Tuner Card: Hauppauge WinTV-quadHD PCI Express TV Tuner Card 1609
I have a Hauppauge WinTV-quadHD PCI Express TV Tuner Card 1609 which I used to use with an HD antenna for local programming, but we’ve moved and our antenna reception is pretty spotty in the new neighborhood.
My Internet provider can provide basic local network channels plus PBS over our fiber internet connection. The problem is their delivery is thru an app which is only available on AppleTV or FireStick.
Assuming the stream is not encrypted, does anyone know whether this tuner card or any other card supports receiving a TV stream over Internet? Does Plex itself have any support for such a stream?
Thanks in advance.
Only on AppleTV or FireStick? That’d be a hard no go for me (but that’s beside the point…)
My ISP delivers TV channels via set top boxes. On investigation, it turns out that it’s actually UDP multicast groups (one of the IPTV transmission methods.) I’ve assembled some open source packages that allow me to pick up this traffic (yes, my ISP is fully aware of what I’m doing,) and get it running through PMS. It might be useful to see how your devices would be receiving your traffic.
Thanks JKalchik, that’s useful to know. I will contact the ISP to see if they’re forthcoming about their protocol.
JKalchik, I’ve requested information from my ISP on their protocol and encryption status. Are you by chance using xTeVe?
No. xTeve is a pretty good piece of software, but only supports directed streams (https, etc.) My TV data is delivered via UDP multicast on a dedicated video network, I’m using tvHeadend/tvhProxy. tvH has a pretty steep learning curve but is massively capable and complete overkill, but seems to be the right solution for my use case.
Here’s the reply from the ISP. Not promising.
“Thank you for contacting us today and allowing me to answer your question on our TV service. To use our TV service you would have to use our App or login to the Web Client, we do not provide the stream.”
It may be this is a “tier 1 support” answer and if I actually subscribed to the service I could escalate and get more detailed info. It’s only $34.95/mo for their basic package, with no time commitment. If I subscribed, are there tools I can use to detect their transmission and take this further?
That’s about what I’d expect from a Tier1 support response. In my case, at least partially because it’s a small ISP, I did get to talk to Tier 2 & network engineering, just to make sure I did not conflict at all with their efforts.
There are certainly network tools that you can use, but in all full disclosure and honesty… unless you have a pretty solid understanding of TCP/IP networking, those may as well be speaking Greek.
Sorry, that was a naive question. As a 30-year IT pro with relevant employment experience in large enterprise and telecom industry, I think I probably have the background for the task. I just haven’t played specifically with IPTV protocol and I wondered if there was any kind of utility (like Wireshark, for example) that you could just launch and it would say, “oh, I see an unencrypted unicast stream,” or “I see UDP multicast traffic.”
Or is it going to be more complicated, like if the ISP says they require you to run their app, does that mean the app is required to establish a VLAN for prioritization and segmentation of traffic, for example, or some other factor that requires an app to resolve?
For me it’s mainly a matter of time investment - is this something I can grok over a weekend or is it going to be a marathon effort? How long did it take you to solve yours?
Like you, my ISP is small - a community-owned utility provider with symmetrical fiber connections of 1GB-10 GB. I just replied to their response and asked them to forward my question to a network engineer. We’ll see what they come back with.
In my case, video for me is delivered on a dedicated network (isolated from my internet traffic at the SmartSwitch/ONT,) using UDP multicast groups, no encryption (I don’t have any premium channels.) I have a port mirror set up at my managed switch so I can completely snoop on the video network traffic. I do use WireShark to capture the EPG data that’s sent to the ISP set top box and filter out the channel name strings. I built an m3u file from that for tvHeadend from that data. The only time I need to rerun WireShark is if the channel layout changes (only happened once in 5 years.) My Plex Media Server host is multi-homed, with the routing rules set to be a good neighbor, and the tvHeadend daemon can attach the proper UDP multicast groups when a channel is selected. I spent a lot more time figuring out tvHeadend’s stuff.
Obviously, this is really all going to depend on you get video streams…
Edit: I should say at this point is that aside from verbal permission to attach to the video network in exchange for being a very polite network consumer, I have no support from my ISP. I’ve figured out the network attach issues, DHCP, EPG channel data, etc., all from reverse engineering.
