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

[Stephen Davies]

On Thu, 3 Oct 2002, ChristianHJW wrote:

> Hi, can anybody hint me to software that was able or could be used as a
> basis to make something like a central DVB-S Server for a 100 mbit/s
> community network ?
> 
> The idea behind is to have 4 - 5 PCs sitting in a central 'serve' room, each
> equipped with 6 - 8 DVB-S cards ( all slots ), connected to a 120 cm sat
> dish with a low SNR dual LNB, signal distributed to the DVB-S cards via
> switching matrix, and then to serve 24 - 40 different TV stations to a
> ethernet network, all via MPEG2 transport stream as given by DVB-S
> satellite.
> 
> Participants to the network needed a PC with a MPEG2 decoder card to be able
> to render the signal to a common antenna line in the house ( or simply watch
> TV on their PC ), one card per program, could record as many TV stations as
> their HDDs and network connection could handle same time, and time shift
> would be an extra bonus also.

Hi,

Sounds fundamentally simple.  dvbstream is one tool that would do what you
want - www.linuxstb.org.

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.

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.

dvbstream uses multicasting.

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.

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

Regards,
Steve