Watch ATT UVerse Stream with VLC?

[Casper42]

I got ATT U-Verse service (its ATT's version of Verizon FIOS) a few weeks ago and after playing with it and talking to people online, it turns out that what they are doing is basically a very large scale video streaming system.

The CO (Central Office) in your city that services your phone gets a ton of extra equipment and processes the video like this:

You have a DVR or STB (Set Top Box) that can be connected via Ethernet back to their 2Wire Residential gateway. The RG supports IGMP v3 Multicast and apparently when you tell the STB you want to watch a certain channel, it sends a request to the RG and the 2Wire in turn sends that request back to the CO. The CO receives that request and then adds your house to the Multicast stream for that channel. When the RG starts receiving that feed it sends it to any STBs or DVRs in the house that it knows want it.

So rather than Cable and Satellite where you get every channel 30 times per second shot at your house and your TV / STB / DVR picks the one it wants, ATT is only sending you the channels you actively want to watch or record at the time you want them and they are doing it essentially over DSL.


One of the things I noticed is that when my wife is watching TV in the next room, the Switch in my office is getting hammered with packets that appear to be broadcast (Every port with link starts to blink). I installed WireShark (or Ethereal for you die hards) on my desktop and found that when this happens I am receiving a ton of UDP packets from a 75.x Source IP but sent to a Destination IP starting with 239. My understanding is Multicast streams use IPs above 224.


So I looked around on the internet and saw that VLC supports UDP in a few different formats.

I downloaded 0.8.6c and went into "Stream and Media Info \ Advanced information" and it was blank.
I clicked Open Stream and used UDP/RTP Multicast and plugged in the Multicast Destination IP (239.x) and the destination Port of all the UDP packets hitting my desktop.
Now at this point I get no video and no audio. BUT, when I went back into Stream and Media Info \ Advanced information it says the following:

Stream 0
- Codec: mpga
- Language: English
- Type: Audio
Stream 1
- Codec: mpga
- Language: Espanol
- Type: Audio
Stream 2
- Codec: h264
- Language:
- Type: Video



So my questions are this:

1) Does this mean that VLC was smart enough to pickup those 3 streams from the incoming UDP Packets?

2) Is there any way to get more details on the packets like if they are encrypted or something?

3) Overall, what can I do to jack into this UDP stream and watch the video?



Thanks in advance for any insight you can give me.

-Casper42

[Casper42]

PS: I noticed that the streaming features tables show that h.264 is a supported protocol over RTP (http://www.videolan.org/streaming-features.html)

Also, if it would help, I can do a WireShark capture of the beginning, middle or end (or some combo) of this traffic and put it somewhere where one of you experts can download it and take a closer look.

[Casper42]

Wow, no responses huh?

Does anyone know enough about this stuff to help me or point me in the right direction?

[bmfrosty]

I believe that U-Verse uses microsoft's IPTV solution - http://www.microsoft.com/tv/Products.mspx. You may want to see if they have any downloadable software and see what you can see from there. I'd do this myself, but I don't have the service..yet.

[bmfrosty]

More information:

U-Verse uses a Motorola VIP1200 set top box, which run's Microsoft's IPTV solution. I wonder if anyone has been able to pull the OS off of one of those to see how it works. Since it's microsoft, it might very well be a windows variant, and therefore might contain a set of common DLLs for most of it's functions with a few for hardware control. Has anyone done a stream capture from one of these while changing channels?

[tuanvu10]

I just got u-verse recently. Still no luck picking up stream on VLC

[boxcar32]

Casper42 or anybody else did any of you figure this out yet? And could you direct me to the software needed to find the IP and port of the streams?

[VLC_help]

Do you get some error messages to VLC log when you open the stream?

[boxcar32]

well i managed to get ip addresses and port info for the uverse streams using wireshark but when I input these addresses and ports via UDP it errors out, but will check the log today. Also pinging these addresses I get a good reply.

[thejipster]

I am very curious to find out if VLC can be used to tap into the multicast stream or even access the content stored in the DVR.

[joeman169]

The OS on all of the STBs is Windows CE/5.0.1400
That info is all available under your system info.
Its just a dinky version i think used more often on touchscreen business devices and laptops.
I am also working on this. I noticed that when i put the ip into VLC that is bombing my domain, I am getting packets into VLC and at one point i got a grey screen. But im not sure the codec used here or how exactly to do this. If i do find a way I, ill keep you posted.

[postalbunny]

Heads up... you can join the multicast but the h.264 encoded video is encrypted, havn't found a way to break the video out.

[jpauls104]

The video stream is in fact encrypted. In fact, it is decrypted in the motorola vip1200 (your uverse tvbox) via an onboard chip. The particular chip in my box is SMP8634LF, its a Sigma Designs Secure Media Processor.

[elbucho78]

if the stream is not encrypted and the encrytion is all on the Sigma Designs processor, could a decrypted stream be read by Snapstream or Windows media center?