Hello,
I have a Twinhan satellite TV installed on my PC, is it possible to use it as streaming source to Wowza server?
Thank you
I’m not sure. Take a look at the Twinhan manual and the Wowza specs page:
https://www.wowza.com/specs.html
Look for common protocol and format.
Richard
I would search through the Live Encoders section, specifically at the the hardware encoder guides, to find one that seems applicable.
http://community.wowza.com/c/-/8
And/Or ask Twinhan support. You can refer them to these guides and ask them which one to follow, or if they have any guidance for publishing to Wowza.
Richard
Chris,
Thanks for the info.
Richard
Twinhan card will probably will work with FMLE, but I have no experience with it.
FMLE can publish to Wowza.
Richard
I would search through the Live Encoders section, specifically at the the hardware encoder guides, to find one that seems applicable.
http://community.wowza.com/c/-/8
And/Or ask Twinhan support. You can refer them to these guides and ask them which one to follow, or if they have any guidance for publishing to Wowza.
Richard
Richard, the Twinhan cards are just generic satellite receiver boards. They don’t decode/encode or otherwise do anything with the actual audio/video services inside a satellite mux. They’re just dumb tuners. They pass off the transport stream to the PCI bus which can be picked up by various playback programs. VLC can do it now I think, but not sure. We use some custom apps to do it, but you can’t just pull it from the card and ship into wowza. Some intermediate software is needed to talk to the driver and then parse out the various program streams from the TS.
By far the easiest way for people to take a satellite feed and put it into Wowza is to use a regular satellite set top box, and feed the output into a regular video capture card and then encode with whatever their favorite Flash/AVC encoder is.
–Chris
The Twinhan card (and just about every satellite receiver on a card) is just a dumb demodulator. It does no processing. It hands off the datastream to software on the PC to play back (the software does the MPEG2/4/etc decoding).
This is actually what we mostly stream. We use a couple of cards and our system direct transcodes from satellite to Wowza. No use for FMLE at that point.
However, the easier way to do this is to just use a regular set top box and then a capture card on a PC running FMLE. Requires no special knowledge, software or hardware. Just off the shelf stuff and is how we originally started our satellite turn around service.
Oh and a note about TSReader (we’re an OEM distributor for that also). It doesn’t actually decode the video. It only disassembles the transport stream for diagnostic purposes. The “player” in TSReader is just VLC (which you have to install separately and is not included with TSReader).
–Chris
Chris, currently we are doing STB to Capture card and FMLE to Wowza , however seems you know how to bypass FMLE and direct transcode satellite to wowza thorugh some cards, can you please suggest how to do this, the cards that you are using, is it possible to have any hardware h.264 encoding at this point to take the burden off of CPU
We’ve got our own homegrown stuff that does that. 
The only other ‘easy’ & ‘commercial’ way you can do it is by using Elecard Codecworks. You’ll still need something to take the transport stream and send it over IP into the Codecworks system ,but it does work. We ran their eval a bit for a while but ended up going a different route. A ‘free’ way to do it would be VLC. But that’s pretty shoddy for reliability.
For hardware stuff, you could just use a Tandberg or other standard name-brand broadcast encoder with low bitrate options enabled to take either ASI or IP transport streams and encode AVC/AAC and send off via RTSP to a Wowza server. Those are really the only hardware ways to do it. Our stuff, Codecworks & VLC all require a fairly beefy PC to do the encoding.
–Chris
Twinhan supports multiple formats, but I don’t know how to broadcast to wowzmedia?
Chris, currently we are doing STB to Capture card and FMLE to Wowza , however seems you know how to bypass FMLE and direct transcode satellite to wowza thorugh some cards, can you please suggest how to do this, the cards that you are using, is it possible to have any hardware h.264 encoding at this point to take the burden off of CPU
Sorry for kicking this thread up, but do you think it’s possible to encode the incoming data using FMLE and then stream it to a server? Using the Twinhan PC card?
Apparently Twinhan doesn’t decode. It just streams the feed and as such FMLE can’t work with it. It only accepts RAW video, satellite feeds are encoded in MPEG2 and so FMLE won’t recognize it.
Just wondering if there’s any PC card out there which does decode the signal and give RAW video so FMLE can work with it…
***update
I just found out that TSreader can grab the video data and decode it. Don’t know how CPU intensive it is, it might be able to use your graphics card to decode.