IP TV Support

[noocyte]

Hi,

I've tried to search on the forum, but didn't really find any posts on this issue.

The thing is; I'll soon be getting a new ISP, they deliver 10 Mbit Internet connection and Digital TV over IP. In order to view any of the channels you either use a set-top box or connect the CAT-5 cable to your Ethernet card and use VideoLAN Player to view the channels!

So my question is this; is there support in the Media Portal for viewing these channels? If not; have anybody done anything similar to this?

I'm a programmer myself, so I guess I could get involved and try to make it work... VLC is open-souce, so it should be possible to get an idea of what it does and perhaps port it the C#... Anybody interested?

[dman_lfc]

Depends on what format they are streamed as.
MP has ad-hoc support for ASX streams under My Radio.
It does video as well.

DMAN.

[noocyte]

It's definately not ASX, more like MPEG of some sort I think...

[dman_lfc]

I guess you'll have to see what streaming method VideoLan is using etc and post more info.

DMAN

[noocyte]

I guess you're right...

I'll get back to you all when I know more... No time now, Yule-holiday's a bitch when you're new in the office!
(I have to cover for everybody else...)

The IP TV provider which is mentioned uses UDP/RTP Multicast as a streaming protocol where a typical stream (MPEG2) will have an address like this: udp:@239.192.7.2:5501. The bandwidth on each channel is approx DVD quality, i.e. 7-12MBit/s. I have not yet discovered any other clients than vlc that handle this very standard protocol. Quite strange if you ask me.

[noocyte]

Thank you, helps a bit at least...

[swedan]

Originally Posted by noocyte

Thank you, helps a bit at least...

Hi,

How is this thing going? What ISP and tv-provider do you have? I have the swedish ISP Bredbandsbolaget and gets the ip-tv-streams and are able to view them in VLC. I am REALLY intersted in this solution, but cannot program myself. Currently I'm running Mythtv and an analogue tv-card, but it sucks.

I can receive multiple streams at the same time, so recording more than one channel at the same time wouldn't be a problem...

[gds]

Hi, let me point out the current situation (as I understand it, don't trust it too much :wink about IP-TV & VLC integration in MP:
1 - I've already asked the developers to consider embedding VLC into MP (http://nolanparty.com/mediaportal.so...431&highlight=) and later I've found some other posts asking the same, but MrMario answered to one of them that, since VLC uses the same codecs as ffdshow, they're not interested in doing it.
2 - Since some of VLC features are still missing in MP (like watching IP-TV streams or acting as a video/audio server), someone has posted some almost painless ways to integrate VLC into MP. For more informations about them, take a look at these posts:
http://nolanparty.com/mediaportal.so...&highlight=vlc
http://nolanparty.com/mediaportal.so...&highlight=vlc
3 - It seems that they're planning to add support for video streaming in the next TV engine (but I'm not quite sure about it, nor I know in which version of MP it will finally appear).
Hope it helps.
Bye.
GDS

[swedan]

Originally Posted by gds

Hi, let me point out the current situation (as I understand it, don't trust it too much :wink about IP-TV & VLC integration in MP:
1 - I've already asked the developers to consider embedding VLC into MP (http://nolanparty.com/mediaportal.so...431&highlight=) and later I've found some other posts asking the same, but MrMario answered to one of them that, since VLC uses the same codecs as ffdshow, they're not interested in doing it.
2 - Since some of VLC features are still missing in MP (like watching IP-TV streams or acting as a video/audio server), someone has posted some almost painless ways to integrate VLC into MP. For more informations about them, take a look at these posts:
http://nolanparty.com/mediaportal.so...&highlight=vlc
http://nolanparty.com/mediaportal.so...&highlight=vlc
3 - It seems that they're planning to add support for video streaming in the next TV engine (but I'm not quite sure about it, nor I know in which version of MP it will finally appear).
Hope it helps.
Bye.
GDS

This looks awesome. However, watching tv is done by entering the url:s for the multicast stream. Is it possible to get vlc to start when you choose a channel? And most important: is it possible to record the streams and also record more than one stream at the same time?

That's the big question for me