Dreambox Streaming via the network
To make it short: I havent't managed a solid streaming yet.
You can control the Dreambox completely via the network. This makes sense if you want to watch with a notebook via WLAN. The Webinterface (on Dreambox-IP) has a VLC button. It does not neccessarily link to VLC but to the player which is associated with M3U files. You can set the M3U association in the options/properties/file types menu.
Which one is best? These did not really work:
- Winamp did not work at all (possibly a settings issue)
- VLC has drop-outs and freezes after about one minute
The best solution for cabled LAN:
(Windows download package). If you're lucky the stream will keep up for hours. Somtimes it takes more than one try to start a stream. I don't recommend it for WLAN though. There it starts to loop scenes and regularly loses the stream (or only the video). If there are wireless signal dropouts you can forget about this software. Once the video is gone it won't appear again. It helped a bit to reduce quality to 1 (Settings / General / Video), but playing with the settings did not really get me further.
For WLAN I ended up with which is available for all Dreamboxes (Enigma 1 and 2). No loops but regular gaps when the WLAN signal seemed weak, solid resyncs on my notebook (HP Compaq 6715s).
My desktop PC (2 x 2 GHz) is connected via LAN cable. I expected gapless streaming here. But after about 3 minutes (independent from the bitrate),
the audio disappears step by step, then the video follows.
DreamStream is the only software which has it's own zap interface independent from the WebIF. The only disadvantage is a lack of further options: filters, screenshots, recording, codecs. But a standard user does not neccessarily need that.
For the first three softwares, every time you zap, the stream has to be restarted by re-clicking "VLC" in the WebIF.
The Web-X-TV link in the WebIF does not work on my PC.
You can also access the stream directly with http://DreamboxIP/video.m3u
Of course, bandwith should fit. TV streams in standard definition usually have 1 to 8 MBit/s, some have a rather constant rate, other streams are highly variable. WLAN standard is 54 MBit (802.11g mode) - should be enough, but only if the connection is perfectly stable. If not, bandwith will switch down automatically to 36, 24, 12 MBit/s or less. This should still be enough but it in my case the streams were cut even at 36/48/54 Mbps. Maybe it's a problem in the moment when the router switches up and down - this happens all the time. It seemed to me that it helped a little to change the router's mode to 802.11b which offers only 11 Mbps, but more stable.
If you have a very fast internet upload bandwidth, you could even stream via the net. Most people should at least be able to stream radio via the internet. This requires port forwarding - haven't tried it yet.
TV streams in HD use up to 10 MBit. Here comes a nice new feature: Old dreamboxes won't show MPEG4, the PC will. But only if it's a DVB-S channel (locked in the Satfinder). If it's DVB-S2 (like in most cases) - no chance with the older models. And the CPU must be fast - some MPEG4 streams are very demanding.
Experts convert their streams to lower bitrates to transfer them via the net. This can only be done by the PC.
By the way I use the DM7000 and a TP-Link TL-WR641G router working on a channel which is definitely free. While testing there was only one client connected to the network.
Radiovibrations.com -> Dreambox Notes