Hikari TV: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 00:08, 17 August 2012

Hikari TV ひかりTV

After going through the typical Japanese signup protocol of calling, giving name and address, so they can mail you a form that you write name and address on, to get the service.

I got the tuner in the mail ok, as well as the signup code. There was also a NTT flets COP code I needed, so I called NTT to get that.

Lots of channels, and the tuner is all in Japanese, but pretty easy to navigate. As always, it is a little sluggish when using the GUI, changing channels and so on. About the same as the satellite and cable STBs I have used before. One would hope they'd made it faster over the years though.

These are things I want to find an answer for:

Hackable? Can I get in, if so, can I add English myself? only port 20000 open so far. (upnp?)
Quick channel list. I want a fast way to get to a more scrollable channel list. Right now you either get full guide (slow) or large icons (slow), or deep in the menus (slow)
Quick channels, can I set my preferred channels on the number keys, and quick jump? Looks like I can, but it sure don't work.
Output is 1080i, why not 1080p.

Networking

I had a fair bit of trouble getting HikariTV to work well. It would sometimes start glitching like crazy, I thought it was the wifi router, or maybe the two switches connected in chain.

But eventually it turns out the be the Win7 PC going into hibernation (sleep). The switch appears to think it still should get multicast packets (wake on lan is on) and something goes weird there. Shutdown has no side effects.

NEC Aterm WR9500N

I picked up an Aterm WR9500N Wifi router. Fairly easy to setup, defaults were all good. Testing HikariTV with this router now.

Buffalo

I signed up for HikariTV recently, to see what that is like to use. I went for the "double" tuner rental.

Initially I was using an old Buffalo G54 wifi router. It could technically handle it, but all wifi communication stopped when watching tv.

I went and picked up a WZR-450HP. You have to enable the "Movie engine" and then IPV6 option. Then HikariTV worked.

However, I noticed you could only watch for 2-3 minutes, then channels would go blocky, corrupt and generally be unplayable. Some channels did not play at all.

It turns out that you can set the "multicast rate", for which the default is "11 mbps", on the Buffalo WIFI router.

However, with HD channels, it is sending at about 8-16mbps. I changed the "multicast rate" to 22mbps and it is currently working well.

@@ Line 16: / Line 16: @@
 === Networking ===
-My home network consists of:
+I had a fair bit of trouble getting HikariTV to work well. It would sometimes start glitching like crazy, I thought it was the wifi router, or maybe the two switches connected in chain.
- VDSL Modem ----- wifi router ----- 8port IOdata Switch ----- 5 port DCL switch ----- HikariTV tuner
+But eventually it turns out the be the Win7 PC going into hibernation (sleep). The switch appears to think it still should get multicast packets (wake on lan is on) and something goes weird there. Shutdown has no side effects.
-However, it turns out that one, or both, of the cheap switches tend to get confused. Multicast packets are sent on all ports. It appears that when it goes wrong, it sends the multicast packet back to the switch it came from. So the switches get over loaded with bounces.
-I connected the tuner to the first 8port switch and the issue was considerably lowered. When I get block corruption on tv, I can just restart the 5 port switch and the image goes clear.
-Alas, both switches are pretty stupid and won't let me disable multicast on specific ports.