This should be easy - recieving video stream and controlling ser

[DirtyBill]

Hello,

 

I'm needing a bit of advice here. I've been through nearly every bit of HTPC software yet nothing seems to be able to do what I want, so I ended up buying DVBViewer, which seems to be struggling also... It's very simple what I'm after... I want to get the video as a stream that can play in VLC, I want to be able to use an API (the COM interface would suffice) and get the level and quality of the signal and be able to move to a specific channel. That's it - yet 3 hours later of going through the COM interfaces and the Recording Service API, there is still no clear way of doing this???

 

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks.

[Gioxy]

Hi DirtyBill, have you already read the DVBViewer Recording Service Wiki?

 

[DirtyBill]

Hi Gioxy,

 

Thanks for the reply. Yes I've read the Recording Service wiki, but to be honest the API (which in this case is a pretty loose term) is too crippled to be useful and can't fulfill a single one of the points fully. Unfortunately there seems to be a lack of consistency with terminology and incomplete documentation all over the place as well that makes things just add to the frustration what is essentially a trivial task.

 

Since my last post I've found a bit of a hack around things just in case anybody else is trying with this:

 

1) Use the netstream plugin (it is an option you must pick when installing DVBViewer Pro) to unicast (or multicast, but the options below will then change):

2) For the netstream settings (found under plugins menu in DVBViewer Pro) ensure unicast is selected, for the interface I've just left at 0.0.0.0 with 1 user and the default port and 100 for the buffer.

3) Load up VLC (time of writing is 2.0.0) and open network stream using the path http://127.0.0.1:2345.

4) Just for a good dash of stupidness, when you need to change channel rather than using the COM interface, call DVBViewer Pro from the command line with the channel number as required, so "DVBViewer -c45" would tell the original instance of DVBViewer to switch to channel 45.

5) For other things such as signal quality, level, etc. I imagine the COM interfaces (which you can find in the documentation in the file "DVBViewer COM Interface" of the members section) should work okay... I haven't tested this yet. Careful when you download the documentation, there are two files, the SDK and the COM interface, the SDK is actually the plugin sdk, so don't get mixed up...

 

To be honest, if the COM interface works as expected I'll just call it done. It may be a hack but it works and really the less I have to do with this program the happier I'll be. As a full fledged PVR application DVBViewer doesn't come close, but it has the potential to be excellent, there just needs to be a lot more work put into the APIs and the correct documentation and it would be fine. One of the main things that needs to be done is a seperation between DVBViewer the thing that handles all the satellite work to DVBViewer the thing that users play with, and don't allow the client have secret protocols etc. to talk to the server. Case in point, nobody has a clue (without reverse engineering) the protocol of the control ports, yet clearly there is a lot more going on than the SDK, COM or the web servers show...

 

Thanks for your time.

Edited April 11, 2012 by DirtyBill

[ak2010]

Hi DirtyBill,

 

Have you tried installing DVBViewer on the client PC and configure the unicast device/s to find the hardware on the server PC. (Works on a home network but not sure if it works over the internet). You will most likely need a

fixed IP address to get it working over the internet. For example on a home network you have full control of DVBViewer and it's channels from a laptop.

[DirtyBill]

Hi ak2010,

 

Yes, however, the reason I'm wanting to do what I planned in the original post is because I'm needing to create a very simple media centre without having to mess around with the BDA, which would complicate things enormously.

[Gioxy]

Case in point, nobody has a clue (without reverse engineering) the protocol of the control ports, yet clearly there is a lot more going on than the SDK, COM or the web servers show...

Yes, you are right, but as you can see RS is still in beta fase and (considered that is a nearly one programmers prog) in constant and fast development, so maybe there is no much time left for the docs...

 

Anyhow netstream plugin is obsolete and superseded by RS, so please try RS streaming (to VLC you can use "direct") via RS EPG WebInterface, it seem to me that it's just what you are looking for... and if it's not enough you can dig inside RS's WebInterface html pages to easily find a lot of RS API clues/methods...

 

Happy if you want to share your finding/doubt