Leaving Sage

[tomfisk]

Well I'm going to start with a rebuild of my SageTV server, which had been pretty faithfully running Windows XP with Sage 6 for the last 8+ years (I started with SageTV version 3 I believe). Going to drop Ubuntu 64-bit on it with MythTV (most likely) or VDR.

My main reason for leaving the SageTV world is the fact that I moved to a small town a couple of months back that has FTTD and IPTV. It's funny how small towns get the better infrastructure first. I did set up my Sage system to record content through 3 STB's, 2 of them plugged into HD-PVR's and one directly into an SD capture card.

Unfortunately, the HD-PVR's have never been a completely stable platform for me and it just seemed to be a Rube Goldberg to take digital content, stream it out of an STB as analog back into a device that turns it back into a digital stream for recording.

So I started hacking around with my Chromebook (that I install Ubuntu on) and Wireshark (and some cryptic examples on the internet) to see if I could capture the IPTV stream directly. After a few days of networking configurations I am overjoyed at being able to happily consume the direct IPTV MPEG TS streams. Unfortunately gettng the hack to work on Windows doesn't look remotely possible and even if so, getting the streams into Sage would be even more problematic with more Rube Goldberg solutions.

I haven't used the SageTV clients for many years now, as I converted over to a variety of front-ends depending on the insfrastructure at the TV...Windows Media Center, WDTV, and Google TV. The recording storage has been a NAS for sometime now after I upgraded my internal network to a gigabit backbone.

I'll be happy to turn off a couple of layers of my DVR infrastructure, saving headaches and frustrations (and even some power! Gotta go green!)

While I haven't been as active as many of you, I certainly appreciated all the help I got from lurking around here...all I can say is Thanks!

Tom

[matt91]

So I started hacking around with my Chromebook (that I install Ubuntu on) and Wireshark (and some cryptic examples on the internet) to see if I could capture the IPTV stream directly. After a few days of networking configurations I am overjoyed at being able to happily consume the direct IPTV MPEG TS streams.

can you share some links for this? I'm interested in reading up on it.

[tomfisk]

Originally Posted by matt91

can you share some links for this? I'm interested in reading up on it.

Certainly!

These are the links that I started with:

http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/SureWest_IPTV
http://exarv.nl/mythtv/iptv-recording/

You can find more stuff out there, but these are the best that I've found. The most recent Ubuntu implementations (I'm on 13.04) use the Network Manager, which has the nasty tendency to overwrite everything you attempt to do in the examples given, or just give up and say that the network interfaces are unmanaged and leave you without any network access.

So, here's where I put all the stuff that ended up making it work for me:

In the Network Settings for the adapter you'll be connecting to the IPTV network (under Options...):

Ethernet Tab: Cloned MAC Address: put in your STB MAC address. For each STB you want to spoof, you'll need a separate ethernet adapter/port. I have the Amino A140 so my MAC address is 00:02:02:44:xx:xx.

IPv4 Settings Tab: In the additional DNS servers, put in your standard DNS server. For me I use my internet router in my private address space as my DNS server so I put in 192.168.2.1. If you don't have your own DNS cache, put in your ISP's DNS server or whatever you typically use.

Choose "Routes..." on this tab and Add a new route with an address of 224.0.0.0 and a netmask of 240.0.0.0. Do not include a gateway or metric. Make sure both options, "Ignore automatically obtained routes" and "Use this connection only for resources on its network" are checked.

Save those settings.

In /etc/dhcp/dhclient.conf I included the following lines (eth0 is the adapter connected to the IPTV network):

interface "eth0"
{
request subnet-mask, broadcast-address, time-offset, domain-name, host-name,
routers, domain-name-servers, root-path, perform-mask-discovery,
router-discovery, static-routes, nis-domain, nis-servers, ntp-servers,
vendor-encapsulated-options, default-www-server;
send dhcp-client-identifier 1:00:02:02:44:xx:xx;
send dhcp-max-message-size 576;
send vendor-encapsulated-options 03:05:41:31:34:30:20:1f:04:20:20:20:20:04:08:41
:6d:69:4e:45:54:20:20:05:0c:32:2e:36:2e:32:20:20:20:20:20:20:20;
send vendor-class-identifier "AMINOx4x";
superseded domain-name-servers 192.168.2.1;
}

You'll have to use Wireshark to get your specific parameters. I started up wireshark and then powered up my STB and then waited for it to come fully up. With Wireshark you can then find the DHCP request sent by your STB and replicate the information you find. You will have to filter out a whole lot of packets to find the DHCP request, so you will have to learn the fundamentals of creating a filter to get rid of the junk you don't need (like not mp2t and not (ip.dst == 239.10.15.2)).

Also in /etc/dhcp/dhclient.conf if there are ANY pre-existing uncommented lines (they don't begin with a "#"), then wrap those with your primary interface, i.e.

interface "eth1"
{
request subnet-mask, broadcast-address, time-offset, routers,
domain-name, domain-name-servers, domain-search, host-name,
dhcp6.name-servers, dhcp6.domain-search,
netbios-name-servers, netbios-scope, interface-mtu,
rfc3442-classless-static-routes, ntp-servers,
dhcp6.fqdn, dhcp6.sntp-servers;
}

If you don't wrap these lines with your primary interface then you'll end up getting incorrect route information and it won't work.

Finally, in /etc/sysctl.conf include the following two lines (changing eth0 for your interface):
net.ipv4.conf.eth0.rp_filter = 0
net.ipv4.conf.eth0.force_igmp_version = 2

Other than that, the two pages I pointed you at earlier will give you the information for finding the multicast addresses for the channels and how to create an m3u file that you can use in MythTV.

If you have any questions, let me know and I'll do the best I can at answering them.

Tom