Direction “IPTV”
We’ve been working on an IPTV project for quite some time now. We have great part of the middle-ware, content distribution system and firmware for a number of set-top-boxes. However, with High-Definition becoming dominant standard we’re moving on to the HD world. We needed new platform for our HD-enabled enterprise system. And we found one. Actually, this new platform is almost perfect. We need to make some modifications to the distribution and middle-ware, but it is doable. Everything seemed fine. Until yesterday!
After playing for several hours with the device, hitting failure after failure, we started to suspect there is something fishy in our setup. Preliminary test showed everything on “our side” of the system is OK. But still no success. Everything on the “other side” seems to be OK too. But still no success. So … what can be the problem ?!
This is the moment when every network engineer should dig deeper. Capture some raw network data using tcpdump or Wireshark (I’d recommend Wireshark for being more user-friendly application) and start analizing it. Our experience with protocol development from the past paid off. Some digging in the network flow and reading the RFC, for the protocol in question, showed us where the problem is. For some strange reason our “so damn good” set-top-box refuses to follow the RFC by the book. It was trying to send requests to a server without previous session establishment. Well, what the heck, let’s just return “OK” message and see what will happen. Ten minutes later our server breaks the RFC too. It does not complain about out-of-session data. But the problem remains.
Digging a little deeper unveiled another mystery. Not only that the set-top-box expects out-of-session communication, but it actually expects specific kind of attributes and values during this packet exchange. We suppose this is some trick to limit usability to a subset of servers, approved by the manufacturer. The issue is open. We have two ways to address this problem: try to reason with the manufacturer to provide us with RFC-compatible firmware or reverse-engineer what we have and modify our middle-ware to cope with it.
Expect more on this saga soon. We will be struggling to provide you with the best IPTV experience possible.