Yes… Mesa Happy (think Jar-Jar from star wars…)

I just managed to setup my mythtv media pc with the new iprecorder functionality to record up to *5* streams of iptv receiving from our local fiber optic tv supplier (XMS). Time for a little party 🙂

Since a few months I have a fiber optic connection to my home, the so called Zeewolde op Glasvezel project. The fiber optic is brought all the way into the house and connected to a Genexis modem. This modem seems to have one fiber optic entering the case from the bottom. But this actually consist of two very tiny fibers. One fiber is for all digital data in _and_ out. This is your internet, digital tv, telephone. The second fiber is a one-way fiber with the 40 analogue tv channels and a few radio stations (don’t know how much). This brings me to the other ports of the modem. It has one coaxial output with the 40 analogue tv channels and radio stations. This can be used for any ordinary tv, video recorder or analogue tv-card in a pc. Because all data of the tv channels and radio stations are broadcasted over this coax cable, the coax cable can be splitted with special tv/radio splitters, so you can watch different channels on multiple devices at the same time. Back to the modem. The modem also has two rj11 connectors (t1 and t2) for analogue telephones. And there are four rj45 connectors (m1 til m4). The m1 connector provides an internet connection when connected to one pc or a router when you have multple pc’s behind the router. The m2 connector provides digital tv and must be connected to a settopbox. In this case a Amino Aminet 130m (with hdmi output). This settopbox is running Linux inside with a opera browser. The tv signal is requested through an ip-connection and broadcasted with multicast. More info over the how this works will be om my site. With the setup mentioned above, you can watch analogue tv on several tv’s. But with only one settopbox, you can only watch digital tv on one tv. It is possible to attach another settopbox, but the local supplier will only send you a non-hdtv settopbox as your second settopbox.

I use mythtv for about 6 years now. About 3 and a half years back (I think), I upgraded my mythbox with a Hauppaugt WinTV PVR-500 (dual tuner). This gave me the opportunity to record 2 shows at any time, while still using the tv to watch a third show. Although it’s long ago that I really watched something live (directly from tv or in mythtv), because we just record anything we want to see, and watch it, when it fits our time schedule 🙂 With the new fiber optic services, I can still record 2 shows at the same time through the analogue coax cable (and have a much better quality (less visual noise) compared to the tv signal from the local cable company UPC). But the settopbox has much more channels, around 160 channels (tv channels and radio stations). The aminet130m settopbox has a usb port. And some rumours on the internet say that it will be possible to attach an external usb drive to the aminet130m and have recording capabilities. But, this first has to be programmed into the firmware. This (I think) will not be available in the next months. besides that… I want my mythtv to do all the recording!

By doing a little traphic capturing between the settopbox and the modem, I managed to configure my linux pc with mythtv correctly, to watch the iptv streams on the media pc. Together with the iptvrecorder, which was added to mythtv somewhere in the last year, I am able to watch live TV. Then ramp it up a little, and finally had mythtv record 5 iptv streams (not hdtv) simultaneously. But I think there’s also a limit on the iptv supplier side, because my 6th stream was not working in mythtv. But 5 streams recorded at the same time should be sufficient enough 😎

More information about how I configured my linux pc and mythtv will be published on my site soon…