Stream DVB-S with VLC

[ronjohn]

I have an old USB Starbox that is not supported with Vista. I have an old XP laptop that is too slow to display HD feeds. Does anyone know if I can use VLC to stream the sat signal to my desktop and use software on the Vista desktop to watch the HD.(Mostly on Saturdays)

EDIT: I should have put a question mark at the end of the thread title.

Stream DVB-S with VLC ?

 

[brentb636]

Usually you would use the Old Starbox software to do the streaming, and use VLC as the client on your Desktop. I do that with TSreader as the streaming application and VLC as the client . I've never tried using VLC as a streaming source, but I suppose others have.

 

[qwert1515]

I have used DVBDream to stream to a VLC client.

(I have used VLC to stream my ATSC tuner and it was a pain to get VLC to control/tune the ATSC tuner)
I am not sure how you would get VLC to recognize the DVB-S tuner, if you can then you can use it to stream.

Or if you have a large hard drive then you can usually use the tuner software to record and then open the file as it is recording and stream it with VLC.

 

[tester239]

Streaming a single PID with VLC is incredibly easy. If you're looking to do something more advanced with VLC like having the streaming server (in this case, your old laptop) be able to change PIDs remotely, that's a different story. You can even use VLM to have it know know all the channels and just select one to stream to you on demand. This is much more complicated to do, but certainly possible. If you're streaming HD and wish to transcode the video/audio to save network bandwidth, you'll need a decently beefy computer to do that. SD stuff should stream without transcoding over a local network without issue.

From the commandline (in linux, it's somewhat similar in windows, but with gui magic!) you can easily stream a single PID:

vlc -vvv --program=108  dvb:// --dvb-adapter=0 --dvb-voltage=18 --dvb-srate=27684000 --dvb-frequency=1250000 --sout '#standard{access=http,mux=ts,dst=192.168.1.54:22222,select="program=108"}'

the dst=192.168.1.54 is the IP address of the streaming server, i.e. the box you run that command on. You can view the stream with vlc (or almost any other client) by using the url http://192.168.1.54:22222. In vlc for windows, you'll want to open a network stream, and select the HTTP option, and put in the URL for the streaming server.

Might want to look at this: Building a DVB streaming server - MetaWiki

Or just google 'vlc streaming' or 'vlc dvb streaming'

 

[ronjohn]

Sorry to bring this old thread back up but, with recent feeds being mostly 4:2:2, I decided to try this again.

Finally I was able to use a Ubuntu Virtual Machine with the Starbox drivers. I used VLC to transcode and stream the channels. I then openned VLC in Vista and am able to watch the video. VLC seems to default to 800kbs video transcoding which resulted in bad video. I increased the bit rate and everything looks good. I have to change transponders and channels in the virtual machine, but other than that it is working great.