Howto setup multicast streaming with the Anysee N7 network tuner

Posted by acidjunk on May 23, 2013

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):

multicast N7

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.

Settings on N7

multicast setup n7

Settings for VLC

just play the stream udp://@239.255.255.100:4567

With command line extension

cvlc udp://@239.255.255.100:4567

Settings for PS3 Media server

I just used a small conf file to tell PS3 mediaserver about the multicast stream. Create a WEB.conf in ~/.config/PMS/ with the following contents:

#Multicast stream is enabled
videostream.Web,TV=Multicast HD channel1,udp://@239.255.255.100:4567,http://www.renedohmen.nl/files/tv.jpg