Feature satip4

FEATURE

Selfmade IPTV

■ This is how our test

centre looked like for
this report.

TV
from
a Network

• Perfect for a hobbyist to stream audio and video
at home
• A small circuit board is all you need to start your
own home IPTV network
• MPEG2 and VLC licenses must be purchased
separately
• TSReader Pro is used for streaming
• VLC can also be used

Part 4

146 TELE-audiovision International — The World‘s Largest Digital TV Trade Magazine — 1
1-12/2013 — www.TELE-audiovision.com

www.TELE-audiovision.com — 1
1-12/2013 — TELE-audiovision International — 全球发行量最大的数字电视杂志

147

FEATURE

Selfmade IPTV

Vitor Martins Augusto

In the first three parts we focused
more on the theory of IPTV. In Part
4 we now want to implement an
IPTV system. And you don’t need
all that much: a PC with a digital
TV receiver (DVB, ATSC or ISDB)
and TSReader Pro would be used as
the server. A Raspberry Pi would be
used as the IPTV receiver.
The biggest problem with implementing IPTV at home is how do you receive
and display IPTV on your TV? Of course,
you could set up a PC next to each TV
but even so-called “cheap” computers still cost some money and let’s not
forget the cost of the electricity to run
these PCs. So, with all of that in mind,
we looked around for some kind of device to use as an IPTV receiver that
matched our criteria: cheap, small,
easy-to-use and fully featured. After
looking at a number of different candidates (from game consoles all the way
to a modified AppleTV) we decided on
the Raspberry Pi.
The Raspberry Pi is a very small computer; the circuit board is not much bigger than a credit card (85.6mm x 56mm
x 21mm). Despite its small size, it is a
fully complete computer with an ARM
processor. It features:
- SoC („System on Chip“): Broadcom

2
BCM2835 with an ARM1176JZFS Kernel
that runs at 700MHZ and includes a Videocore 4 GPU graphics section capable
of decoding H.264 at up to 40MBits/sec.
OpenGL ES2.0 and OpenVG libraries are
also supported.
- “B” models come with 512MB RAM;
currently 1GB RAM versions are also being shipped for the same price.
Connections:
o SD-Card: used to load the operating
system
o 2x USB: used to connect a keyboard, mouse, USB sticks, etc.
o LAN: RJ-45 with 100MBit/s
o Audio: analog stereo output

1. The Raspberry Pi is a small computer
with the footprint of a credit card. Still, it
features all conceivable connections:
- HDMI
- Composite Video
- Analog Stereo Audio
- 2x USB
- 1x Micro-USB for power supply
- RJ-45 Network
- SD card reader
On the PCB there are furthermore
connectors for digital and analog inputs/
outputs
2. The Raspberry Pi will convert any TV or
monitor into a full blown media center when
using XBMC. Because the Raspberry Pi is
so small, it will snug away behind the TV.
If you then use a wireless keyboard with
integrated trackball or touch pad, you won’t
even see any loose cables.

1


3

7

4

3. The webpage “openelec.thestateofme.com” features all
published versions of OpenELEC for Raspberry Pi, including
Windows-friendly *.img version, which can be easily flashed using
Image Writer, whose Windows version is called Win32 Disk Imager.
4. Just download the latest rXXXXX.img.zip File and extract it with
your favourite compressing tool.
5. Use Win32 Disk Imager to write the image file onto the SD card.
We recommend the use of 8GB SD cards with 6x speed or better.
The card is written with 10MB/s which is not that bad. Flashing
should take less than a minute.
6. When the flashing is finished, a message box appears. Don’t
remove the card yet, because we need to write the license keys for
the MPEG2 decoder.
7. On the root of the freshly written SD card you will find a file
called “config.txt”. Open it with a text editor (we prefer to use the
free Notepad++) and scroll down to the license keys section. Copy
& paste the license file you
from
6 received After the Raspberry
Pi store.
completing the
purchase our keys arrived
about 2 hours later, but the site
mentions that it could take up to
72 hours.

5

o RCA Video: analog composite video output
o HDMI: for digital audio
and video output
o Micro-USB: for connection of a power supply
The most interesting part
about the Pi is its price: officially the Raspberry Pi Model
B costs about US$ 35 plus
shipping and any applicable
taxes. In Europe you can get
the Pi for about 35 Euros.
Why such a low price? It’s because this mini computer was
developed by the Raspberry
Pi Foundation; their goal is
to make a very inexpensive
computer available to every
child in an effort to get kids
at their young age interested

in programming just like it
was back in the days of 8-bit
computers like the Spectrum
and the Commodore 64. For
everyone else it’s just fun to
be as creative as you want to
be with this little circuit board
and develop applications that
would previously have been
unrealistic because of the
costs that would have been
involved.
The Raspberry Pi is manufactured in cooperation with
Farnell and RS Electronics. The little circuit board
is powered by a Micro USB
power supply, the same kind
that is used with today’s
modern Smartphones. You
would also need an SD card.

We recommend an 8GB card.
A suitable housing can now
also be purchased for around
6 Euros and this is probably
not a bad idea as it would
help prevent any accidental
short circuits and also help
protect it against any static
discharge. We used the Pi
for weeks without any housing, repeatedly touching and
handling it, and nothing happened to it.
Since the circuit board is
so small, it can easily be hidden behind any TV. For the
keyboard and mouse, a wireless version with both integrated into one unit would
be the best option. It would
be easy to find a keyboard


labeled “Multimedia” or “TV’
that would have an integrated trackball or a touchpad as
the mouse.
Very important: in order to
keep the price of the Raspberry Pi low, the necessary
license to play back MPEG2
content is missing from the Pi
even though the hardware is
available to do just that. But
this is necessary to display
IPTV since most of the channels that are transmitted in
SD are encoded in MPEG2.
In the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s webshop you can buy
an MPEG2 license for 3.00 Euros. You’ll get a key e-mailed
to you that will activate this
function. This key must be
placed in the right spot in the
config.txt file on the SD card.
From this point on, MEG2 encoded content with hardware

8

supported decoding can now
also be viewed. In the same
way a VC-1 license can be
purchased for 1.50 Euros so
that the corresponding content can also be viewed.
The Raspberry Pi works
primarily with a customized
Linux Distribution although
in the meantime you can get
a hold of ready-made firmware files (called Images)
with XBMC. The name of this
media software stems from
the abbreviation for “Xbox
Media Center”: this software
was originally developed for
the first version of the Xbox.
Since then this software has
been ported over to every
conceivable system including Windows, Linux, MacOS
as well as Android and iOS.
There’s no doubt: with XBMC
you’re talking about one of
the best multimedia programs. Nearly every possible
format can be played back
(audio, video and pictures),
there are what seems to be
an unlimited number of plugins and using it is easy as
pie. If you’re not yet familiar
with XBMC, you should load it
on Windows, MacOS or Linux
and take it for a spin.
Just like with Linux, there
are a variety of different versions of XBMC for the Raspberry Pi: OpenELEC, Raspbmc, XBian, etc. We achieved
the best results with OpenELEC.
To use the Raspberry Pi
with XBMC the following
steps have to be carried out:
1) The file with the XBMC
image must be downloaded
from the XBMC website (see
the table of links).
2) Unzip the archive with,
for example, WinRAR.
3) Next the *.img file
should be flashed onto the
SD card using the Win32DiskImager. Make sure that the
Win32DiskImager has identified the correct drive for the
SD card so that you don’t accidentally format the wrong

9

10

drive.
4) Now the “config.txt”
file needs to be edited: the
MPEG2 license key must be
added in the correct spot.
Now the Raspberry Pi can
be started and after a few
seconds the XBMC interface
appears that is very self-explanatory. Important note:
when the Pi is started for the
first time after the SD card
was written to, it is quite
normal for the operating sys-


11

12

tem to automatically restart.
When you start it a second
time, XBMC will be loaded.
The first pass serves to configure the operating system.
Therefore, instead of doing it
like we did, just wait a little
bit: we thought at first that
something had gone wrong
and promptly reprogrammed
the SD card…
With TSReader Pro it is
possible to take the received
stream and insert it directly
into the network via UDP.
The transport stream can
either be transferred 1:1
into the network or the integrated Demuxer function can
be used. With this function
each individual channel in
the transport stream can be
streamed separately into the
network. Since most multimedia devices typically don’t
come with a Demuxer function, you would not be able
to view a transport stream
or only one channel in the
stream could be displayed
without the ability to select
any other channel. The same
thing happens with XBMC:
you try to receive the entire
transport stream, but only
one channel can be viewed
and it’s not possible to switch
to any other channel.
That’s why we use the Demuxer function in TSReader
Pro so that the desired channels can be streamed into the
network via Multicast whereby though for each channel
an individual port number is
used.
In order for XBMC to be
able to receive these streams
on different ports, we need
to create a Playlist in *.m3u
format. In this way a list of all
the complete channel names
appear in a list in XBMC;
channel surfing is now fun!
The great thing is that you
can start multiple instances
of TSReader Pro, each with
a different tuner (it doesn’t
matter if it’s one PC or multiple PCs – don’t forget, we’re
using Multicast), so you can

13

15

14

8. Start TSReader Pro and tune
to the desired transponder as
usual.
9. Open the “Forward” menu
and select “Forward to UDP…”.
On the list in the upper part
of the window select each
channel you want to stream
and configure the respective IP
address and port number. You
can use the same IP address for
all channels, but then you need
to use individual port numbers.
Remember that the multicast
addresses start at 224.1.1.1 and
go up to 239.255.255.255.

10. Using a text editor like
Notepad++, you need to
configure the play list for XBMC,
introducing each streamed
channel with the respective IP
and port.
11. In our first experiment, we
streamed four channels and
configured the IPTV.m3u file
accordingly. Naturally you can
name the file as you desire,
as long as you keep the *.m3u
extension.
12. Not too soon, we wanted
to try to increase our IPTV
bouquet and added a second

TSReader session, this time
using a DVB-T tuner.
13. With this TSReader
session we were receiving the
Portuguese digital terrestrial
television, which contains only
4 channels.
14. Each channel was assigned
an IP address and an individual
port number.
15. Streaming has started.
TSReader tracks on how much
data has been sent and how
many errors occurred.


153

16
6

16. Boot screen of the OpenELEC
distribution of XBMC for the
Raspberry Pi
17. Main menu of XBMC. You can
access all functions from here,
using the keyboard, the mouse
or any other device you connect,
including a wide range of remote
controllers.
18. The video menu. You can add
new folders containing video using
the “Add Videos…” entry. These
can be folders on the Raspberry
Pi or shared folders within the
network.
19. Playing a TV channel received
over the network – IPTV at its best
20. XBMC includes a wide range of
configurations for audio and video,

17

21

18

22

19

23

20

24


including the display of subtitles
21. Zapping can be done using the
|<< and >>| buttons or by going
back to the playlist.
22. Playing a streamed channel
from HOTBIRD 13.0E.
23. This is a different playlist,
showing the channels we are
streaming from our DVB-S/S2 card.
You can have as many playlists as
you wish.
24. Zapping between the different
channels within the playlist is easy,
but naturally you have to expect 2-3
seconds to see the next picture.
The reason is the buffering that
is required, to ensure that sudden
delays within the network traffic
don’t stop the reproduction.

25
6

26

27

28

put together an impressive
bouquet of channels. For
example,we combined several channels from a HOTBIRD (13.0E) transponder
that carries Portuguese digital terrestrial TV. These eight
channels were now available
throughout the entire house
via the network and could be
received with the Raspberry
Pi as well as other devices
(PCs, Tablets, Consoles, etc.)
as long as they could work
UDP streams. It would, of
course, be especially easy if
these devices had XBMC installed on them.
The *.m3u Playlist format
is quite simple and looks like
this:
#EXTM3U
#EXTINF:0,RTP-1
#E X T V L C O P T:n e t w o r kcaching=1000
udp://@224.2.2.2:1001
#EXTINF:0,RTP-2
udp://@224.2.2.2:1002
#EXTINF:0,SIC
udp://@224.2.2.2:1003
#EXTINF:0,TVI

30

udp://@224.2.2.2:1004
The first line identifies the
file as an EXTM3U Playlist
and must be available exactly like that. Next there are
three lines for each channel:
#EXTINF offers “Extended
Info” so that XBMC shows
the name of the channel
rather than the file name and
IP address. After the “0” can
be any text you want, in our
case we used the channel
name. The next line sets up
a buffer to prevent the video
from being interrupted from
brief network hang-ups. With
larger values channel surfing
would take longer. We used
values between 100 and
1000. The third line identifies
the protocol (udp://@) and
the corresponding IP address
with port number.) Naturally,
these values have to match
the IP addresses and port
numbers in TSReader Pro.
These three lines are repeated for each individual
channel. To create and/or
edit this file, any preferred
text editor can be used since
this is nothing more than a

normal *.txt file whereby the
file suffix is simply changed
to *.m3u. We suggest Notepad++; it’s an excellent
Open Source editor with
many functions and Plugins
that can also be used as a
Hex editor with the proper
Plugin.
The completed *.m3u file
can then be saved to a USB
stick and simply plugged in
to the Raspberry Pi. You can
do this while the Pi is running; XBMC will recognize
the USB stick automatically.
If you now go to video you
can click on the Playlist and
then select a desired channel. You can also quickly
surf to the previous channel
or next channel. The only
thing you can‘t do is select a
channel directly by number.
You can also choose if you
want channels from different
transponders - that are being streamed from different
instances of TSReader Pro
- integrated into one *.m3u
playlist or if you‘d prefer different playlists for different
transponders.
The
configuration
described here can also be

32

setup with VLC as the server.
This would actually save you
some money since VLC has
to do with an Open Source
Project but it also would involve investing more time
compared with TSReader Pro
because configuration of VLC
servers is not so easy. For
example, we were able to
stream a DVB-T transponder
via VLC but it didn‘t work at
all with a DVB-S transponder
probably because the current version might have a
problem with DVB-S tuners.
If an older version of VLC
were to be installed, then
DVB-S reception would work
but streaming would no longer function.
Our conclusion: In general, IPTV is not really all that
complicated. We achieved
completely usable results
and with a 1000Mbit/s network you won‘t be aggravated by an overloaded network. Through Multicasting
you can connect as many receivers as you want and with
XBMC you can easily access
music and movies all at the
same time that are available
either on a local USB stick or

from the network.
In the meantime the Raspberry Fan community have
already gotten a number of
USB tuners to work which, of
course, means that we will
also see if we can construct
our own „Linux Receiver“

based on the Raspberry Pi.
Without a doubt, the Raspberry Pi is an interesting
device to build things with
and if you work with audio
and video you‘d have a usable platform for very little
money.

www.raspberrypi.org
The Raspberry Pi Foundation website. Here you‘ll find the most
important operating system images for download, a Wiki, a forum and documentation. You‘ll also find new projects introduced here on a daily basis.
www.raspbmc.com
One of many XBMC distributors for the Raspberry Pi. This one
we found to be particularly beginner-friendly.
wiki.openelec.tv/index.php?title=Installing_
OpenELEC_on_Raspberry_Pi
OpenELEC XBMC Distribution Wiki page for the Raspberry Pi.
This one seems to be very sophisticated and offers the widest
range of features.
sources.openelec.tv/tmp/image
On this official web page the OpenELEC XBMC Image for a variety of platforms, including the Raspberry Pi, can be downloaded. This image can only be loaded via Linux.
openelec.thestateofme.com
On this website OpenELEC XBMC Images for the Raspberry Pi
are also made available in Windows compatible format. These
can be flashed to an SD card using Image Writer. At the end of
the list choose the newest Zip file (rXXXXX.img.zip).
https://launchpad.net/win32-image-writer/+download
Website for the Image Writer for Windows. This tool writes the
firmware image to the SD card.
www.tsreader.com/tsreader
TSReader‘s website. The professional version is needed for the
streaming function. There is a cost involved.
www.videolan.org/vlc
If you prefer to use free solutions, you should try VideoLAN‘s
VLC. With this software it‘s also possible to demux a transport
stream and then stream the channels it contains individually
via separate IP addresses and/or ports. The configuration is far
more complicated though.

29

31


33

25. Here you can see both playlists: one for the Portuguese TDT
transponder and one for the HOTBIRD 13.0E satellite transponder
26. If you prefer, you can merge the channels of different playlists
into a single playlist. Here we see all streamed channels in one
single playlist, despite the fact that these channels come originally
from different tuners.
27. Naturally, XBMC has many more capabilities. Why not watch
a movie? Almost all formats are recognized and supported,
including subtitles and multiple audio channels.
28. Time for a break: watching the classic Metropolis. Did you
know that this masterpiece can be downloaded for free, because
the copyright expired long time ago?
29. Here a different movie, encoded and encapsulated differently
(*.mp4): a recreation of the Space Odyssey, but using Lego
actors…
30. XBMC can be adjusted to your preferences and needs. Just go
to the settings menu.
31. Here you can setup every detail, including the weather settings.
32. We specified the location of our test centre.
33. There are many options to setup audio and video. The
Raspberry Pi features a full HDMI connector and is capable of
resolutions up to full HD at 1920x1080

157

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