Astro IPTV potential issue

syazlan — Thu, 25 Jul 2013 15:03:59 +0800

Just want to share my experience with Astro IPTV/Maxis fiber so that it will not happen to others..

In my home area all fiber infrastructure belongs to TM, up to the BTU box dalam rumah customer. When we change to IPTV, Maxis will be using the same BTU box for their channel. Once you moved to IPTV, your Astro decoder no longer accept signal from dish, it will come from fiber.

Imagine if the TM BTU box rosak, who do you want to call? Kalau you call TM, diaorg akan cakap you are not their customer and they are not responsible to change the device. Kalau you call Astro, diaorg akan cakap BTU box tu belongs to TM and the cannot replace it for you. What they will do is to log a request to TM to come to your house and swap the device. Then boleh agak sendiri la macamana response time dari TM since we are not their client..

That is what happen to me.. from saturday last week until today TM tak come back to Astro yet on the date (only date, bukan utk datang tukar device) when they are available to come.

I am now literally fighting back with Astro to convert my decoder back to dish.. so still menunggu sampai bila Astro boleh solve my issue..

Unifi + home entertainment system

syazlan — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 12:05:14 +0800

Hi All,

Just want to share my new experience since I have Unifi and building up home entertainment system

The Unifi service comes with these feature

1. Phone - uses 2mbps of bandwidth
2. HyppTV box - uses 8mbps of bandwidth
3. Internet browsing - for VIP5, the speed capped at 5mbps. But normal speed that I get is around 4.5mbps

Those phone and HyppTV bandwidth does not uses the VIP5 cap limit. The limit is just for intenet browsing

From Unifi router, I attached

1. Home PC via wifi
2. IP based cam via wifi
3. Laptops via wifi
4. Phones via wifi
5. Sony Bluray player via wire

The Sony bluray player have an internet service, it is able to stream videos/radios via internet. Depending on the country where it resides, the service will be custom to what is available for that particular country. For Malaysia, not many services are available. All the services (except youtube which I will talk later) are streaming a normal quality (as in normal TV channel) and for VIP5, it is slow. I would think if you subscribe to VIP10, you may get a smooth streaming of videos.

The best part of it is that it also allows to stream youtube. Since the quality of videos in youtube is not really good, it works well with VIP5. What I mean not good is not that bad, if you can stand watching youtube on your computer screen, it would not be an issue to watch it on TV even though your TV is big LCD/LED TV. My 2 years son love watching Backkom, so it is easier for him to watch from TV instead of from computer screen.

Nothing much to say about the IP based camera. It is a networked camera, can do pan/tilt, and I have configured it to be able to access it via internet. I have this before when using Streamyx, and when watching the video feed from internet it is very slow (like 1 frame per 2 second rate). Now using Unifi, the speed is acceptable, but it very much depends on where you are connected to the internet. I would think after using Unifi, the bottleneck in not in my house connection, it is more like the bottleneck of the internet connection that you are using.

The other service, which really not related to Unifi, but just want to share here is the DLNA (Digital Life Network Alliance) feature in the Sony Bluray player. Sony have come up with this standard that any manufacturer can integrate it in their product. So far I have install it in my home computer (using latest Windows media player) and share my multimedia files to the network. When turning on my Bluray player, I have the option to browse my computer content to play photos, songs and movies directly from my TV. This works well when I download movies.. er movies trailer from internet and can play it directly from my TV. The only thing that is not really convenient is that DLNA support very limited format of videos (I only use avi, other format like mkv, wmv etc not supported by DLNA). You can google to check what others format are supported by DLNA.

I have also used iphone with DLNA. There are some apps that you can install in iphone that can turn your phone into DLNA Server. What you need to do is to turn on the service on the phone, select picture (the app that I use is free one, not sure if paid one can support music/video too) and open Bluray menu, you can see your iphone picture content listed there and can view it from your TV.

There are some other device that supports DLNA, such as digital frame and for phone Android phone also supports it.

I think I am pretty much satisfied with my setup at home (Unifi + DLNA), I would think anyone that have intention to do home entertainment system can taket this one approach. Of course there are other ways to do it (like using MediaPortal app) but for me this is more than enough for now

Hope my experience will give some idea if you wanted to do the same.

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Astro IPTV potential issue

Unifi + home entertainment system