7 hours without sleep.. 3 hours sniffing and analyzing packets in wireshark.. 4 hours acquiring the software, setting up the proper codecs and preparing an IPTV content list from the wireshark dumps.. and finally..

REALM FIRST !



Managed to get Unifi's IPTV to stream over any network (wired/wireless) into any PC on my home network ! Yeah ! No more shitty set top box !

I'll post a guide in a bit however this method doesn't work with all channels. As dongster said, there is DRM (or rather scrambling) employed. So it can't be used to replace your STB but its good for streaming HD channels.

Channel list : http://athena.my/imagehost/chanlist.txt

I extracted that by sniffing the STB as it requested an IP from the IPTV service DHCP servers and set itself up. It contains the channel names, properties (encryption/HD/PIP stream/channel bandwidth/etc.) and multicast information to connect to the stream. TM uses UDP multicast for streaming open channels along with RTSP which enables them to provide services such as VOD (RTSP sends account information and time duration for stuff you stream). I've stripped out my account information from the RTSP requests in this file though.



As you can see, I chose Luxe.TV HD for a few reasons. I like it because its HD (IsHDChannel=1). Streams at 8000kbps (ChanBandwith=8000) and has no DRM/scrambling employed (ChanEncrypt=0). I'm assuming they don't use encryption on HD channels (8000kbps+) because the STB can't handle it. Standard channels range between 2000-2048kbps and are all encrypted.

The video quality was much better than using the STB though. Hopefully they won't encrypt the other HD channels as they add them to the IPTV network.

---

UPDATE : Picture in Picture stream is not encrypted!

The PIP stream for all channels is not encrypted. The quality isn't as good as the real channel but those channels are SD anyway. It streams at nearly 1mbps.



The best part is you can just stream it directly in VLC player rofl

This post has been edited by rizvanrp: Apr 9 2010, 04:07 PM

Yo dawg, I herd you like picture in picture, so I put a picture in your picture so you can picture while you picture



Streaming 9 channels at once.. this is why your PC > STB any day lol

Also, its confirmed that IPTV is capped at 8mbps (or around 1.10MB/s). I did this test by watching multiple streams till the bandwidth maxed out and the picture started lagging. Network graph topped out at 1.10MB/s down. I'm still unsure about upload speed at the moment but if its capped the same way as the Internet VLAN, it should be 8mbps up/down - unmetered.

This post has been edited by rizvanrp: Apr 9 2010, 04:28 PM

Oh okay didn't notice that. There's no label marking it as an ON/OFF button and the original DIR-615 firmware has a Wireless ON/OFF feature.

Packages have 5mbps/10mbps/20mbps upload speed. Streamyx lags when you use PPStream because it basically saturates the uplink which is only 384kbps-512kbps. So far on my VIP20 I've been able to download at 2.0MB/s and still play online games without any lag.

Probably but it has to support VLAN tagging.. this means custom firmware like dd-wrt.

MAC address and serial number is recorded for every device, the Fiberhome modem, Dlink router and STB.

Dir-615 revision G1 but you wont find any reviews on it because its custom built for TM. This revision has a totally different chipset inside and is smaller than the others too.

Cheap hardware chipset with custom firmware for VLAN support. It's needed to separate the Internet and IPTV network. They're also refusing to give out the user/pass combination for the SSH and telnet login for the router.

This post has been edited by rizvanrp: Apr 10 2010, 05:12 PM

If you're talking about the practice of giving users a custom DLink router, yea it is. Based on the DD-WRT forums, all the DIR-615 revisions after C1 are ISP given boxes that perform poorly -- hence the need to put DD-WRT on it. What's not a normal practice is locking the users out of that hardware or forcing them to use their IPTV set top box though.

A lot of people have started using this already.. just scroll back a few pages on this thread.

I can't tell you for sure that it will work because I currently don't have a dd-wrt router to mess around with. However, someone else confirmed that as long as you have the VLAN ID (500) it should work as he managed to get it working on his own hardware. I've probed, retrieved and confirmed the VLAN IDs myself and it appears he was correct. Having dd-wrt firmware means having full control over the router so I'm pretty sure there's a 99% chance it will work as long as you know what you're doing

In any case, they will provide you with a DIR-615 router so you could probably post some screenshots here later and we'll try to help you get it up and running on your WRT310N.

I opened up my DIR-615 yesterday to take a look at the chips. The CPU was covered with some metal shielding (which I did not want to remove) but the RAM and Flash memory chips were visible. According to Google, the Linksys WRT310N is (300mhz/32MB RAM/4MB flash) and the DIR-615 is (400mhz/32MB RAM/4MB flash). However, since I didn't open the metal shielding I can only confirm the TM router (DIR-615 rev G1) has 32MB RAM/4MB flash.. it has 2x Winbond SDRAM chips. I don't know what processor it's using.

Their performance would be about the same however the Linksys definitely has the upper hand because :

1) It can run DD-WRT whereas the DIR-615 G1 cannot
2) The DIR-615 is completely locked down and lacking many features, DD-WRT is not
3) Linksys WRT310N has Gigabit ethernet ports while the DIR-615 is 10/100mbps, meaning if you have a wired fileserver the wireless would still peak out at 10-11MB/s maximum regardless if you're using Wireless N .. because of the 100mbps port limitation

In other news.. I did some testing earlier after I replied to your question :



As you can see, I managed to connect to Unifi without the use of the DLink router. I just plugged my laptop directly into the Fiberhome modem. Basically the screenshot shows the 8021q (VLAN) kernel module loaded, eth0.500 (Ethernet VLAN ID 500) interface running, pppoe configuration file (dsl-provider), ping test to google.com, ppp0 (established PPP connection) interface status and wireshark with PPP auth/configuration packets and what not to prove its not photoshopped.

The PPPoE connection must be made on eth0.500 (VLAN ID 500) and not just eth0 like Windows dialer normally does. Failure to have PPPoE run through eth0.500 results in no PPP server response. Basically, as long as your router firmware supports PPPoE connections and VLAN tagging.. it definitely will work for Unifi

This post has been edited by rizvanrp: Apr 10 2010, 10:04 PM

Put the Internet/WAN port into VLAN ID 500 and set the PPPoE dialer to use that, if possible.

Beats me.. but the DIR-615 performs fine for torrenting (1 user) and such. I only hate it because they've locked us out from the SSH and telnet access, meaning we cant flash it with our own firmware unless we use a JTAG connector (which I believe it lacks too).

Regarding IPTV, the STB is shit but they're forcing us to use it. They went with a Service VLAN based set up where nothing is separated physically but rather digitally through the usage of VLANs. Scroll back a few pages, I've already been able to pick up multicast streams using my PC however they've decided to employ scrambling (decoded using a digital smart card in the STB) for some reason. Unlike ASTRO however, I doubt anyone is going to hack it for free TV because they would basically need to pull the fiber cable from the FTTH box into their house and obtain a fiberhome modem somehow (has to use the same PON protocol the main transceiver is using). The only reason they're scrambling the streams is to _force_ us to use their shit slow STB.

On top of that, they would not be able to hack the streams because they're employing RTSP for VOD content along with MAC address filtering. The RTSP requests sends and negotiates username authentication, video play time and is a stateful protocol. The only thing they would be able to receive are the UDP multicasts which are public channels. If anything its much more secure than Astro however has more attack vectors seeing as it is "IP" TV after all.

Looks correct to me but I really cant tell you how to configure it just yet. I have to get my own dd-wrt first then I'll write up a guide for it. But whatever the case, it definitely will be possible via the web interface or by SSH-ing into the router itself. The PPPoE dialer would default to the WAN port I guess so there's no need to set it specifically. If it doesn't work, you can SSH into the router and manually update the dsl-provider file to point to the proper interface.

This post has been edited by rizvanrp: Apr 10 2010, 10:45 PM

Adding VLAN support is just a matter of having the proper kernel module loaded. VLANs afterall are created simply by adding a small amount of bytes after the Ethernet layer to match the 802.1q spec.

I'm also looking into the possibility of using a smart 5 port switch with VLAN support (netgear prosafe plus gs105e) to handle the VLAN layer so people without dd-wrt users will still be able to use their own router without having to buy a dd-wrt compatible one. I think it should be possible.

One additional benefit of using your own hardware is performance. According to smallnetbuilder, the dir-615 suffers from bandwidth stability issues when you use multiple connections. I'm testing direct PPPoE links on my VIP20 package at the moment with 10x HTTP threads. What I've seen is a 400KB/s performance gain. While my HTTP downloads maxed out @ 1.60MB/s with 10 threads via the DIR-615, a direct fiberhome modem connection is giving me 2.00MB/s flat out in the same situation. I'm not going to 'confirm' these results yet but thats what I'm experiencing at the moment -- hopefully its something I've overlooked and not the fault of the DIR-615 that TM provides. Can even be because its about 6.00am right now and there are less users on

This post has been edited by rizvanrp: Apr 11 2010, 06:36 AM

http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/lanwan/lanw...riefly-reviewed

Here I was looking at LYN pricelists and I agree its kinda of hard to find a gigabit wireless N router with full dd-wrt support. As you can see, the GS105E supports VLAN tagging and port mirroring. So the setup would be.. Fiberhome modem -> GS105E (Port 1). Then you set up VLAN ID 500 on port 2 and VLAN ID 600 on port 3. Port 2 will then be able to connect into *any* Wireless router with a WAN/Internet port that supports PPPoE connections. Port 3 would hook up into the STB for IPTV access.

This is what I'm guessing should work based on my tests. The Fiberhome modem basically sends 2 VLANs over the same Cat5 cable so your hardware has to assign each VLAN to a different port in order to use the services.

About the forum thread, what the guy means is basically dd-wrt has no software support for VLANs on gigabit switches. Which is weird because tweiyang11 is using the WRT310N.. maybe the GUI says it supports VLANs but it doesn't actually work? Anyway.. if you dont want to risk flashing your router, you will need a piece of hardware to handle the VLAN tagging and I think the GS105E switch is capable of doing that @ the cost of 60USD. Gonna pick one up soon and test it out

Yes, that would be the simple solution. I've thought of this before however we users don't have access to the Fiberhome console (it runs embedded Unix/Linux.. didn't really see enough to tell the difference). I mentioned a few pages earlier that I noticed the TM installers using a USB<->Ethernet converter to connect into the Fiberhome modem and start up a shell to configure it. TM doesn't even want us to access the SSH and telnet daemon on the DLink router, its highly unlikely that they want us to access the Fiberhome modem.

Don't think so. You'll want to place all your PCs behind the router that's connected at Port 2. The Smart Switch is just used to separate the VLANs and assign them to a physical port. This is because your *own* router and the STB are not aware of the VLAN tags. The TM router is aware of the VLAN tags and therefore can forward all VLAN ID 600 traffic to the physical IPTV port and VLAN ID 500 Internet traffic to the other 3 LAN ports.

Another reason is because Port 2 will be wired into the Internet/WAN port on your own router. This means only PPPoE traffic intended for WAN communication will be able to pass through there. You can have a PC on port 4 and 5 but they will only be able to communicate with each other and nothing else.

FYI, I'm doing more testing and I've confirmed that the Fiberhome modem only allows 1 of its physical ports to access VLAN traffic at a time. You cannot have 2 or more VLAN aware devices plugged into the Fiberhome modem at the same time. If you have say 2 TM Dlink routers plugged into the Fiberhome modem, only the first one you plugged in will be able to use the IPTV and Internet VLAN resources. The second one will have no access at all.

This post has been edited by rizvanrp: Apr 11 2010, 07:22 PM

I'm not sure really. I opened it up to look inside and noticed a 5 pin connector however based on the markings on the board, it looks more like a jumper than a JTAG port. There might be one under the metallic EMF shielding where the main chips are but I didn't open it because it looked like it was soldered down. Don't want to brick my only Unifi router I'll take some pics later when I find my digi cam

And no, I don't have a JTAG cable at the moment

http://www.unifi.my/unifi/images/pdf/btu_onu.pdf

Fiberhome manual. No reset switch, console says 'For local equipment debugging. Not open to subscribers.'

Yea it needs a user/pass, username@unifi and a long random password