the Playlist
- Select a Channel from SAP and doubleclick it
- Enjoy
Streaming the complete transponder to the network produces constantly about 1.8 megabytes of data (300-450 kilobytes / s) . On the Gigabit test network that was not an issue. I don’t know what happens if you try that on a wireless link. I conected about 10 receivers simultaneously with VLC on different plattforms, which worked flawlessly. Changing channels is even faster compared to switching channels on a DVB receiver. Processing power seemed not to be a problem.
Mumudvb is very flexible and has a lot of configuration parameters which I did not try… But the documentation says it is even capable to stream crypted channels if this is legal in your country.