Going full circle and allow for FTA video/audio while outernet is idle

Feature Requests
1

Hi, I am new to Outernet. I have a FTA setup with motorized dish, receiver, etc. I use it to watch FTA TV and listen to music.

Yesterday I decided to grab a raspberry pi and a hdstar tuner to give outernet a try. It is up and running. I have been monitoring and I see that it is not constantly receiving data, but it happens at burst.

Would it be possible to allow video or radio music stream from the other FTA services to be displayed on the main page while no outernet data is being received?

2

What made you draw this conclusion?

3

Hi Branko,

I am looking at the tuner settings page and I see the last received file has been outernet-rx-.2.5.2.pkg for a while and the storage device hasn’t move. But maybe I am wrong? Like I said I am new to outernet.

4

So the stream is constant. It’s like a tape device on a loop. There are a few streams going in parallel which we call ‘carousels’. When the file is received, it comes around again after a while, and the downloaders sees it again, but it won’t redownload it. It will, instead, skip and you will see it being at 100% constantly for a while.

5

I’m not sure if you’ve already considered this, but if you have a dual-output LNB you can connect one output to your TV receiver and another to your Outernet receiver. That way you can watch TV anytime, and outernet will download anytime the dish is pointed at the appropriate satellite. So, if the TV or audio content you are interested in is on the same bird as Outernet, you can watch/listen while simultaneously downloading Outernet content.

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6

Can you try the new 2.6rc1 image? It can be downloaded from Dropbox - Lighthouse images (snapshots) - Simplify your life.

7

Yes absolutely, I will when I get home. Does it need a Pi 2? or can I run it from a Pi B+?

8

There is an image for Pi B+ as well, though as we noted in one of the recent posts, it’s no longer fully supported. We sometimes boot it to see if it boots at all, but we don’t actively test.

9

I installed the 2.6rc1 on a RPI 2 last night, it was an easy installation. It is up and running and reporting data to you guys. Anything you would like me to test?

10

We’ve just released 2.6 final.

11

Nice, I will give that a try.

12

You’ll find the release notes here.

13

Ok as a side note, I was able to do a remote “live” upgrade from rc1 to release.

I SCP the zip in to the PI (the wget on the pi doesn’t like getting files from https servers).
Then I unzipped the file and copied the files on to /mnt/sdcard crossed my fingers and then rebooted. A minute later and boom, I am on 2.6… Not bad.

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14

Good to know. I haven’t gotten around to testing that scenario. :smile: Thanks for testing it!

15

Have you tested this? Last I heard it doesn’t actually work.

16

Dual LNB should be fine. What did not work was a DiSEqC switch (two LNB heads, one coax).

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17

Branko is correct. The Lighthouse (or ORxPi with Geniatech HD Star) can’t see thru a DiSEqC. The problem is control of the DiSEqC.

My system works fine thru a motor, because the motor just inserts a line loss which hasn’t impacted my Outernet receive levels. If you can run 2 coaxial cables into your house, then Outernet could live on one LNB, and your FTA (with motor to point dish and control the DiSEqC) could live on the other. Ken

18

Yes. I’m doing so as I write this. I’m using a fixed dish with dual LNB. One output connects directly to my Lighthouse, the other output connects to my television receiver.

It’s actually a bit more complex than that. I have two fixed dishes, one for G19 at 97w (actually a repurposed DirecTV Slimline - photo here: Antenna or dish to buy?) and another for AMC21 at 125w. The lighthouse is connected directly to the 97w dish, and the TV receiver is connected, via a DiSEqC switc, to both dishes.