Streaming Dreambox over the net?

[yazooo]

I used various things to watch my Dreambox 7020 over internal LAN, and the Gemmini I have now the Web-X-TV seems to work quite well (although it seems I've temporarily broken it).

Anyone know the ports of the stream so I can open it up to be viewed externall, would be fun to see if I can watch stuff at work. Can browse to the Dreambox web page easy enough as that is just a http port forward, but I dont know the ports for the VLC stream.

 

[mhku]

In theory port forwarding will work (if you know your router's external IP).

I tried it with an IP camera but the port forwarding didn't seem to work (not sure which way through the router though).

e.g in your router set up forwarding on port 81 to your dreambox IP on port 80

Let us know if it works!

 

[yazooo]

yeah, its all about the ports, already have the page viewable externally, but because it loads the vlc stream through a plugin i cant see what ports it uses for that. am looking now for some network traffic analyser and see if can spot what is going on.

 

[yazooo]

I figured it. 31339 is the port needed to be forwarded, I didn't get it to work so well through the Engima interface, but I managed to connect direct through VLC. You need serious upload badnwidth for it to be any decent though, however am looking into downsizing the video or something for it to better stream over the net.

 

[conper]

well my webxtv freeze all the time and i dont know why. Anyone knows?

 

[yazooo]

the only time i have experience poor streaming over lan was when wirless was involved in more than one instance, i.e. from the computer to the router, and also from the dreambox to the router using a wireless ethernet bridge. the streaming is quite bandwidth heavy i'd imagine, so i would look at you connection as the source of the problem first.

 

[sputnick]

Little question pls, you install VLC on your DM ? Or just on pc ? I downloaded VLC and dont get how it works, going to try to figure out. Thx.

 

[yazooo]

For what I am doing, and to see view streaming over a LAN say, with the gemini version I have, you just need VLC on your pc. The feature built into Enigma web interface just makes use of VLC via a plugin so you never even have to start up the software.

You can directly connect to your box via VLC but it entails having to put in some hefty streaming addresses.

 

[sputnick]

Pli has it also i think, the Pli web interface has this button, VLC... dont get yet what it does, it just starts my VLC player on my pc, guess it needs some configuration, going to find out.

 

[sputnick]

When I press on the VLC button in Pli Web Interface, it asks if I want to save file or open, if I press open, it opens VLC player and thats all.

 

[yazooo]

That's the same with Enigma through Gemini. But we also have a web-x-tv button which loads the stream correctly. You can load the stream yourself through VLC if you want. There will probably be a button in the web interface which will give you the stream info, pids etc. Simply then goto VLC, Open Network stream, choose the http one, then put it in the format dreamboxip:31339/0,PMT,VPID,APID,PCPRID

e.g. i put in 192.168.0.24:31339/0,0x76c,0x76d,0x76f,0x76d to view Digit ALB 5

 

[BGonaSTICK]

Yep, that's how I get it to work.

Pain in the a*** though if you want to flick through a few channels !

 

[rolfw]

I simply click on the video stream info and VLC opens the stream. Doesn't seem to show a picture on any channel decrypted with the emulator though, just the CAM. Strange.

 

[yazooo]

I've seen some code flying about which calls up the stream info, passes the relevant pids to memory, then sends through to VLC through it command line parameters, so you can flick and it will restart the stream. Did think of doing it before, but I don't know if I can be asred, I really dont use it much, was only interested. Now I am trying to see about transcoding the video to something more suitable for internet transmisson, viewing stuff at work would be ace!

 

[ruperte]

Hi,

I'm sure there are better examples of how to transcode out there, but here is how I do it.

Dreambox on 192.168.0.34
Debian Linux server on 192.168.0.1

I port forward 80 of the dreambox and select the channel (or radio station) I want, from the web interface. Then I run my little script:

#!/bin/bash

/usr/bin/vlc `/usr/bin/links -dump http://root:dreambox@192.168.0.34/video.m3u` :sout='#transcode{acodec=MP3,vcodec=DIV3,ab=32,vb=128,width=320,height=240,deinterlace,fps=15,channels=2}:std{access=mmsh,mux=asfh,url=:8154}' vlc:quit

This uses links (a text web browser) to download the video.pls file and passes it into vlc as the first item on its play list to transcode. The second item (for when the dreambox stops streaming tells vlc to quit).

VLC then transcodes it to MPEG4 (aka divx) video and mp3 sound in port 8154 of the linux server, which you also need to have open on your router/firewall.

Then you start either VLC (mmsh://your-ip:8154/) or Windows Media Player (mms://your-ip:8154) on your client and enjoy the benefits of TV at work ;)

The above script is set for 128kbs video and 32kbs sound, so should work for most uk adsl upload speeds! The 15 frames per second, is so my anemic broken fanned 450MHz P2 can keep up! I suspect a faster processer won't need to be limited this way. However its quite watchable.

As soon as you want to change channel, just select a different channel on the dreambox web interface and restart the script. I hope others have as much fun with this complete hack as I have.

I'm using Gemini 2.4 but I can't see why it shouldn't work for any other image.

If you use the default vlc debian package you won't get sound, because they don't compile in the mp3 encoder - so you'll need to compile it from scratch. No reason at all why this shouldn't work on a different linux distro, just change the paths to vlc and links.

Rupert

P.S. The VLC command is all one line and shouldn't have any spaces, but I can't work out how to stop the forum putting in extra spaces.

 

[BGonaSTICK]

Hey, we had to wait nearly two years for your first post, but it was worth it ;)

I'm gonna put this on my list of things to play with over the never-ending Chrimbo holiday, unless Santa brings me some new solid-fuel rocket motors

Thanks for the contribution.

:-snowman

 

[yazooo]

Cheers for that. Got transcoding working in VLC, but going to have to sort out some script for myself as I'm not using a Linux distro, well not just yet anyway. Thanks for the tips tho.

 

[ruperte]

Glad you liked its been useful to someone. What platform are you running? Windows?

Let me know and I'll see if I can make a equivilent .bat or some such.

As for the time to my first post - well I joined when I was first started looking at sat stuff. I didn't actually get a DreamBox till much later on, so nothing useful to add until now!

(Changed all to add)

 

[yazooo]

Yup am running windows...Was gonna have a bash myself, but if you wanna do one for me...well that would be very kind indeed!

 

[BGonaSTICK]

Yes, would be a nice early Chrimbo prezzie for the non-Linux peeps out there.