Manual RTP streaming

[Aprel]

Hi I have an Infinitv PCIe 6 tuner in network bridge mode on WMC Windows 7. I've configured WMC7 to use 5 of the 6 tuners, and have been playing with the open one. I want to use the open one to stream a Copy-Freely channel via RTP over network. Here is where I'm running into a problem.

I'm doing this in the Ceton HTTP page. It is accessible by all computers on my network because of the network bridge config. I can get in via HTTP and successfully tune a channel. Now on the tuner's page I go to "Streaming Setup" and type in the LAN IP and port of the computer I want to stream to and save to start streaming.

I can't get the receiving computer to play the RTP stream. VLC and mplayer (this is a linux PC) show they connect successfully, detect it's a TS stream, but then just wait. So I opened up Wireshark and see the Ceton isn't sending anything substantial over RTP. About every 2 seconds it sends 3 UDP packets of length 1328 bytes. There are a lot of common bytes between packets; some payloads are identical. Also mplayer prints "Stream not seekable!", but other than that, increase verbosity doesn't provide much diagnostic information.

I'm guessing the 3 UDP packets every 2 seconds from the Ceton are some kind of control protocol...? Now how can I get the Ceton to stream the actual content? Increasing the cache in maplayer to 8000 kb takes forever...I take it it's just buffering these UDP packets and not negotiating the stream to start.

Thank you.

[mdavej]

I assume you've already set it up like this, which works fine for me, BTW. But I must use the addresses in that post. No others will work for me.
http://www.thegreenbutton.tv/forums/vie ... 508#p74508

Brings my network to its knees though. So it may not be a good long term solution for you.

[Aprel]

I assume you've already set it up like this, which works fine for me, BTW. But I must use the addresses in that post. No others will work for me.
http://www.thegreenbutton.tv/forums/vie ... 508#p74508

Thank you for the link. I had not come across that page. I see from those instructions you have to start the stream *before* tuning the channel. I was doing it the other way. Now I'm getting the full content via RTP, i.e. 1.5 megabytes per second over udp.

mplayer and VLC now "play" the stream, but no video or audio. By "play" I mean the verbose output indicates the RTP content is being received, but mplayer or vlc produces no video window. Let me troubleshoot this and come back with more information....

[Aprel]

Shame on me for not reading the directions in the linked page carefully enough. Let me underscore for others who may find this thread the importance of the "Program Number" on the HTML page and matching it on the VLC Playback menu.

I can confirm that, although those instructions are for multicast, using a unicast IP works too. On the Ceton HTML page, enter the LAN IP of the device that you intend to watch the stream on and an arbitrary port, say 8005. Then in VLC, go to Open Network Stream and type in "rtp://@:8005" or whatever port number you chose. Don't forget Program Number on Playback menu!

Thanks, mdavej. Let me repay the favor: on my network the stream propagates at about 12 megabits per second, which even a 10/100 network should be able to handle seamlessly. Maybe you would benefit from using unicast instead of multicast (unless you intend to watch on different devices simultaneously). I have an Ethernet switch that when it receives multicast packets, it propagates them to *all* connected devices, whether they registered to that IP's multicast group or not. I wouldn't be surprised if other network equipment had peculiar handling of multicast leading to network issues.