[clug] TransAct ISP

[Francis James Whittle]

Apart from a tendency to disconnect you 1433 minutes after connection (7
minutes short of 24 hours -- go figure?) which I personally don't have
problems with due to automatic reconnection - however some debian
systems apparently don't handle that well, and a single episode where
the routers were out and they wouldn't even tell us what was going on,
CyberOne (http://www.cyberone.com.au/) have been pretty good for us -
and they offer uncapped plans that give you a slightly lower traffic
priority although I've never noticed a significant speed deficiency.

<tangent>
Just out of interest, did anyone know that you can stream TransTV
straight to your linux box - the i3 Mood Digital TV system actually runs
on a strange but effective high-speed Ethernet bridge over the cable
system.  You can, after setting up appropriate routes:

route add -net 224.0.0.0/4 dev eth0
route add -net 192.168.0.0/16 dev eth0

(Yes, that is a 4 bit netmask there: that's multicast) use a media
player that supports RTP over UDP and mpeg1 transport streams (with full
surround audio ;-) such as VideoLan or Xine (I prefer Xine from them) -
GStreamer 0.7 supports multicast udp as well but setting up video
decoders is hard and gst-player does *not* support it.  However you can
relay through a FIFO to mplayer which at least has a decent deinterlacer
- and connect to 239.193.0.x on port 8208 for the video stream where x
is one of (these are really fairly obvious - Mostly the same as channel
numbers):

2 for ABC
5 for Transact Info Channel (Kinda' pointless, but hey)
7 for Prime
8 for SBS
9 for WIN
10 for Ten
11 for House of Reps.
12 for Senate
14 for BBC World
(17) for SBS World News (I think)
18 for LNTV (Only has mono audio and plays on one speaker - very
annoying.  But then, I don't speak Mandarin anyway.)
19 for TV5
20 for DW
22 for ABC Analogue (and 4:3)
27 for Prime Analogue (and 4:3)
(96 for Disney Channel, but it's encrypted(?))

eg: xine udp://239.193.0.2:8208 will get you 16:9 aspect ratio surround
sound ABC with full support for Xv or VIDIX.... and gives you a short
rewind buffer (although you tend you lose sync when you go back to the
stream end).

Nice for cron-based recording, perhaps?

Just something I thought I should share with you all....
</tangent>

Francis

On Sat, 2004-01-17 at 12:51, Michael Carden wrote:
> Sorry to rehash a possibly tired topic, but...
> 
> Among the recent discussions regarding suitable ISPs for ADSL etc, I have a 
> vague recollection that TransAct was mentioned along the way.
> 
> Well, Jo has decreed that we should become a TransAct household so I've signed 
> up for their phone/TV/data package.
> 
> Now all I need is an ISP. One with a Debian mirror would be excellent. One at 
> least slightly Linux-friendly would be good. One that won't send me broke 
> paying for throughput will suffice though.
> 
> Does the CLUG hive-mind have any suggestions?
> 
> Thanks,
> MC
-- 
Francis James Whittle
BSEng Student,
Australian National University
Canberra, Australia