Digital ATV - IPTV
IPTV can be used as an alternative to building expensive DVB-S transmitter systems for sending Digital Televsion..
Recently in CQ-TV John, G0ATW has explained about the use of high power (1W) Ubiquiti WiFi equipment for the 13 and 6cm bands, with this there are many options of how you can stream live video/audio through the WiFi link and i will hopefully cover them later on.
The great thing about the Ubiquiti equipment is that they have a manual frequency setting so they can be used outside the 2.4-2.485GHz license free band, we can use them in the 2.3GHz section with much better results.
I managed to get hold of some very cheap Aminet110 IPTV receiver boxes from a seller on ebay, these were advertised as returns but i was up for a challenge as there were no working ones advertised at the time...hi
The Aminet110 box is basically an AV receiver for MPEG2 transport streams over a network connection, some of the later boxes are said to be HD so they 'should' support MPEG4 too but I have not tried this yet. The Aminet110 boxes were talked about in CQ-TV a few years ago.
Aminet110 board information
These boxes are not the easiest things to use if you are starting with a suspected faulty one but certainly worth a look into if you are interested in doing DATV the alternate way.
Basically a PC or MPEG-2 stream server box is used at the 'tx' end to send the MPEG-2 av stream onto the network, the IPTV box is the 'rx' which receives and displays the selected MPEG-2 stream from the network on it's AV output.
Here is my guide to the Aminet110 boards: Other models may differ?!
Apply 5v power to the board (< 500mA)
Video o/p is on Pin3 and Video ground is on Pin4 of the 10-way AV o/p connector, i just soldered some flying leads on for testing.
Once connected up you should have something showing on your monitor, if it begins with the aminet logo and gets to the browser screen you are likely to be in luck, if it shows 'loading...' then your box has been re-set and is awaiting a firmware upgrade via a server, it will not progress any further than this until the server is available.
The DHCP/Multicast server is run in Linux and is difficult to re-create, believe me! There are various sites on the net that explain how it is done though if you feel up to it!
To be able to do an upgrade you have to setup your own DHCP/multicast server in linux OS and you also need to have the appropriate firmware image for your model of box... It's not very freely available but if you search google hard enough then you may well get lucky?.!
google 'fresco'
So you have a box that boots up into the browser window.. If you have a remote control then the box setup is fairly easy i guess (I've not got any remotes so never tried) if not then you will need to login to the Embedded Linux OS via a serial port connection to the board. You can change some configuration settings so that the on board web browser defaults to load your live video stream address once the box has booted up.
A guide to setting up the DHCP/Multicast server is here: vlc forum
The address for the browser is basically the address/port of your streaming video server (VideoLan)
The Address should be in this format: 'igmp://224.0.0.1:1234' Where 'igmp' is the on board media player - similar to mms for Windows Media Player, 224.0.0.1 is the multicast address you entered in vlc and 1234 is the port number in vlc.
Once you have done this the screen should go blank and then the video should appear from your stream? if not then the video stream format maybe incorrect or the stream may not be getting to the box.
Using VLC to stream is very easy.. File,Streaming. Select video file or capture device to stream from, Stream type needs to be MPEG-TS, video MPEG-2, Audio MPEG-1, stream address for UDP for multicast is something like 224.0.0.1. There is RTSP streaming where the box can request different files/streams from the server but i have not experimented with this yet..
Multicast is used to send one stream to multiple viewers(boxes) eg 224.0.0.1 You can just stream to one box by entering the stream address as the ip address of the aminet box eg 192.168.1.68
When using multicast streaming you may need to add a route in the windows config to let the multicast data be sent through your network adapter to other devices, you can do this with the route command in dos command prompt:
'route add 224.0.0.1 192.168.1.2'
This adds a route for 224.0.0.1 data packets to the network adapter assigned with the address 192.168.1.2, yours will be different numbers. **Windows forgets this after a reboot**
There is a lot of information in the VLC forum about streaming video which is where you will find most of the answers like i did!
