Could working IPTV ever be possible ?

[Michael Freeman]

Hi, I did quite an extensive forum search but could not find much about IPTV, apologies if I missed anything.

I knew from the beginning that its "just one of those things" that the box can't do IPTV. However in an internet search today I noticed that Humax appeared to be planning to add it at one point. So with the extensive changes that can be made to the box with the custom firmware why is it not possible to fix IPTV ? Not demanding anything, just wonder as so many fixes and other addon's are available through the custom firmware.

 

[Black Hole]

Too demanding for the HDR-FOX hardware, and even if it wasn't we have no way to output audio/video from the CF.

I would like some Custom Firmware modifications that alter the way the HDR-FOX displays things on the TV

Not possible, no can do. The HDR-FOX (and HD-FOX) hardware (ie the electronics) is a "black box" - ie a mystery to us, hidden inside some very large scale integrated circuits with documentation Humax keep to themselves. We can guess the general architecture of what's inside, but not the detail. To compound the problem, the Humax software (which we can inspect) that operates the mystery hardware is also an undocumented lump of binary.​

​

The consequence is that we have no access to the video and audio streams sent out on the HDMI, SCART, and RCA socket, or the graphics overlays, and cannot affect them except in very limited indirect ways (one rare example being substituting our own set of digit graphics for the screensaver clock). So, do not ask for anything that needs to present output on-screen (eg a better photo album or MP3 player, or the ability to play a currently incompatible media file type).​

​

What has been achieved with Custom Firmware is to provide a way in to the HDR-FOX's open source operating system so that our own applications can be run alongside the Humax application. These applications have access to everything the operating system has access to - ie networking, file system, and process status. With a very few rare exceptions, everything the CF does is by manipulating the files and file system, with command and control via a web browser or command line interface over the network.​

​

If you feel you really would like some tweak to the hardware output, please feel free to analyse how the hardware actually works and let us know (in detail) which parts of the Humax code need changing (and to what).​

 

[/df]

Not to disagree entirely, but the iPlayer app shows that the HD/R can support quite high resolution content delivered by IP.

What OP might have discovered by searching the forum and elsewhere is that the Freeview HD IP channels use the MHEG-5 Interaction Channel Streaming Extension as their "app". While support for this is required for Freeview HD certfication, this wasn't the case when the HD/R Fox T2 models were launched, considering that the MHEG-ICS specification wasn't ready. Possibly MHEG-ICS would have been the last straw for performance but I suspect Humax correctly identified the balance of cost and benefit to decide against back-porting it. Instead they adopted their Portal system based on Hybrid Broadband Broadcast TV (HbbTV) specifications that were already used in their German offerings. This (ie, HTML, JS, CSS, DASH) is what the iPlayer app uses. Apparenly the D-Book (which profiles the technical specifications used for UK digital TV and from which the Freeview, Freeview HD, etc, specifications are drawn) allows for both approaches.

The now antique proprietary software development package that would allow third parties to develop Linux binary programs that access the display output has never escaped into the wider world.

The Humax software does include the Opera browser that should be able to display web pages provided by the CF by tweaking the TV Portal setup. I've seen it display a WebIf page, but interaction with the page was problematic. The BBC has put its Television Application Layer, presumably used by the HD/R iPlayer apps, online, so perhaps it might be possible to create an app using this and serve it to a custom HD/R Portal from the CF. If that were possible, then perhaps there could be some way of acessing IPTV streams. However any internet access using the built-in HD/R Fox T2 platform software may fall foul of HTTPS enforcement because it doesn't support current SSL versions.

 

[Black Hole]

the iPlayer app shows that the HD/R can support quite high resolution content delivered by IP.

Indeed it does, and presumably uses the same hardware acceleration as is used to display the H.264 (or whatever) from the broadcast video stream or other media playback, and maybe the built-in browser is a means to leverage that, but somehow it would be necessary to contrive feeding the IP stream into the browser in a compatible way.