pow
Premium Member
Registered: 11th Sep 06
Location: Hazlemere, Buckinghamshire
User status: Offline
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The internet connection to the school isn't great. It's average. It would be fine if people in offices wouldn't keep streaming Heart/Capital/Radio 2 to listen to while each room is trying to show last nights' Newsround to each pupil in the school from iPlayer. Hmph.
My last place had an Exterity receiver that used to broadcast all of the channels over the network (IPTV) to VLC or mini receivers that plugged into TVs. The setup was over 10k when it was bought, not something that I want to stomach spending.
So I found this:
http://angrytechnician.wordpress.com/2010/07/23/how-to-stream-every-channel-from-freeview-onto-your-network/
I actually used to work with him. the blog is VERY funny if you understand IT in schools 
Had some free time on my hands recently, so put the plan into action, bought a shit aerial from Screwfix, 25m of cheap coax and connectors, a 6 way splitter, 3 dual tuner cars to throw in an old P4 1GB RAM machine that I had stashed for some future use. Installed Ubuntu on it and away I went. After a learning curve about Multicast, IGMP Snooping and Querying and how to program it on NetGear ProSafe switches, I have it all working BEAUTIFULLY. Fire up VLC and look at the listings:
Only available to the staff with clever VLAN stuff
Just thought I'd share the love 
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Doug
Member
Registered: 8th Oct 03
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Good Work!
Might look into a system like this actually.
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pow
Premium Member
Registered: 11th Sep 06
Location: Hazlemere, Buckinghamshire
User status: Offline
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top - 19:33:49 up 7 min, 1 user, load average: 0.26, 0.33, 0.19
Tasks: 101 total, 1 running, 100 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
%Cpu(s): 6.0 us, 10.3 sy, 0.0 ni, 74.9 id, 0.0 wa, 0.0 hi, 8.7 si, 0.0 st
KiB Mem: 960908 total, 223032 used, 737876 free, 35580 buffers
KiB Swap: 982012 total, 0 used, 982012 free. 68624 cached Mem
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
1209 root 20 0 4008 2316 860 S 11.6 0.2 0:49.05 dvblast
1207 root 20 0 3896 2312 876 S 9.3 0.2 0:39.89 dvblast
1204 root 20 0 3736 2200 884 S 6.3 0.2 0:26.75 dvblast
1191 root 20 0 3652 2056 864 S 6.0 0.2 0:27.60 dvblast
1202 root 20 0 3816 2256 1016 S 5.6 0.2 0:22.54 dvblast
1188 root 20 0 3392 1832 848 S 3.7 0.2 0:16.30 dvblast
7 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.7 0.0 0 2.56 rcu_sched
13 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.7 0.0 02.36 ksoftirqd/1
3 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.3 0.0 00.83 ksoftirqd/0
126 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.3 0.0 00.04 kworker/0:2
1211 root 20 0 3556 1208 1040 S 0.3 0.1 00.29 sapserver
1506 adminis+ 20 0 5632 1356 1016 R 0.3 0.1 00.15 top
1 root 20 0 4720 2640 1388 S 0.0 0.3 03.70 init
2 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 00.00 kthreadd
5 root 0 -20 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 00.00 kworker/0H
6 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 00.21 kworker/u8
8 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 00.00 rcu_bh
9 root rt 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 00.16 migration/0
10 root rt 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 00.00 watchdog/0
11 root rt 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 00.00 watchdog/1
12 root rt 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 00.04 migration/1
15 root 0 -20 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 00.00 kworker/1H
~40% CPU usage on an old single core Pentium 4, that's transcoding 54 Freeview channels, doing SAP announcements and I've also just installed UDPXY - makes the multicast rtp streams into http ones (so I can listen to radio on my phone )
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Doug
Member
Registered: 8th Oct 03
User status: Offline
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What (if any) would be the best way of getting the streams to appear on a TV?
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dannymccann
Member
Registered: 9th Aug 06
Location: Doddington, Lincolnshire
User status: Offline
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Just read through that, such a simple solution and would make a huge difference to the network - I know this working in a large college and constantly having emails flying around telling people to stop streaming live TV and radio in their lunch hours as the Thin Client network dies every day at 12 o clock!
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pow
Premium Member
Registered: 11th Sep 06
Location: Hazlemere, Buckinghamshire
User status: Offline
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Doug - I'm going to pick up a couple of old SD Exterity receivers this week from my old boss (who has kindly donated them to me but they are ~£20+ on ebay) to see if they will pick them up, otherwise I bet you could boot a Pi into either VLC or a web browser with a plugin to show the stream. I'm going to have a stab at this guide with a 1080p res webpage:
http://blogs.wcode.org/2013/09/howto-boot-your-raspberry-pi-into-a-fullscreen-browser-kiosk/
Danny - give it a go, just give me a shout if you need any help, my biggest stumbling block was getting upstart to start the streams on startup (which I worked out by understanding the filesystem layout on Ubuntu) and then understanding the mindfuck that is Multicast.
I'd also recommend anyone who is going to give it a go install the server version of Ubuntu LTS as it comes without a GUI - I installed the desktop version and had to turn off the GUI it boots into (and boot it into the CLI) as it was just too much for the old box it's running on. I did have this on my support VLAN but now I've chucked it behind my proxy (Ubuntu doesn't support proxying with authentication out of the box as far as I can see) so it doesn't have an internet connection = no updating! I have installed a package that allows me to connect to a SMB share to get files on to it quickly rather than mess about mounting USB sticks. Also using the CLI makes you feel like a BOSS when programming it all in remoting using SSH
[Edited on 09-11-2014 by pow]
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pow
Premium Member
Registered: 11th Sep 06
Location: Hazlemere, Buckinghamshire
User status: Offline
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Note to self - tomorrow - pull hard disk from machine and make an image of it 'just in case' (I fuck it up by messing around hahahaa!)
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willay
Moderator
Organiser: South East, National Events
Premium Member
Registered: 10th Nov 02
Location: Roydon, Essex
User status: Offline
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bookmarked, that is really cool.
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Ian
Site Administrator
Registered: 28th Aug 99
Location: Liverpool
User status: Online
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quote:
For 3 days, the attendance system was erroneously reporting to all form tutors that they needed to fill in a missing register for a day during half term.
Exactly 1 person reported this problem to me.
For 3 hours, the web filter was erroneously blocking Facebook access for staff.
I got 16 emails about it.
He sounds like every IT support person I've ever worked with.
Tempted to reply to this one and say no one GAF about register faults particularly when the fault is whoever set up a class in HT, that's not the teachers' problem.
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DaveyLC
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Registered: 8th Oct 08
Location: Berkshire
User status: Offline
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What a cool project
I wonder if there is a way to hack a triple tuner DVB-T box to do the same thing? 
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pow
Premium Member
Registered: 11th Sep 06
Location: Hazlemere, Buckinghamshire
User status: Offline
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I suppose you could if you could load a flavour of linux on it that supports dvblast and you can get drivers for linux for that tuner hardware. That's why I went for the Nova T-500's as they are support in Unbuntu 11 onwards (I used 14.04LTS).
You need 6 tuners to get all UK channels, all of the SD freeview channels are broadcast on 6 different frequecies. The Nova T-500's I've used are dual tuner, so you only need 3 Trying to find a PC with 3 spare PCI sockets was a laugh
[Edited on 10-11-2014 by pow]
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dannymccann
Member
Registered: 9th Aug 06
Location: Doddington, Lincolnshire
User status: Offline
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I'm an accountant Pow, not an IT nerd - just an interested bystander
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pow
Premium Member
Registered: 11th Sep 06
Location: Hazlemere, Buckinghamshire
User status: Offline
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Small update - these exterity boxes work a treat: http://pages.ebay.com/link/?nav=item.view&id=221613277199&alt=web
The multicast streams have to be on the 239.255.x.x range for the box to pick them up but other than that it works beautifully. Got one hooked up to a TV in a remote building and one hooked up to the hall projector. Both PoE and you can change the channels with the remote that it some with.
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