Hi, there. Long time no see. I’ve spending super-hard time to work, unfortunatelly. Recently, I’m so lucky to have some private time, so decide to write some code to transmit TV to Kodi.
history #1(Gen.1 transmitter,around 2000-2005)
Its so long time from I had disconnected terrestrial tv cable from my display and connect into IPTV box. My first experience is Sony’s “Location Free TV( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LocationFree_Player )”. It’s proprietary product and limited in order to view programs via special software (and, it worked only on windows of cource !). I remember that my father had worked in Korea and I had told him to use this and he pleased to view Japanese TV in Korea. It’s one of my happy memory. At that time(and even now !), Japanese TV company was so much nervous about people transcode TV program into IP datagram and send to other location outside of his home. There was some reason to do such thing. There was a lot of tech-native and rogue young guys rip a lot of TV programs and movies and shared through P2P softwares(such as Winny, Share, and so on). That was difinitely a challenge to existing authorities, and people were afraid of their bothered behavior. Authorities tried to limit their challenge using every means, and finally nuked and wiped them practically. IPTV was also disappeared from the market in a form that involved collateral.
history #2(Gen.2, 2010-2014)
I had so tired about japanese closed product so much and switched almost all equipment to linux box including my home TV. Japanese homebrew hardware vendor Earthsoft( https://earthsoft.jp/ ) released PT1 which can receive and decode terrestrial and can be save as raw binary file into computer. It was landsliding phenomenon among tech savvies in Japan and tried to hack aboud. Currently japanese terrestrial broadcast is encrypted with MULTI2 protocol( https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/MULTI2 ) and cannot be decryted in simple way, but there is some decrypting software made by volunteer hacker with legal decrypting key(B-CAS card. This is sold with legal device.). (Note: There is a lot of discussion to decript terrestrial with legal key and homebrewed software) I won’t write detail, but purchased PT3(3rd gen Earthsoft’s terrestrial receiver) and connect them up into a linux box. I’ve sent decoded stream to gstreamer and forward to other linux box. I’ve finally succeed to view live TV at outside in adition inside of my home ! I’ve written transmitter and receiver using perl and it worked so good. Disclaimer: All of my terrestrial stream is decrypted using legal key and legal equipment.
history #3(Gen.3, 2014-2017)
Gstreamer is complete suite about media handling, but have some nervousness to treat transport stream. So gstreamer missed to catch media stream from trancoded terrestrial stream which includes some other information other than media stream itself. So, I’ve switched gstreamer into ffmpeg. I’ve modified my transmitter and receiver in order to fit ffmpeg. Ffmpeg did its job nicely. I’ve added additonal feature ffmpeg can transcode transpote stream into H.264 in case of narrow bandwith connection. This feature was so nice when I went business trip and want to view my subscribed TV channel.
Now(Gen.4, 2017-)
I’ve switched my linux box into Raspberry Pi 3 and Kodi. Kodi is sweat software to handle personal media content. Kodi also has smart controller works on android smartphone. Kodi also has feature to handle realtime TV stream and network video stream service such as YouTube in addition to saved media content. I’ve rewritten again my transmitter Kodi can receive stream in proper way. Kodi can receive realtime TV as HTTP live streaming(HLS) and I’ve hacked my transmitter to work as HLS server. My transmitter can reply my subscribed channels and realtime media stream along with HLS manner. Source code is here( https://github.com/mkiuchi/epgrec-kodi-backend ). Now, I can see my tv in my home and outside, I can have my smart remote controller, and low-powered receiver !
Conclusion
IPTV for terrestrial is niche. Almost all people view authorized network tv such as Hulu, NetFlix, dTV, and so on. Additinaly, people spent their times in SNSs and tons of CGMs. So demand for transport terrestrial into IPTV gonna be still niche, I think. But I’m happy, for now.