malakudi

Hello everyone, I've been away from this forum for quite a while but I am happy to be back.

The last weeks I have been using sat>ip support in OpenPLI to receive signals from around the world (WAN access). Server used is the minisatip open source.

There are various issues trying to use such setup. Some of them can be fixed and I expect to send required patches in the next days or weeks. But some issues needs improvements in the enigma2 core.

- As it is, you can only "discover" LAN broadcasted SAT>IP servers from the enigma2 menu system. You are not allowed to enter the connection details yourself (unless you manually edit vtuner.conf). I am planning to fix this.

- While satipclient has been updated to understand the "tcpdata:1" option to enable TCP RTSP access (which really helps WAN setups), the enigma2 plugin does not. I am planning to fix this as well.

- satipclient has a fixed port for RTSP (554) and it is not configurable. I am planning to add a "port:XXX" option to also support different RTSP port for SAT>IP server

- DVB-T2 is not supported from satipclient, because it does not export "FE_CAN_2G_MODULATION" capability for the vtuner. This can be easily fixed.

Those are kind of easy fixes and I will send patches soon. More difficult issues include the following:

- You cannot have two (or more) DVB-T SAT>IP tuners from different areas (probably same applies to DVB-C but haven't tested it). For example I have one local SAT>IP DVB-T server for my local DVB-T channels and I also have another DVB-T SAT>IP server for the DVB-T channels in UK. As soon as I have both enabled, whenever I tune a DVB-T local channel, it tries to tune the UK server and fails. It never tries the second tuner, unless I setup a PiP or recording etc. I guess this needs a support inside enigma2, maybe to give IDs to DVB-T tuners and this tuner ID should follow the service scanned, in order to only tune to this ID. Something like "satellite position" for DVB-T.

- You can have a SAT>IP server that can have both DVB-T and DVB-S. But satipclient does not allow to have a "hybrid" tuner. Don't know if this is possible with vtuner, but since hybrid tuners are supported in enigma2 (C/T or even S/C/T) I think we could configure this.

- You can have SAT>IP server with 2 or 4 or 8 tuners (or more) but you can only use one in enigma2 (unless you setup a second connection to same server for a 2nd vtuner). I don't know if this can be fixed/improved somehow since the concept of one tuner = one frontend in enigma2 is very low level.

- Since most STBs have a limited amount of vtuners and satipclient does the assignment statically outside of enigma2, in order to add support for more SAT>IP server sessions maybe we need "on-demand" assignment of servers to vtuners. But this to work has to be managed inside enigma2 code.

In the era of fast internet, sharing DVB-T/DVB-C or DVB-S tuners over WAN with a friend is a great feature.

Waiting for your thoughts on this.