DVB to WiFi

[Lawrenciumbc]

I am an Electronics Engineering student and wondered as a project idea if I could broadcast my incoming digital TV signal (from my satellite dish or aerial) over my WiFi network.

I just wondered what sort of things/topics I needed to look into to get started with it, e.g. how to transcode the signals? what sort of hardware i'm likely to need (aside from a router)? could I use a microcontroller or an FPGA? and ultimately, is it relatively achievable or is there a fundamental reason why nobody appears to be doing it?

I am assuming that this would only be possible with free to air channels as subscription channels such as Sky are probably encrypted somehow and that I would probably need some kind of software interface for computers/devices to play the transcoded signal back.

I'm not sure yet how ambitious this is and so any guidance from anyone who has attempted this or similar would be much appreciated.

 

[Gryd3]

I am an Electronics Engineering student and wondered as a project idea if I could broadcast my incoming digital TV signal (from my satellite dish or aerial) over my WiFi network.

I just wondered what sort of things/topics I needed to look into to get started with it, e.g. how to transcode the signals? what sort of hardware i'm likely to need (aside from a router)? could I use a microcontroller or an FPGA? and ultimately, is it relatively achievable or is there a fundamental reason why nobody appears to be doing it?

I am assuming that this would only be possible with free to air channels as subscription channels such as Sky are probably encrypted somehow and that I would probably need some kind of software interface for computers/devices to play the transcoded signal back.

I'm not sure yet how ambitious this is and so any guidance from anyone who has attempted this or similar would be much appreciated.

You will most likely need to work with an SDR and/or FPGA ...
What you want to do is not 'complicated' when it comes to the actual conversion... but the high bandwidth aspect of it renders most micro-controllers unfit for this task. You might get lucky with a faster processor... but I'm not too certain.
You also run into the issue of *what* exactly you will be transcoding. Will you be tuning this device to a specific channel, then it will forward that channel to another device to be viewed, or were you wanting to capture multiple channels at the same time? This gets very complicated because you cannot capture all of them at the same time without multiple copies of the hardware working on their own channel.

 

[dorke]

I am an Electronics Engineering student and wondered as a project idea if I could broadcast my incoming digital TV signal (from my satellite dish or aerial) over my WiFi network.

I just wondered what sort of things/topics I needed to look into to get started with it, e.g. how to transcode the signals? what sort of hardware i'm likely to need (aside from a router)? could I use a microcontroller or an FPGA? and ultimately, is it relatively achievable or is there a fundamental reason why nobody appears to be doing it?

I am assuming that this would only be possible with free to air channels as subscription channels such as Sky are probably encrypted somehow and that I would probably need some kind of software interface for computers/devices to play the transcoded signal back.

I'm not sure yet how ambitious this is and so any guidance from anyone who has attempted this or similar would be much appreciated.

Why do you think It isn't done?
A wifi video streamer does it,like the Slingbox M1.

I think it may be too complicated as a school project.

 

[Lawrenciumbc]

Ok, thanks for your thoughts, i had heard of the Slingbox a few years ago but i wasn't aware that it actually performed this function, I thought it was more about streaming locally stored media. I will look into it though.

It's not for a school project, it's extending a masters project I am working on and I just wanted to get a starting point for research and an idea of how challenging it might be to go down that route.

My guess was that a solution would have to be able to capture the incoming signal, re-encode it (to a h.264 mp4 or something) and then send it via a streaming protocol (like rtmp or dlna??) over the network. I would then need some kind of software solution which can act as the viewing client for the receiving mobile devices or computers which is another layer to it. Lastly, to be able to change channels it would probably need something that can be controlled before the re-encoding stage which ideally would have to be selectable by the receiving device, but then it would be restricted to 1 channel at a time.