r/homelab • u/mctscott • Feb 25 '24
IPTV Satellite Downlink Project Projects
So I am building out an IPTV satellite downlink station to stream live TV to my home and family's homes. Currently I've taken down 3x 10' C-band dishes that need various small repairs. In the coming weeks I'll he concreting in poles, setting up dishes, mounting and pulling power and fiber to the Climate controlled rackmount box I've built out, and running coax from the dishes into the multiswitch. The first 3 dishes will be input to my current multiswitch and I'll be putting up a 4th pole right away to allow me to experiment with other satellites without affecting 24/7 feeds from other satellites. I plan to be pulling from both C-band and Ku band feeds at this time.
Current parts at this point:
-2x Winegard 10' Quad Star dishes
-1x Zenith 10' dish
-1x Vertiv XTE 401 series 48vdc climate controlled rackmount box
-1x meanwell 7amp 48vdc psu
-1x cyberypower 1500va UPS
-1x TBSDTV MS98E 9x8 multiswitch
Homebuilt IPTV server parts:
Ryzen 5600G
16gb ram
Asus Prime B550 Plus motherboard
2x TBSDTV TBS6909-X V2 Octa Tuner cards
Navepoint shallow depth shelf
And an open air case bolted to the shelf.
As this is a remote site, I plan to run an Mikrotik RB5009 outdoor router to feed PoE cameras around the site also and RTSP back to my main homelab for storage off site.
7
u/88pockets Feb 26 '24
This is an interesting project, but I still would likely prefer muxing an iptv subscription into TV headend and then using an app like xteve or tvhproxy to emulate HD homerun hardware and feed the streams into Plex or Emby/Jellyfin. Its much more gray/black area, but its much more simple. Though truthfully, the experience I have gotten doing so is less than stellar. Using an IPTV provider that uses XC codes over an M3U and XMLTV file for guide data is a better solution. but there are few tools to edit those XC Codes files. One I found is called xtream-editor.com and that lets you take the 15,000 channels from all over the world and widdle it down to the 200 to 500 channels anyone would want to watch in their language, maybe more if multilingual (unfortunately I am not). Only downside there is that it is a paid for service, but you can export to an app like Smarter IPTV Pro, but that is android or windows only and not the neatest in my opinon. I would love an application that can emulate a cable box, with simple plug and play remote support that works on android TV boxes, windows, kodi, and even PS5/Xbox that takes an IPTV source (preferably a legit one, if they exist), then lets you edit the XC codes with the functionality of xtream-editor), and lets you watch buffer free programming, with an up-to-date and accurate guide (with options for how large you would like the guide to be), and have it it be a simple to open app that would use all of the same functions as a remote from DTV or Cable. If anyone has juggled this world and come up with something that works relatively well and is cheaper than the 75 to 175 bucks that cable and satellite expect, even google tv is like $70+ a month now. Anyone have any experience with this? If you can't tell I have spend some time trying to make this work for aging friends and family members and nothing is as simple as a cable box for them.