How To Set Up Your Own

Home/Office IPTV-VoD System

By Alexander Cameron, Managing Director, Digital TX Ltd.

There’s a secret many people in the IPTV/VoD industry don’t want

you to know. Setting up an IPTV network is actually incredibly easy. In
fact, almost anyone can do it. But if you knew that, you’d build your
own and no-one would make any money by selling you proprietary
products with huge mark-ups.

IPTV networks are basically intranets, only the web browser isn’t on a
PC, it is on a set-top box. If you’ve set up an intranet or public
website, you can set up your own IPTV network and do what you want
with it. You don’t need massive and expensive servers, specialised
set-top boxes or overly large development teams working with
complex software. With the right hardware and software, it should
take you less than a few hours.

But why would you want to build your own?

Maybe you could, and/or want to:

Create an internal TV system for training, advertising or

information display;

Create an IPTV showcase for your clients so they can
visualise opportunities;

Evaluate current IPTV technology without massive expense;

Convert your existing client websites and applications to IPTV
versions;

Cross-train your web developers so they have IPTV skills;

Simulate a real IPTV network to test applications and ideas;

Put your products and services on an IPTV demo platform;

Build a great new idea or application that would work well on
IPTV;

Integrate your current web-based systems into an IPTV
environment (e.g. VoIP)
This is what we’re building will eventually look like:

Doesn’t look too difficult does it? Let’s get started.

What you’ll need:

 A TV
 An IP set-top box
 A multicast-capable router
 A web server
 A video server
 2 x PLC Adaptors
 Sample video material

In this guide, we’re going to be cheap and cheerful, using free open
source software (FOSS) where we can. We’ll also be adhering to
open standards wherever possible. Our HTML screens and menus
will be housed on an Apache web server running PHP, Perl, Python &
MySQL, and our video will be encoded in MPEG-4 H.264 AVC,
packaged in a simple MPEG-2 transport stream. We’ll stream out our
video with VLC and Helix Server.
Naturally you can exchange any of those for something else that does
the same thing, for example, WM9/IIS/.Net/SQL Server instead of
MPEG-4/Apache/PHP/MySQL.

1. Finding a new home for the kit

Luckily, your brand new shiny IPTV system won’t need much space at
all. The 2 PCs (web server and video server) can be hidden away
under a desk, kept in a server room or tucked away under the stairs
somewhere. Using PLC adaptors means you don’t need cabling
dangling around. What you will need is a space for demonstrating it
on a TV. That could be on a desk, in reception or in a corner of the
office with a couch.

2. Choosing the right set-top box

The most critical decision in setting up your system is what IP set-top
box you will be using, as all of them run different software and have
different capabilities. All of them connect to the TV using a standard
scart cable or RCA sockets, and display PAL/NTSC video at standard
resolution. It’s preferable if they have a web-based control panel, but
many have proprietary configuration screens or use simple telnet.
Firmware upgrades are best served with a remote TFTP server, such
as that provided by vendors like SolarWinds.

The most popular choice of software is an embedded web browser,

which for all intents and purposes does the same thing as a PC web
browser like IE, Firefox, Opera or Safari. The developer interface
tends to be a mark-up language, usually HTML/Javascript. The main
embedded client software programs in use on IP set-top boxes today
are Fresco/Galio (from Ant Plc), Opera, Escape/Evo (from Espial) and
Myrio (based on Espial). You can think of them of little web browser
units.

There are a lot of OEM vendors of IP set-top boxes to choose from all
across the world. Some examples include Complete Media Systems,
Amino, Kreatel (now Motorola), Vidanti, Tilgin (formely i3 Micro), ADB
Global and Netgem. Most are open to the idea of directly selling 1-10
units at a time, although in many instances it is better to go through a
central distributor like Garland Partners. The cost varies, but you
should be paying in the range of £100-250 GBP for each set-top box,
including a remote control and/or keyboard.

In this guide, we will be using the CMS 1080 (from Complete Media
Systems), running Ant Galio 2.0. The box itself supports video
delivered in H.264 AVC or Windows Media. We will be using the
former.

3. Setting up the network

IPTV runs over an IP network, which means it will work over your
existing home or office Ethernet network. You’ll probably already have
a router or switch that your desktop PCs are plugged into, although it
will be best to create a new, separate network for your TV as the
traffic load is much higher than a normal data network designed for
internet and/or LAN connectivity.

You can use any router or switch at all, as long as it supports

multicast. Any £50-200 product from the high street or online retailer
will do. Check the side of the packaging or the manufacturer’s
documentation to see if the product you choose supports multicast
natively (IGMP etc). Normal 100Mbit Ethernet is fine, although use
Gigabit Ethernet if at all possible.

If you’re running all the screens and video from one server (for
example, a portable laptop demo), you can even just use a simple
crossover cable. Don’t try and run video over a wireless connection,
no matter how good the reception is. HTML screens and menus will
work fine, but processor-hungry compressed video is another story.

An IP set-top box is just another network client device. When it is

connected to the IP network, it is assigned an IP address by DHCP
just as a desktop PC would be (this can also be static). If your router
doesn’t act as a DHCP server, you don’t have a network gateway or
are experiencing problems with a crossover cable, simply download
and install a free DHCP server from the internet onto your web server
PC.

Your PLC (powerline communication) adaptors create an Ethernet

network over existing electricity cabling, which avoids the need to
have wiring everywhere when you can’t use wireless. They generally
come in pairs, and cost £100-200 from the high street, your ISP or
online retailers. The first should be plugged into an AC plug near the
router, and the second should be plugged in next to the set-top box.
Both then have Ethernet sockets which you plug normal cat-5 cable
into.

4. Streaming live broadcast video

The first thing to simulate on your IPTV system is live TV that can be
tuned into, and this can be done in two ways. The first is easy, the
second is either painful or expensive. Live broadcast IPTV needs to
be multicasted 24-7 over the IP network, as unicast is too inefficient.
We will be streaming live TV from our video server.

For each channel, we need to broadcast a 5 minute looping pre-

captured video clip to a multicast IP address. For this, we can use the
free VLC player, or the industry standard WinSend, created by
Pixstream. The clip itself ideally needs to be previously encoded in
MPEG-4 H.264 AVC, and formatted into an MPEG-2 transport stream.
However, VLC being the Swiss army knife it is means we can convert
open virtually any video file and encode it on the fly as we are
broadcasting. Open your video file, and use the advanced options in
VLC to stream the output onto the network as UDP, using a multicast
address such as 235.5.5.5 to a random port (such as 10201).
You can test if the stream is being correctly outputted by opening the
same network stream with another copy of VLC on another computer
on the network. Do this for as many channels as you require. Once
they are broadcasting, the set-top box will be able to tune into the
multicast stream just as VLC does.

The more advanced way to provide live broadcast TV (such as

Freeview) over an IP network is to convert MPEG-2 video received
from a DVB receiver (a TV tuner card, for example those made by
Hauppage) into multicast format, which is known as IP encapsulation.
The painful way is to code your own encapsulation program using the
vendor’s SDK, and the expensive way is to buy industrial hardware
that does it for you (for example, Exterity, Anevia etc).

5. Preparing VoD content

Making DVD quality video across your network is split into two
separate parts – getting the video files into the right format, and
secondly, setting them up to stream from a video server. The bad
news is that there isn’t a free or open source VoD server that you can
use to exactly simulate what would happen in a commercial service.

Your video material will need to be pre-encoded in the same way the
live multicast video is. Software encoders from vendors like Elecard,
MainConcept Cyberlink and Nero will easily compress video from
most formats (MPG, AVI, MOV etc) into MPEG 4 H.264 AVC, but they
will additionally need to be encapsulated in an MPEG-2 transport
stream for delivery over the network. The free open-source Media
Coder program produces excellent results.

Video is very temperamental and requires state control, unlike typical

web protocols such as HTTP. RTP (real-time protocol) and RTSP
(real-time streaming protocol) were designed to provide VCR-like
controls for IP networks, and most, if not all commercial VoD servers
use these technologies for delivering quality-assured video. A lot of
set-top box manufacturers have adapted their hardware to be able to
simulate VCR-like features using HTTP so video can be streamed
directly from a web server like Apache. We will use a combination of
both to stream files ending in .mpg.

The main choices for serving video on-demand over our IPTV network
are the open-source Helix Server and Darwin Streaming Server, both
of which come in Windows flavour, but can also run on Linux. We also
have a trial of the Elecard RTSP server that can also be run on either
OS. If your own network is set up to use Windows Media, you can
happily and easily unicast and/or multicast video from a Windows
Server PC running the free Windows Media Server.

Once the video files have been pre-encoded, they need to be placed
in the directory on the video server that has been allocated as the
storage folder, as well as mirrored in the Apache web directory
allocated on the web server. Almost all the RTSP servers have a web-
based configuration panel and will need to index/identify each file for
streaming. Once these are in place, test the RTSP capacity of the
server by opening a network stream to them in VLC, and once any
problems are corrected, your IP set-top box will play them using its in-
built API.

6. Creating screens and menus

Menus for the TV screen are created in HTML, CSS and Javascript,
just as normal web pages are, using the same standard tools
(Dreamweaver, Photoshop etc). The software on the device is an
ordinary web browser like IE, Firefox, Opera or Safari, and overlays
the web pages you create on the screen through the scart cable
(OSD). Most have full support for open standards and current
technologies such as RSS and AJAX. Some also include the
Macromedia Flash 6 player. It’s a case of write, and then refresh the
browser screen, just like normal web development.

When the IP set-top box starts up and gains an IP address via DHCP,
it will also request a “starting” URL of a web page from a web server,
in the same way a PC web browser (e.g. IE, Firefox) will request a
default home page. Producing screens for IPTV is almost the same as
building an intranet site, with the only difference being that the HTML
and Javascript contains set-top box-specific code that only the set-top
box understands and executes (e.g. for tuning into multicast streams
or issuing RTSP commands).

Each set-top box’s hardware is different, so there is a different

Javascript API for each device model that must be obtained from the
manufacturer. Video can be displayed and scaled as any kind of
image on the page, and manipulated by normal Javascript functions.
The set-IP will not come with any software applications pre-installed
(or even commands on the remote to go back or refresh the screen),
so the very first application you need to create is an electronic
programme guide (EPG) to navigate around your service and watch
video streams.

When mocking up screens in Photoshop, it is important to know that a

standard definition PAL TV screen is 720 pixels wide by 576 pixels
wide, before the so-called “safe area” is taken into account. Colour is
considerably more primitive and much more sensitive to variance than
on a desktop browser. The only input device available is a remote
control with key codes similar to a desktop keyboard.

Using HTML for menu and screen displays means content can be
dynamically generated using a server-side process just like any web
page. The TV screen displays whatever you send it, meaning you can
integrate any type of web-based system into your new IPTV network,
such as the Asterisk VoIP PBX, the Jabber IM server, multiplayer
game servers, your own web application or an external XML API.
7. Showtime!
Once you have your network set up, its up to you to get creating
menus and screens, and adding video content onto your video server
that can be played back through the TV. The production procedure is
exactly the same as it is for a website, only with TV-specific
functionality and usability issues. Over a few days or weeks, you
suddenly have an entire TV network to yourself that you can do
anything to, just as when you have your own website that you can do
anything with.

Once you’re happy with what you’ve put together, its time to sit down
the boss, colleague, wife, girlfriend, boyfriend or fellow interested nerd
and beam with pride as you press buttons on that remote and surf
around.

Digital TX is now offering a great value one-day workshop course

on IPTV and Video On-Demand (VoD) specifically for web and
media professionals. It can help you get up to speed on the latest
technologies, content deals, operators and applications across the
world, and offer immense value in identifying both new opportunities
and threats for your business and personal career.

If you would like more information, call Alex on 07986 37317, email
iptvworkshop@digitaltx.tv or visit www.iptvworkshop.co.uk. Readers
who quote this publication as their source will receive a 10% discount
on the course fees.

About Digital TX Limited

Formed in early 2004, privately owned and based in London (UK),
Digital TX Limited is IPTV/VoD consultants for interactive digital
television and broadband media. Some of the keywords you might
associate with us are IPTV, Video On-Demand, Triple Play,
Broadband Entertainment, Video Over IP, Interactive TV, Network
Video Gaming and Telco TV.

http://www.iptvworkshop.co.uk