[mythtv-users] Recording from an IPTV source

[Jan Ceuleers]

On 23/11/2022 04:12, Stephen Worthington wrote:
> Your basic problem with using the advice on that page is that your
> HDMI to IPTV capture devices do not do HTTP output.  Everything on
> that page is based around using curl to do HTTP connections, so it
> will not work at all for you.  Fortunately, MythTV does actually do
> RTP/RTSP UDP protocol - it was originally used for some older network
> tuners, which are still supported.  And now it is used for SAT>IP
> connections, which use a specific subset of RTP/RTSP.  So it may be
> possible to get MythTV to do the capture directly by just giving it a
> URL in its IPTV channels.

Thanks for your reply and for your constructive input.

> MPEG TS with H.264 video is fully supported by MythTV as that is the
> format used in many parts of the world for DVB-T(2) transmissions.  So
> there should be no need to use ffmpeg to convert it - if you capture
> the stream to disk as is it should just work.

I fear that it may not work because:

- the signal is not quite standards-compliant in ways that I can't
explain but, for example, prevent vlc from playing it as-is. The article
I link to below provides an ffmpeg incantation that enables me to
capture the stream, minimally transcode it and write it to disk, the
result of which is indeed playable by vlc.

- the stream is sent to an IP address of my choosing (so I can direct it
to the backend) but not to a port of my choosing. So the streams of
multiple such devices end up being sent to the same IP:port combination,
and I suspect that Myth won't be able to tell them apart (by source IP
address). Perhaps some iptables trickery could solve that, but this
remains to be seen.

> The big problem with IPTV channels is setting them up using a .m3u
> file.  The parts of that page that refer to .m3u creation may help
> with that.

I fundamentally don't understand why that should be needed in my use
case (and in fact also in yours): is it not the case that determining
which channel is sent in the stream is determined out-of-band (in my
case by sending IR signals to the STB), rather than by visiting some URL?

But if it is needed because MythTV's ability to ingest IPTV signals was
built with another use case in mind, then I suppose we'll have to jump
through those hoops, and I thank you for your help in this area.

> So exactly what HDMI to IPTV capture hardware do you have?  If it uses
> a compatible RTP/RTSP protocol, you should be able to just create
> rtsp:// URLs as I have done.

The devices I have are based on the LKV373A as described here:

https://gist.github.com/Juul/8adc297cf49675d858976f5d10fffc6e

Thanks, Jan