[Mplayer-dvb] Re: How to do a central DVB-S Server for a community network ?

[ChristianHJW]

"Stephen Davies" <steve at daviesfam.org> schrieb im Newsbeitrag
news:Pine.LNX.4.21.0210031057520.1008-100000 at bob.daviesfam.org...
> Sounds fundamentally simple.  dvbstream is one tool that would do what you
> want - www.linuxstb.org.

Thanks a lot !

> One thing that you are missing I think is that a single DVB receiver card
> is capable of grabbing more than one station at a time - in principle all
> the stations in a single multiplex (ie muxed together on the same
> frequency) can be handled at the same time.  So I don't think you'll need
> as much hardware as you imagine.

I had no idea ! its hard to believe also, because this would result in huge
streams coming out of one card ? i can receive 120 TV and 300 radio stations
with my Pinnacle DVB-S card, and AFAIK the Astra DVB-S will all use the same
transmitting frequency ?

If we estimate a TV station to be 3000 kbps and every radio station 240
kbps, this sums up to 450 mbit/s ?? Probably a bit too much for a simple PCI
slot :-) ?

So, to be able to render about 40 TV stations, how many cards were
reallistically necessary ?

> For your servers you probably want the cheaper "Budget" DVB-S cards -
> which have the advantage of access to the entire transport stream as
> transmitted.  On the other hand, these cards don't support CAMs - perhaps
> you need that for your application.

CAM ? sorry, you mean CIMs, for PayTV ? no, thats not necessary, and also
not planned ..

> dvbstream uses multicasting.

Excellent !

> On the client side rtpfeed can be used to send the mpeg into a
> full-featured dvb card, dumprtp with mplayer would be a software solution.
> Mplayer can display to the PC's display, and to PAL/NTSC TV via cards with
> TV-out, via DXR3 card, via DC10+ type cards...
> Recording is as simple as
>   $ dumprtp ... | ts2ps ... >afile.mpg
> Time shift could be as simple as:
>   $ dumprtp ... | ts2ps ... >afile.mpg &
>   wait a while...
>   $ mplayer afile.mpg
> I'm not qualified to comment on the client options on Windows - perhaps
> someone else knows about that.

Unfortunately the client side would have to be covered with a Windows
solution, as this is targeted to normal people, and these are 99% Windows
users ( if they ever know how to switch on a PC of course ).

Why would we have to use DVB cards on the client side ? wouldnt any normal
MPEG2 decoder card work fine also, if we convert the transport streams to
normal MPEG first ?

Of course, playing on PC and outputting via TV out was the easiest option,
but i am thinking of a solution where no interaction with PC was necessary
to watch TV, like a radio remote 'calling' the wanted TV station on the PC,
MPEG2 decoder card ( even more than one, max 4 ) outputting to TV out, and
signal being converted to an antenna signal ( an old VCR can do this job )
and distributed in the whole house via normal antenna cable, so every TV in
the house can receive those 1, 2, 3 or 4 different 'internal' TV channels
same time, everyhwere in the house. TVs had only max. 4 different UHF
channels to be tuned to ( like ch 26, 30, 34, 38 ) and the radio remotes
connected to the PC could be used to decide what TV station is rendered to
every of these 4 channels.

> I think that the technical side is simple.  I don't think the same can be
> said about the contractual/legal side, unfortunately...

Legal side was no problem at all, as there was no PayTV decoded and
distributed, but only freely available stations.

Contract/Payment side was the bigger problem, but this is something i could
get my teeth into :-) !

Thank you very much for you very informative answer

Christian