Paul Sanders

This article is part of a series. If you are having problems with stream with VLC, take a look here.

Over the last week or two, I have been tasked with setting up a DVB-T (Digital Terrestrial) streaming box to host the world cup games over the coming months. The only brief was to get it on everyone’s desktop (all running Windows) and without any cost or using any extra software. After looking at Windows Media Encoder (which doesn’t support dvb-t) I decided to go down the Ubuntu 10.04 route. Here is what I did:

=================Choose the Hardware=================

CPU and Network bandwidth are the main considerations when streaming a TV signal to multiple boxes. I was hoping to user a dual core/dual processor system with multiple load balanced network cards. That would have been given, if the only TV aerial wasn’t sat in the Directors office.

As it has to be quiet and out of the way, I ended up using a HP dc5600 with 5GB of RAM. The TV card was a USB Hauppauge Nova-T 70000.

=================Software Setup=================

After building the box, I installed the latest x64 Ubuntu 10.04 and updated it with the latest patches. I then had to install all codecs. To do this, I needed to add the mediabuntu software repo. This is done by:

sudo wget --output-document=/etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/$(lsb_release -cs).list && sudo apt-get --quiet update && sudo apt-get --yes --quiet --allow-unauthenticated install medibuntu-keyring && sudo apt-get --quiet update

Once added, install the following packages:

sudo apt-get --yes install app-install-data-medibuntu apport-hooks-medibuntu

You now need to install a number of packages to ensure ffmpeg is configured correctly. To do this from the command line, do:

sudo apt-get update

Then

sudo apt-get install libavcodec-extra-52 libavdevice-extra-52 libavfilter-extra-0 libavformat-extra-52 libavextra-util-49

=================DVB-Apps=================

Before I could use my DVB card, I needed to tune it in to my local transmitter. First, install dvb-apps:

sudo apt-get install dvb-apps

Once installed, you need to scan for your channels and output the frequencies to a file. To do this, you will need to find out your local transmitter. The digital switch over site is ideal for UK users. Enter your postcode and you will be told your transmitter. My local was Winterhill. Make sure you replace uk-WinterHill with your transmitter.

Scan by doing the following:

scan /usr/share/dvb/dvb-t/uk-WinterHill > ~/Desktop/Channels.conf

Once done, time to install the media streamer.

=================VLC=================

To do the streaming, I decided to use VLC player to stream the data. Install by:

sudo apt-get install vlc

Now you have it installed, time to test the TV player. Run VLC pointing to the configuration file created above:

vlc ~/Desktop/Channels.conf

All the channels will now be listed in your play list. Simply change channel by double clicking on the relevant entry.

=================Time to stream=================

Here comes the fun (and probably most frustrating part). This requires a fair bit of tweaking depending on your environment and requirements. You need to set the source, any transcoding and the output. As I needed to stream to over 200 machines, all running windows, I used this:

vlc -vvv ~/Desktop/Channels.conf --sout '#transcode{vcodec=DIV3,vb=2048,scale=0.25,acodec=mp3,ab=32,channels=2}:std{access=mmsh,mux=asfh,dst=:8080}'


This sets up a HTTP stream on port 8080, converts it into Divx and sets uses MP3 to encode the sound. The ‘scale=0.25′ shrinks the image to keep CPU and Memory in check when streaming.

=================More to come=================

I will add a couple more articles to this in the next few days that run through a number of troubleshooting and tweaking tips.