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TELE-satellite International — The World‘s Largest Digital TV Trade Magazine
— 12-01/2012
— www.TELE-satellite.com
these cards can be installed
in a standard 1U rack. With
a corresponding network
connection and software the
customer‘s
requirements
can be solved at an attrac-
tive price.
A server can be equipped
with two of these cards
thus providing four com-
plete transponders to the
network. These can then be
received by IPTV receivers.
Hotels could then build up
an inexpensive bouquet of
channels out of DVB-T and
DVB-C transponders that
could then be made avail-
able to individual rooms.
Ideal is the fact that en-
crypted transponders can
easily be decrypted with just
one SmartCard and then re-
streamed further down the
line. This makes it simple
to make encrypted DVB-T/C
channels available in the
IPTV stream.
We thought it would be in-
teresting to set up an IPTV
streaming server in our test
labs which would then be
used to drive a number of
PCs that would act as IPTV
clients in an attempt to sim-
ulate a network load. We
wanted to see how difficult
it would be to set up an IPTV
server with NetUP cards.
We installed the well-
known VideoLAN VLC soft-
ware on the server and the
clients. This involves an
open-source project that
is available for a variety of
platforms. The advantage
of this solution is the ease
in which our needs could
be implemented. Configu-
ration data must be set up
for the server. We chose the
http-protocol since it can be
directly used without any
excessive network configu-
ration so that PCs with vari-
ous IP addresses can access
the server; that’s what a
Unicast solution is all about:
a stream is made available
for each client in the net-
work.
In the configuration data
each channel must have a
row added that identifies
what channel is to be made
available on what stream.
The VLC clients have to
choose network streaming
as the source and http://
iptv-address:por t /stream
must be entered where “ip-
tv-address” is the IP address
of the server, “port” is the
port identified in the con-
figuration data and “stream”
is the corresponding stream
for each channel. Our ex-
ample data can be seen in
Figure 15.
To test this set up we
opened four VLC windows
and streamed four streams
parallel to each other as
you can see in Figure 16. On
three additional computers
we opened four VLC windows
with various channels on
each of them. A total of 16
channels were streamed in
parallel. The feared network
bottleneck never happened.
Instead an Asus EeePC
turned out to be too slow to
play back four MPEG4 chan-
nels at the same time. A look
at the network load showed
that there were still enor-
mous reserves available as
can be seen in Figure 17.
Our network was a 100