Chris Holmes Online

This is the second post in a series of posts about the IPTV project.

In the previous post I introduced the IPTV project that we built at Nez Perce County. Today I’m going to talk about the Video Signal Path. Basically, how we route the video signals to the individual television sets that are scattered throughout the jail.

We begin with four DISH Network receivers located in a climate controlled server room environment. The output from each DISH Network satellite receiver is taken to a port on the Osprey-450e Video Capture Device. The ports on the back of the Osprey accommodate standard RCA video cables. The audio RCA cables are attached to a squid on the Osprey.

The Osprey-450e is located on a Windows XP box that we built. This is where our server-side application (written in C#) resides as well as an installation of open source VideoLAN (VLC) software package. Our C# server application utilizes VLC processes to perform transcoding and streaming of the DISH network signals that are coming in off the Osrprey-450e. What we’re doing here is taking the signals that the Osprey is providing and we’re transcoding them into MPEG-4 format and then multicasting them via UDP over the internal network.

The streams then travel over CAT-6 cable throughout the jail facility. The streams are broadcast as multicast UDP, so any device that is listening on this internal network can receive the signal. The Tornado Set Top Boxes receive these streams via the plugged in network cable and transmit the signal to the television sets via HDMI cables. By issuing commands to the Set Top Boxes, we can instruct the STB on which stream to display to the television.

In the next post we’ll cover how we control the DISH receivers remotely without the use of hand held remote controls.