Streaming TransTV (was: RE: [clug] TransAct ISP)

[Francis James Whittle]

On Sun, 2004-02-01 at 21:20 +1100, Brett Worth wrote:
> Well I followed your instructions and it certainly works.  In fact it works
> perfectly.  So what's the catch?

Err... Even disney? (On the list, but doesn't work for me....)

> It certainly raises some questions:
> 
> 	Will this stream be visible to my ISP?

Nope.  Unless you do something strange with multicast routers on your
box - and even then you don't have the bandwidth anyway.  Your ISP using
a PPPoE tunnel, TransTV is a separate PPPoE bridge....

> 	Are Transact likely to block this capability once a few people start
> 		using it?

That would require an extreme change to the system (Alright, it would
just require encrypting everything), and I don't personally see any
reason why this would be a problem (Except in the case of channels where
uncut films etc. are shown without advertisements, ie. Disney Channel).
The Bandwidth usage is not an issue, at least no more than standard use
of your STB (Well, unless you're recording one thing and watching
another or whatever...).  Although, that doesn't make the future of
this ... feature ... secure.

> 	How do I get to the Fox channels?  :-)  (Just kidding)

Well, in order to find out what to do, I used tcpdump and later a neato
little perl script I wrote that filters out all traffic except UDP
traffic on port 8208 in the multicast IP range - and then only shows
anything if there's a change in the target address.

You could try doing something similar flicking through Fox channels if
you want (and are subscribed, obviously - I'm not ;-P), but I doubt that
you'll be able to do this with them.

Cheers,
	Francis.

-- 
Francis James Whittle
BSEng Student,
Australian National University
Canberra, Australia