An Interesting and Very Cheap Network Streamer

[will]

So while researching network streamers that support HDMI w/5.1 audio (no luck so far) I found a YouTube video talking about a product called a "LKV373A HDMI Extender." You can find them on eBay for about $40 (just the sender, not the receiver).

The guy who made the video realized if you don't hook it directly into the receiver then it will stream an HDMI signal in h.264 with audio (I presume it is 2.0). As soon as he plugs in the device to his network he is able to access a UDP stream of the video from VLC - which makes me think it should work with OpenDCT.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SAvGylthpkU

Has anyone seen this before or have any thoughts on this? I'm considering replacing my HD-PVR 1212s and this could be a cheaper option than the HD-PVR 60.

[egeller]

Thanks for the heads-up. Viewed the video. Worth the time.

When I went to Unraid I replaced my HDPVR 1212 with the BM-3000 streaming device. The streamer certainly is a bit cheaper than the BM-3000.

I agree that it could work with OpenDCT. You would need all the tools he talks of, namely the Google drive site and the EXE there. I am not sure it would work out of the box, due to the zero-byte UDP packets the streamer produces.

If OpenDCT or SageTV would choke on the zero-byte UDP packets I would set a process on a Windows VM on my Unraid server. I would output the streamer to the VM, pick up the stream in VLC, and use VLC to output a network stream (not a physical file like he does in the video).

OpenDCT can process a VLC-produced network stream. I have already played around with that and got it to work. VLC can even do transcoding, but I do not think you'd need to bother. You could have OpenDCT do any required transcoding by specifying the FFmpegTransSageTVConsumerImpl consumer.

Other random thoughts include - I would not be inclined to bother with a firewall rule, but I would work to turn off multicasting.

Erv

[will]

I agree with everything you said.

I ordered one and will report back with how it works - it ships from China so I won't have it for a few weeks at least.

I'm not sure if I am going to use it anymore as a network recorder; I'm planning to use it as a streamer to an Android tablet running VLC. I want to output a HD300 in my basement to my kitchen tablet and then run an IR cable for the remote. The lag looks pretty manageable and I think that might work a lot better than the mini-client experience on the tablet.

[KryptoNyte]

Interesting. Nice find, Will.

[EnterNoEscape]

I bought something like this from Amazon and ended up returning it a while ago. It was a pain to deal with in Java because of the 0 length UDP packets. Java can't natively work with that, so you need to write some C++ to connect to a raw UDP socket. After getting something that worked roughly, I gave up because the picture quality was really bad and the audio was washed out. I had bought the sender and receiver just to be sure I wasn't missing anything and the expected configuration is just as bad as what I put together.

[MattHelm]

The newest version says they fixed the 0 byte UPD packet.

[will]

It looks like it does RTP streams as well now - so that should help with quality (I think) and keeping audio in sync.

https://blog.danman.eu/new-version-o...ender-lkv373a/

As for the quality:
"Bitrate of the stream is quite high, about 15Mbps, but unfortunately, it doesn’t stream in FullHD, but in strange resolution 1728×1080@30fps. If i lowered the resolution to 1280×720, I’ve got 60fps. Used codecs are H264 and mpga."

I'm looking forward to getting my LKV373A.

[KryptoNyte]

Will, how did this pan out?

[will]

Originally Posted by KryptoNyte

Will, how did this pan out?

Not well, I couldn't get the stream to work reliably. I spent about an hour playing with it, got it on my network, but VLC complained every time I tried to open the stream.

So I ended up sending it back to the eBay vendor which isn't easy because I had to mail it to China - still waiting on my refund.