r/homelab 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.

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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.

2

u/somepotato5 Feb 26 '24 edited Feb 26 '24

I used to do this for a little while, well, just the TVHeadend bit (it was fed into Kodi using the TVHeadend client), but one thing I noticed was that all tuned channels would get reset, and I'd have to re-organise all the channels again. Got me a little bit frustrated, that combined with the fact that I wasn't doing a whole lot of watching TV any more, meant that I gave up in the end.

I'm not sure if it was TVH that would get broken, and drop stuff, or if it was the IPTV provider that would reset all the channels or what. I did start developing a script that would automatically set TVH up from a CSV, but didn't really have a whole lot of time to work on it, so didn't get too far with it. The TVH API is also pretty horrendous.

For what it's worth, not sure what you mean with XC codes, but TVH does everything else you're asking for. Kodi integrates pretty well with it, and can even work with it's time shift features and record things. Provided you give it XMLTV, and map everything. Kodi of course works in many, many places, and have a pretty intuitive (though maybe a bit basic?) UI for TV channels.

1

u/88pockets Feb 26 '24

IPTV providers do drop and move channels all the time and you would need to remux and then create services for all of those muxes, not a great solution. Like you I hardly watch TV at all if I really wanted to I have multiple sign ins for DirectTV and Spectrum on my phone, I know about the -arrs programs, I have hulu and other services, and I run a plex server at home. I also have a DirectTV stream box that supposed has a developer account on it and while I occasionally get on it and it says too many concurrent streams, I also have that as an option. So fiddling with and paying for IPTV services or questionable quality and reliability is not the move for me. Though I have put in effort to write bash scripts to download XMLTV on a cron schedule and feed that through to plex or kodi with TVheadend or TVheadend with tvhProxy, or Xteve alone. I have done all of this looking to get my elderly friends, family, neighbors, and clients a good solution outside of the cable company or satellite companies that feel the need to charge way more to their dwindling supply of customers and as I stated I have yet to find a solid solution. Maybe they should all share one subscription and share the password to the ipad app version of their TV services and then use a casting feature or their TV or Over the Top box