Status: Digital Terrestrial Television South Africa.

Hi all.. does ANYONE know what is happening with the digital Terrestrial
television rollout in south africa, and ANYTHING regards the signal, if
it's currently broadcasting, which channel (Frequency) and the encoding,
and what areas. I'm prepared to go somewhere where I can get a decent
signal, and send that over the Internet to the hotel, and demux it there
into all the stations and radio stations.

An unencrypted DVB-T2 signal allows one to run six streams per demodulator
onto the network at once, they cost around 10k each, and allow you full
control of channels tuning etc via a web interface. Now it's stacks of
decoders with remotes all over the place, really old school.

However it's possible to decode the broadcasts using SDR's, works like a
charm for radio stations. We running cheap SDR's for radio stations,
transcoded to rtsp onto the network, really easy (see
http://www.rtl-sdr.com/ .. lots of fun to play with.) What I want is a
DVB-T2 signal, break it up into all the separate channels, transcode with a
tv headend, and send over the network. That's a room full of decoders/power
supplies plugs etc that can be shelved.

I'm pulling what's left of my hair trying to get info. Theres something
running on that frequency but it's the digital equivalent of static. I
can't even find out if it's encrypted or not, this changes the equipment we
need to order.

I'm busy rolling out a IPTV network at a hotel, gone through two kilometers
already of cabling, all is running smoothly, except this free to air issue.
Currently we stuck running a decoder to a channel, and it's a pain in the
arse. DSTV is a ripoff and a joke, they do not offer anything remotely akin
to IPTV, they offer there own version of it, but again, we need to put DSTV
set top boxes in each room. What was the kicker was any branding changes to
the menu or adding/removing channels has to be done by DSTV themselves, at
cost.

Daniel

_______________________________________________
IOZ mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.internet.org.za/mailman/listinfo/ioz