setting up IPTV on OpenSuse 12.3

English Network/Internet
#1

There are a few posts on configuring network for receiving IPTV on this forum, but most of them have zero replies, and a solution did not come up yet. So I decided to give it a try again. After all, it surely must be possible…

The hardware setup in my case is as follows:

  • the settop box (STB) is an Amino M540
  • it is connected to a Genexis modem, which has an plain internet output, and an IPTV-dedicated output.
  • between the STB and the modem I placed a switch, and connected a second ethernet card on the pc to it (besides of course the STB)

The trick is to pretend to be an Amino STB, get an ip-adres in the range of the STB, and then fetch the TV-signal from the stream that is presented through the IPTV-output of the modem.

The (Dutch) site tweakers.net has a recipe

http://gathering.tweakers.net/forum/list_messages/1416373///iptv

to get that done, but it has to be changed at some points to be effective in opensuse; both the code, and the location of the files differ from what is suggested at tweakers.

What the changes are, and how to implement it, is the question I’ d like to pose here.

This recipe involves three basic steps (the code is straight from Tweakers, as are the places/files where that code should be placed):

======================================================================

Step 1 - spoof the mac adress of the ethernet card to be one in the range of all Amino STB’,s:

Change /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth1

# nVidia Corporation MCP55 Ethernet
DEVICE=eth1
BOOTPROTO=dhcp
HWADDR=00:1f:c6:xx:xx:xx
MACADDR=00:02:02:xx:xx:xx
ONBOOT=yes
NM_CONTROLLED=no
TYPE=Ethernet
IPV6INIT=no

Step 2 - Change the DHCP-request:

Alter /etc/dhclient-eth1.conf:

request subnet-mask, time-offset, routers, domain-name-servers, host-name, domain-name,
   root-path, default-ip-ttl, broadcast-address, perform-mask-discovery, router-discovery,
   static-routes, nis-domain, nis-servers, ntp-servers, vendor-encapsulated-options;
send dhcp-max-message-size 548;
send vendor-encapsulated-options 03:09:61:6d:69:6e:65:74:31:33:30:04:05:66:69:73:79:73;
send vendor-class-identifier "Aminoaminet130fisys";
send dhcp-client-identifier 01:00:02:02:xx:xx:xx;
supersede domain-name-servers 208.67.222.222, 208.67.220.220;
supersede static-routes 82.139.121.0 10.252.160.1;

Step 3 - Alter the routing:

Add these lines to /etc/sysconfig/route-eth1:

ADDRESS0=224.0.0.0
NETMASK0=240.0.0.0

==============================================================================

This should be all to get an IP-address from the router in the amino-range, and have an IPTV-stream from the modem.

But how to implement that in opensuse?

I hope someone knows how to do it, and is willing to share his of her knowledge here. After all, this should be possible on opensuse too, isn’ t it?!

#2

IPTV is an interesting enough topic I can spend a little of my extra time looking for any special required configurations, but skimming your post I don’t recognize anything particularly unique. All the settings look very TCP/IP generic to me, the only benefit I can think of is that you may be pointing to DNS that might respond better and/or faster for resolving names specific to the Services you wish to watch. In fact, when you start messing with network masking, you might be doing plenty of harm because the recommended settings wouldn’t likely have anything to do with your own Internet connection.

An FYI,
The following article suggests that you can easily configure VLC to connect to an IPTV stream, so would suggest that no special system level configs like networking is needed
How to watch IPTV with VLC

Of course, that looks like a client-side solution only.
If you’re looking to implement a Media Server, I would guess whatever software you choose will have its own IPTV-specific instructions.

HTH,
TSU