May 23, 2013

1 min

Normally you connect to the N7 network tuner via HTTP protocol. That’s fine for a simple, single TV screen setup. If you want to watch television on multiple devices this won’t work simultaneous. So I started exploring the multicast streaming capabilities of the Anysee N7 network tuner. My first attempts were very discouraging, when I started the stream, my WIFI router (linksys WRT54GL) crashed immediately. Most of the time I tried to play the multicast stream with MPlayer but it needed a long time (> 30s) before it started playing at all. So after I bought a new WIFI router I tried it again with VLC. VLC seems to be the best Open Source multicast player out there at the moment; it can start playing a HD stream in less then a second with the setup I’ll describe below.

For best results you should isolate the N7 network from your normal LAN either by using a separate LAN or by using a intelligent switch that support VLAN’s; a multicast HD stream can consume up to 55 Mbit. At the end I settled for this setup, giving me 3 stand alones players that can tune to the stream in under 1 sec, and a media server to convert the stream to other formats that can be used in the rest of the internal LAN when needed. (iPad/iPhone/other VLC users):

I had some problems on windows when using DHCP for the second network card (the DHCP server did fill in a gateway by default, I couldn’t just leave it empty); Some additional routing was needed to allow internet access on the players. At last I just configured static IP’s for all the devices on the second LAN without a gateway/DNS so the players would uses LAN1 for internet access.