BBC & ITV (UK) Multicast Streams

[Diginerd]

So, I have a dream, and I have a degree of networking skill (I run a large chunk of a multinational network for a living) and I've come accross something that could make my life over here in the USA wonderful (I'm an expat Brit).

http://www.bbc.co.uk/multicast

and

http://support.bbc.co.uk/multicast/streams.html

If there was a way to engineer this into Sage life would be great.

At present it only supports certain UK ISPs who are multicast enabled, which at first sight represents a significant barrier. Fortunately due to technology produced by those clever people at Cisco it's possible to tunnel these streams pretty easily without requiring the interconnecting ISPs to support multicast.

That means I can pipe the stream to myself or a developer pretty easilty. The next step is to create a way of getting Real, or Windows Media or H264/AAC into sage as a tuner object (Thinking along the lines of some form of network encoder a la HD via firewire project). EPG should be pretty easily based on the UK XML stuff.

So, I have the local UK ISP, I can get the stream elsewhere. Who's up for a challenge? Failing that if there is anyone in the UK on one o the blessed ISPs who can play directly I'd be very interested if you were to start collaborating on this.

Any takers?

[Alfiegerner]

Originally Posted by Diginerd

Fortunately due to technology produced by those clever people at Cisco it's possible to tunnel these streams pretty easily without requiring the interconnecting ISPs to support multicast.

hi m8, I'm very interested in this. I'm in the uk but unfortunately my ISP does not currently support multicast. How would I go about circumventing the need for this?

[ben_gb]

Originally Posted by Diginerd

At present it only supports certain UK ISPs who are multicast enabled, which at first sight represents a significant barrier. Fortunately due to technology produced by those clever people at Cisco it's possible to tunnel these streams pretty easily without requiring the interconnecting ISPs to support multicast.

That means I can pipe the stream to myself or a developer pretty easilty.

Um...wouldn't this mean that you would have to have a supported broadband line with router on the end setup in the UK in order to receive the stream before tunnelling it back out to yourself in the US?

If this is how you're planning to set this up, the the problem you'll hit is that most DSL lines in the UK have an upstream that is lower (usually 256k) than the 512k minimum specified in the BBC's technical requirements.

If you are going to have some hardware in the UK anyway, then you could do what I do, which is to have a Sage server setup in the UK with a DVB-T card, then use the placeshifter to setup recordings and to view whatever you've recorded, or for higher quality, convert the mpgs to DIVX (to reduce the size) and FTP the files over to the US. Doing it this way also gets around the problem of having to watch the multicast streams live.

Ben

[Diginerd]

Ahh but I cheat.. ;-)

One of the ISPs also offers this service via an E1, which a buddy of mine has, since 90% of what I am after is out of UK business hours should pose no issue.

You're right though, I have a 2600 parked up on his network and have built a GRE tunnel back to me..

The network I run is for an financial Software company, and multicast streams are our bread and butter (Think realtime stock market prices). Tunneling them over semi decent bandwidth is pretty effective