Cable Forum - VPN for IP TV

sure its more than possible, my prefered basics are a simple Multicast tunnel (rather than wastful Unicast)you run at both ends, server end point mode on the VM BB, and client mode on your other end OC.
http://www.cdt.luth.se/~peppar/progs/mTunnel/
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http://www.cdt.luth.se/java/pics/JAVA.POWER.60.GIF multicast Tunnel - mTunnel http://www.cdt.luth.se/pic/cdt_logo.gif

The mTunnel is an application that tunnels multicast packets over an unicast UDP channel. Several multicast streams can be sent over the same tunnel while the tunnel will still only use one port. This is useful if tunneling through a firewall.
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a cheap old analogueTV card with the REQUIRED composit-IN to feed your video into the transcoding PC app,and a copy of VLC running on the same machine thats running mTunnel to transcode and push your single multicasted (realtime transcoded down to less than 512Kbit/s or less if your on 10Mbit/s VM) TS content through.

VLC/or the new VLM serving inside it, Multicast serving <>LAN Multicast IP tunnel<>VM web side IP<internet>works webside IP<>VLC MC text announcements<> select and play them inside your VLC client

http://wiki.videolan.org/VLC_command-line_help
http://blog.tmcnet.com/blog/tom-keat...ng-live-tv.asp

see http://forum.openwrt.org/viewtopic.php?id=2420 for a basic VLC line you can use as a starting point, key eing dont over do your bitrate setting as you only have a very limited size depending on your package.

i find multicast IP 224.0.0.1:7777 to be a better choice for your multicast port and MC IP

and if your PCs powerful enough try using AVC/x264/H.264 transcoding for your Encoding as it gives you far better and lower bitrates for a given size and quality so helping keep your upload bandwidth use under control without swamping it....yet keeping really good quality compared to the antiquated Mpeg2 codec when used under low upload bitrates.

the Virgin Media IPTV streaming is complicated by the fact VM dont like you using a generic open market DVB-C transport stream card and decoder for your payed for VM subscription so proventing you from directly accessing the already Mpeg2 encoded video transport streams ,forcing you to take the antiquated analogue composit out of the SCART sockets and feed that into a hardware or realtime software Encoder.... hence the need for a powerful PC for AVC encoding....

you can try direct DVB-T Mpeg2 access easy enough using a BDA driver for any compatable windows card and VLC tuned to the DVB terestial channel, or simply use Linux and it generic ability to use almost all these BDA compatable cards, remember a DVB-T USB device IS NOT DVB-C cable device DVB is only for the DVB-T digital freeview transmissions over the air, just so thats cler ;)

CM-STB-Scart-Out<>generic-PCI-TV+composit-IN<>VLC-composit-select<>transcode-to-AVC inside a TS container and placed on the Multicast IP:port

you can get PC software controlled infrared remote controllers that you then remotely change your selested channels,that may work for the current/newest VM STBs, but someone else will have to point you there.

if you want to get fancy you could always use and expand a simple rebol view (GUI) web server script for your remote control of your basic streaming server

http://search.virginmedia.com/result...Kbit+streaming

http://box.lebeda.ws/~hmm/rebol/mp3.html
http://www.rebol.net/cgi-bin/r3blog....=0183#comments
http://www.rebol.net/
http://cheyenne-server.org/
Cheyenne is a full-featured Apache-class web server implementation using the REBOL programming language. The project started just as a simple rewrite of our UniServe's HTTPd service to make it more flexible and ended as creating Cheyenne !