Television

Regular Movistar TV channels travel over Multicast/UDP, but everything you ask for yourself (a movie from the video store, rewinding what is currently on, a cloud recording) travels over Unicast, and that is where a home-made Linux router chokes. In this post I explain how that traffic works today, measured with the TV switched on, and what you need to put on the router to make it play. There is a surprise: not everything uses RTSP anymore. More than a decade ago I wrote Video on Demand for Movistar, the first time I wrestled with this on my Linux router. Recently I felt like checking whether igmpproxy and the kernel RTSP helper were still needed, I took another look at the whole thing, and this post is the result. Yes, I was bored and decided to do an academic study. …

Proof of concept to extend my home network to a remote site through the internet, from where I could consume Movistar’s IPTV services. I used a pair of Raspberry Pi 2s, connected to each other by a pair of IPSec tunnels. This post is related to Linux Router for Movistar and video on demand with Fullcone NAT on Linux. …

The IPTV video streams used by Movistar come in two types: regular channels (Multicast/UDP) and video on demand (Unicast/UDP). In this post I describe what needs to be done on the Linux router for Movistar to make “Video on Demand” work. They use the RTSP protocol which requires our router to support Full Cone NAT. The set-top boxes request videos via RTSP from their control server, but the video is sent from a different server with an unknown IP, so if we do nothing the video traffic will be dropped. Let’s see how to solve this. …