So my parents live in spain and have been using an IPTV service out there to watch English TV and they're not keen on it. So I thought to myself why not try and make a SlingBox type of addon so they can pass Sky from this country over to their TV and use Kodi as the interface. First off, I'm presuming this is all legal (or at least grey?) as Slingbox have been doing it for ages, right? I'm sure there may be easier ways of doing it as well, I'm guessing put it on TVHeaded and usea IR blaster over the internet or something, but my parents aren't tech savy at all, so installing an addon is the easiest way I can think for them to do this.
Requires a bit of hardware to get it all working, currently using my old Hauppauge PVR to get the signal and a cheap £50 mini Windows 10 machine to handle the streaming, wrote a script to talk to the sky box so that kodi keyboard/remote controls are passed to the Sky box so you can navigate through the menus and then port forwarding on your router for external access.
Was wondering if anyone would be interested in this, if so I'll upload, I'd imagine it's fairly limited in use as you would need Sky and the couple bits of hardware to stream.
Still in the very early stages, debating whether to add menus to allow to jump to a channel outside of the Sky interface... but don't know if it's worth it. Any thoughts?
Also, managed to get a Hauppauge HD Pro 60 on sale for £30, so will at some point have a look at streaming from the HDMI socket, anyone had any luck with something like this, HDCP seems to be an issue here.
No I don't think this is legal at all.
Well reading through the terms and conditions it would appear to breach the terms and conditions BUT having a read around this would work similar to slingbox in the sense that it would using a paid for service for one user and simply changing the place they watch it.
Slingbox are claiming that placeshitfting is covered by the fair use policy much the same as timeshifting. Since there's tonnes of chat within the Sky forum about slingbox setup and none of the mods have closed or told people to not talk about it... unlike stripping hdcp... i can only presume that it is legal, certainly slingbox have been around for 10 years and are still selling their products within the UK without any issue.
Depending on how it's implemented, this part may be relevant
Quote:Each Sky Multiscreen subscription you take out can only be viewed at the same Address as your first Sky digital subscription.
If it's using multiscreen/sky Go type setup then they could get you on that one.
So who's sky subscription is it?
Multiscreen is an optional addon (at £12 a month) to allow other devices around the home (on the same network as the Sky Q box) to receive and display the media. Presumably via local IPTV of some sort.
They will be trying to get around sharing in multiple places via VPNs and similar remote accessing like the case in this thread perhaps, depending on how it's implemented.
This is similar I think (at least in concept) to the old Sky Go addon that used to be around but I think no longer works?
At the moment im testing with my old sky box which has no active subscription (which is why no channels show up) but it would require a valid paid for Sky subscription to actually watch channels. In the case of how I want to use it, the account would be my parents but accessed from abroad.
I've never messed around with multi room before so have no idea how that actually works (do they use the same box?) the way I have this working is to capture the Sky output via analogue into a hauppauge pvr (hdcp stripping seems to be a pain, so will look at switching onto hd once I have everything working correctly), the addon then just plays back the stream. I then just channel the remote control commands over the network to the sky box (works with both sky hd and sky q boxes) and only bring the controls back to Kodi once the escape is pressed.
As it's just using a single room subscription, I'm guessing that gets around any issues with multiroom/multiscreen.
I need to test it externally at the moment this is running over the local network and theres a delay between pressing a button and visually seeing it, i'm presuming this will be longer when done over the net. This was one reason why I was thinking of perhaps just creating menus which would make channel number requests over the network rather than having complete control over the box via the remote.
Also, there's no reason why this shouldn't work with Virgin or Now TV boxes as long as they can receive remote control commands over the network.
I guess if it is your parents' subscription and no one else is using that Sky box, it is at least in the spirit of "one household per subscription" model of Sky.
Why reinvent the wheel though? Use mythtv as your backend in the UK, and Kodi with pvr-mythtv in Spain.
I'm trying to spend as little money on this as possible at the moment, so I'm working with what I have laying around.
As a machine to stream the signal is a mini Windows 10 Beelink pc, I'd attempted to install Linux on it but gave up.
Original idea was to use Tvheadend, when I found out the Hauppauge I currently have isn't supported without going back a few versions, I decided to give Myth Tv a go.
When I couldn't Linux working properly I went with MediaPortal but wasn't a fan. So I went simple and user Cast4Me.
Main issue I can see with using a PVR is it would detect as one channel and I'm guessing the kodi PVR front-end wouldn't allow the control of the Sky box?
Yes mythtv allows control of the sky box via an ir blsster.
I would be really interested in this add on, any chance I could try it out. Thanks
By the way did you get this running with HDMI capture - its exactly what I'm looking to do.
(2018-07-10, 18:05)mattmarsden Wrote: [ -> ]By the way did you get this running with HDMI capture - its exactly what I'm looking to do.
i didnt manage to get it working with HDMI as i couldnt strip out the protection and got fed up buying HDMI splitters that said they did it but didnt. I did get it working with a HDMI to YPbPr converter but I then run into issues as I wasn't sure how to configure TVHeadedEnd to pick it up. I instead then went with a Windows setup and used Cast4Me, but it wasn't 100% reliable sending out the stream, I found at times it would just hang... although not to sure if that was my pc setup (it wasnt a great setup) or not.
I can certainly dig out the file and upload if you want to give it ago.