Please help setup VLC to distrbute live and VOD TV

[tted67]

We are installing VLC as a live and on demand media server for a small Private High School. Our company is donating all the equipment and labor for the install.

Question
Q1. Is their anything under the Licenses Agreement that would not allow VLC to be installed as described above?

Q2. Can we install VLC about (60) computer?

The IP TV system shall distribute (9) encoded CATV channels, (3) encoded local produced video streams and videos from a file. The CATV channels shall originate from the commercial TV providers cable system. Then the channels shall be put through (9) different demodulators (stand-alone TV tuners) one for each channel desired. The individual channels shall be encoded into a MPEG2 video stream using hardware encodes. The (3) locally produced channel shall originate from any LAN interface through the campus by students with a video cameras and MPEG2 hardware encoder. The files shall be video placed on a large hard drive. The hard drive shall be located on the same computer the VLC server is running on.

Q3. I am trying to make a play list for the video files. My crude attempt is creating a play list that starts playing the first video as soon as the play list opens. How can I create a play list for the video files? Or is there a better way to for all VLC computers to access the same play list?

Q4. At the server I have to open (1) VLC player for each live streaming channel. Is this the proper way to do this? Or is their a better way to multicast (9) live streams/

Please be aware I am scouring this forum looking for the answers to these questions so do not be upset if these questions have been asked before.

[assyrian47]

I can give a few tips

1. Get the latest version 0.8.5 and load it on the machine you want to designate as the server. This will be the VLC SERVER

2. Designate another machine as the HTTP and VLM interface to the VLC Server. This is where you will setup the various streams you want. It will take time. Test each type of stream you want to use.

3. DO NOT USE THE OLDER VLS application.

4. Do not use this VLC server to view any streams. This should be done from another client machine. You will get really confused using all the various streams that you gave identified.

5. On the 60 client machines, you want to be sure to have them all start up the same way. All configurations shoule be identical or you'll have problems maintaining them.

Hopefully this will get you started.

[tted67]

Thanks for your reply.

We are know installing the headend / server onto the schools network.

The Head end consists of:
(9) demodulators
(9) Mpeg 2 endoders
(1) HP Pro Curve 2626 switch
(1) PC running XP pro

CATV (broadband rf signal) signal in being feed into each demodualtor. Then the demodulator is picking out one channel and sending it to a Mpeg 2 encoder.

The Encoder is unicasting the video to the servers address 192.168.2.224 ports 50001-50009 at 5500kbps.

VLC is finding the videos and streaming them out RAW to IP adress 225.1.1.1 ports 5001-5009.

At this point do you know if this is a workable solution?

We can multicast in this manner across the same LAN but the school has (30) VLANS (subnets) and we need to beable to multicast across many of them. Is this possible?

The HP vender is comming out today to try to get the muticast cross his switches.

Also, for testing purposes we have the TTL set to 100. Is this a problem because we are not sure exsactly what number to set TTL to?

[tted67]

PIM is the protocol for rounting multicasts across diffrent VLANS.

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

With PIM you should be able to do it.
all you describe seems to works, AFAIK. We had a similar config.
Maybe you should not stream to different ports but to differents multicast IPs.
You should put the TTL to 5~10.
Use the SAP announces to help the comprehension.

[tted67]

We are using TTL 5 and we are saving the play list as an icon on the desktop. The saved play list has all the info except TTL. Any suggestions? For some reason the TTL is not saved when saving the play list.

Fixed the problem by setting the TTL in the preferences but the SAP announcement are not being delivered. Here is what the icon says if opened with note pad:

#EXTM3U
#EXTVLCOPT:sout=#duplicate{dst=std{access=udp,mux=ts,dst=225.1.1.1:5001,sap,group=Jesuit TV,name=Ch.1}}
udp://@192.168.2.224:50001

Any idea how to get the SAP through TTL or across VLANs?