Friday 11 November 2016

The end of the World is nigh...AGAIN



Now let me make it clear I'm no fan of Donald Trump, I think he is probably one of the most repulsive individuals currently in the public domain, I do however understand how he has risen to become the president elect of the United States.

I stayed up on the night of the US election and watched it until 4am after which I knew he'd be elected. What astounded me by the BBC was their initial "Hillary has it in the bag" attitude and even when it was becoming obvious she didnt' "have it in the bag" they still carried on pushing the "oh well Hillary will surge any minute now". 

A blind and deaf man at that point could plainly see Mr Trump "had it in the bag". This is the problem with liberal media they simply cannot understand how anyone else could possible have a different world view, and if they do its because they are stupid, under-educated, ill-informed, racist, or worse.

Take the demonstrations around America against Trump, these liberal disgruntled voters most of which I notice are millenials....are simply not accepting democracy, they are railing against the very thing they purport to hold dear, you cannot say you believe in democracy and then in the same breath protest against it, you are NOT being democratic, like it or not (and I don't) Donald Trump is going to be the next President of the United States, I do however accept it as democracy in action.

There are huge similarities between what has happened in Brexit here in the UK and the US elections, London for instance has been in a massive liberal bubble for years, they have conditioned everyone who lives there (almost) that the EU was the best thing since sliced Hovis. The same can be said of Westminster and those gaggle of overpaid politicians who blindly thought they'd walk away with a referendum victory to remain in the EU, so much so they didn't even have a plan if it should fall the other way, their staggering smugness is beyond written words to be honest. 

They paid the price for being completely out of touch with the "common" people who saw from day to day, week to week, year to year, billions being wasted on the dying EU project with very little advantage to themselves, just more laws, more control more political union and more of Europe rammed down their throats. 

They say the older voters won the referendum, they very probably did because they can remember what the UK was like prior to the EU micromanaging our lives, and do you know what prior to the EU we were doing ok and life was good. 

They also say the older voters have stolen the youth of todays future, well I don't see it that way, I see it as saving them from another 40 years of entrapment and slavery, which can only get worse if the truth be known what with the EU's plans for centralised taxation and an EU army and god knows what else. 

Yes I voted for Brexit and to be honest it cannot happen soon enough for me if only to shut up the liberal leftards who are crying into their fair trade breakfasts whilst waiting to finish charging their hideously expensive virtue signaling electric car.

Trump is normality resurfacing after being pushed down by political correctness for decades, Trump is the status quo, love him or loathe him, he represents change to our political systems just as Brexit does, Theresa May doesn't like Brexit one bit, but she is one of the few people who understands that the old way of doing things has gone. 

The likes of Tim Farron and Nick Clegg and their ilk are a dying breed you can see that simply by counting the MP's they have in the liberal party (eight at last count). It wouldn't surprise me if the liberals are all but wiped out next election along with a decimated Labour party. Yes Corbyn is popular within the party but considering the Labour voters who voted to leave the EU it wouldn't surprise me if Labour tanked in the next election, especially with Corbyn's special blend of lunacy.

Nicola Sturgeon is a different kettle of fish, her ONLY interest is to gain freedom from the United Kingdom no matter what the cost to the people of Scotland..... so much so her "independence" from the UK will be quickly (if she had it her way) replaced by bowing down to an even bigger union of the European kind. 

Which puzzles me, why would you walk away from a union where nearly 4/5th of your business is with..... to get into bed with a Union where only 1/5th is ? Has she done the maths ? 

She says she wants to protect Scotlands interests, she'd be doing that by STAYING in the United Kingdom not trying to leave it. I suspect she has some kind of mental illness.

They (the SNP) also seem to think they will keep Sterling if they leave....nope won't happen, they will lose their central bank the bank of England, and the treasury,  They will have to pay back their debt currently running at 16 billion, they will lose all of the access to our security forces such as MI5 and GCHQ, all British Army barracks will move out of Scotland, they will lose Faslane nuclear submarine base, the list is big....

There will also be a hard border with passport and immigration checks between Scotland and the rest of the UK

All of this will have to be paid for and rebuilt by Scotland standing on their own, where all funding will be cut by the UK government and the EU....They also want to rejoin the EU....where one of the first things the EU will insist upon is the Euro currency....Tax in Scotland will rise like a rocket.

She really hasn't thought this through at all....They (The SNP) can't even manage their own economy as it is now, I would love to see them try with all of that on top of them as well.

No this is all about her wanting to leave the UK at ANY cost that's all, and the only hand she has is the independance trump card (excuse the pun ...oh the irony)...Scotland would be economically destroyed if they left the UK and joined the EU they would sink into depths of poverty not seen in decades, by that time the SNP will be voted out, but the people of Scotland will have been betrayed by Scottish national lunatics.

We are living in exciting and worrying times, I'm hoping it's purely a massive reset sweeping out all of the liberal ideology that has systematically destroyed our way of life for decades. It's not going backwards as some liberals love to say, its returning to the only sane way of living, where people can have differences and different ways of thinking yet still get on without being labelled as racist or misogynistic or thick or uneducated, if they have a different world view, we all have a different world view, tolerating those different world views is much more important than trying to silence them or destroy them.  





Wednesday 29 June 2016

BREXIT and the end of the world





I've never been a fan of the EU...I've followed it's rise over the years and I haven't been impressed at its total disconnect between the people it represents and the bureaucrats who run it...The council for instance is unaccountable to the public, they are appointed by a nod....

It has all the trappings and appearance of democracy but unfortunately falls completely short of it because of that disconnect between the council and the public...

They can push through laws with no comeback from the public they control...they have effectively removed the ability of the people to remove them and that removal of self determination is a dangerous line to cross ....because it's been done in the past any dictatorship has that key element the inability to remove them. It always ends badly.

The last tool democracy has is the will of the people to ignore it is dangerous....

The ill will towards the EU has been steadily rising for years, their dream of total integration and fiscal union is total madness it will never work in a collection of European states which have such disparate economies....which is why the likes of Greece is now in debt to the EU to tune of 300 billion Euros with another 86 billion agreed....They will take generations to just break even with the mounting debt levels they have.

I'm not going to go into a deep financial rant it's pointless there is plenty out there to find out how bad this is I suggest you research to truly horrify yourself.

The ECB is buying the EU debt at an alarming rate it's simply not sustainable it's like the EU is a person with an inability to see how bad it's finances really are ....so it applies for another credit card to pay off the last one which has hit it's limit...

Deutchesbank is also in serious trouble the EU is a slow motion car crash and people do not see it.

Remain voters seem to think leave voters have ruined their lives....what they don't realise yet is that we've mitigated a disaster waiting to happen that will be an enormous crash protecting the UK by voting to leave the EU...

There has been so much political posturing over this referendum...initially allowed by Cameron to stave off the tory voters switching to UKIP... where Cameron thought it would also heal his own parties deep divisions over the EU..

Alas that didn't happen and like most of our ivory tower politicians who are totally disconnected from the public... he and his advisors had no idea how strong the anti EU feeling was running...which is why he thought it would be safe to call a referendum....but he was playing Russian roulette with a single barrelled shotgun.....

The majority of the remain voters I've spoken to seem to have rose tinted glasses on, they've believed the hype and the lies piled on thick like plaster on a wall. Whilst the EU gives the impression of a democratic organisation they are not, instead of thinking we've lost something, they should start thinking we've actually got rid of a nasty creeping infection...The information is out there you just have to go looking for it....The deeper you dig the more horrifying it becomes, and I fear the majority of remain voters simply cherry picked the good points and didn't register the bad ....or worse still didn't know about them.

 Time will tell what will happen.

But Sterling is rising, shares are increasing and the doom and gloom predicted is simply not happening.

Either way democracy has spoken and our country should pull together with each other to make a success
of the UK in its new direction after 40 years of capitulation to the EU.... Change isn't always bad....We have opened up our markets to the rest of the world, things can only get better and they will.








Monday 2 May 2016

Broadcasting Terrestrial TV across your LAN

First off you need a bit of background into how this all works, TV transmitters have transponders which multiplex their digital channels onto the transponder, they are then transmitted to you and I over the air.

So one frequency can contain many different channels, in the old days of analogue this meant that one frequency meant one channel, but digital TV has opened up the radio spectrum to many more channels by splitting channels into different streams and transmitting them on one frequency.

This makes it ideal for computers to deal with because its just a digital stream and it can be split from the signal and displayed on appropriate hardware.

The hard bit is converting a digital tv signal into a signal that can be broadcast over wires or wifi.


There are two ways to do this, you can use Multicast traffic or Unicast traffic, they each have their plus points and minus points....


Multicast
Multicast traffic is one continuous stream of data broadcast on the multicast IP's all of the time.

IP Multicast Address Ranges and Uses
224.0.0.0 - 224.0.0.255
Reserved for special “well-known” multicast addresses.
224.0.1.0 - 238.255.255.255
Globally-scoped (Internet-wide) multicast addresses.
239.0.0.0 - 239.255.255.255
Administratively-scoped (local) multicast addresses.

The advantages of multicast broadcasting is reduction in bandwidth usage, as its only ever
one stream of data and the clients "join" the stream.

One of the disadvantages of Multicast are that if your router or switch doesn't support IGMP sniffing you will flood your lan with multicast traffic, older HP switches are prone to this behaviour, newer HP switches can be configured to behave themselves instead of bringing your network to a grinding halt.

So to sum up broadcasting and entire transponder of say the BBC channels wouldn't eat up much bandwidth at all. 

Unicast
This is a one to one connection to the TV server/streaming server and each unique connection adds to the bandwidth consumed.

now a standard definition broadcast will consume in its raw broadcast format around 3 - 4 megabits/sec and a HD broadcast up to 8 or more megabits/sec.

Now without doing the mathematics you will have realised that you'll soon flood a 100Mbit lan link with stream data. Which is true but there are things you can do to reduce this to make it very workable in a LAN.

There are many different ways you can broadcast your TV on your lan but I've found these two the simplest and most reliable.

How to do it 



first off there is Mumudvb which is available under Linux for quite a few different distributions, including the Raspberry Pi

http://www.mumudvb.net/


this extremely small piece of software will allow you to multicast your TV channels using a very simple configuration file and using very cheap USB adapters, bear in mind you will need a separate tuner for each frequency/transponder you want to broadcast, ours here in Wales where I live is Preseli and it has 6 transponders.

698000000 khz
738000000 khz
770000000 khz
730000000 khz
786000000 khz

as of 2nd May 2016


This simple configuration file below I used to broadcast the 786Mhz digital tv transponder across my network, some 31 channels in all, on a single usb NOVA-T stick

#For DVB-T if the bandwith is 8MHz you don't have to set other parameters
card=0
freq=786
port_http=9091 <---anything already="" font="" isn="" like="" t="" taken="" that="" you="">
timeout_no_diff=1000
dvr_thread
rewrite_pat=1
rtp_header=1
check_status=1
pol=h
srate=27500
autoconfiguration=full
autoconf_radios=1
autoconf_pid_update=0
autoconf_ip4_header=239.10
multicast_ttl=2
multicast_auto_join=1
unicast=1
ip_http=192.168.1.175
sap=1  <-- broadcast="" can="" font="" pick="" so="" streams="" that="" them="" up="" vlc="" your="">

sap_default_group=MCAST


the items in bold are the things you'll need to change, obviously the frequency of the transmitter and the tuner card(s) you have, if you've only got one it will be 0 (zero) two and it will be 1 (one) etc... and the IP address of the computer which has the tuner card fitted. 

I wouldn't advise you setup six tuners on a home network unless your router understands multicasting (BT homehubs seem to)  otherwise you'll effectively kill your network for any other use......as all transponder frequencies pushed to individual multicast addresses would be well in excess of 80Mbit/sec, which is fine if you have 1Gbit connection but not 100Mbit....

a saner setup for home use would be TVheadend, which has a very simple web based front end which is setup very easily and with the newer versions above 4.1 you can even stream your tv in your browser .

https://tvheadend.org/projects/tvheadend

and there are clients out there for Android and iPhone/IOS, with TVheadend and one tuner you can tune to one transponder at a time, but that transponder will make all the channels on that transponder available, so say if one person in your house was watching BBC1, you could have another client watching BBC2 or any other BBC channel at the same time, but if one of the users decided they wanted to watch ITV it would kick off the other client tuned to BBC, so if you need all channels available at all times, you'd need more than one tuner, if you are never going to have more than three people using the tv streamer then you'd only need three tuners, as the likelihood is three transponders would serve the majority of the channels at any one time, you could possibly get away with two tuners, but you may get fights occurring with clients who want channels on other transponders. 


If you are intent on broadcasting the entire content of your local TV transmitter across your lan (as I am in the school I work in) then TVHeadend is the sanest approach, as it also allows DVR recordings which Mumudvb doesn't.

You'll need at least 6 tuners preferably PCI not USB such as the excellent TBS 6205 and a gigabit lan on the backbone of your lan, fortunately we have that where I work, remember with unicast you add to the bandwidth requirements with every client you serve.... so if 30 people each watched a channel it would be 30 x 3 megabits = 90 Megabits/sec if you upped that to 60 clients it would be 180 Mbits/sec, similarly if 30 people wanted to watch BBC1 simultaneously it would still be 3 - 4 megabits each, under multicast it would only EVER be 3 -4 Megabits regardless of how many clients you had, so for scalability multicast is the way to go.

You can serve multi channels with just one tuner lets just say for arguments sake the BBC transponder and that will allow as many clients per channel as your pc and lan can stand, watching or listening to any BBC broadcast.

You will need a very beefy computer to run TVheadend where that many people are going to stream from, I've specified an i7 top of the range 6 core beast with 3 TB of disk space and 16GB ram, because I'm going to transcode the video and audio streams into a lower quality and hence lower bandwidth, which takes CPU power.

I've managed to produce a perfectly respectable picture and sound consuming 400 - 500 kbit/sec on the VP8 video codec, which is fine for Windows 7 on Google Chrome .....So that is 1 Mbit/sec per two clients ......

Small tricks like only encoding one sound stream instead of stereo cuts it down a fair amount and I've found that setting the maximum bandwidth for sound at around 32kbit's in mono was fine, if you really needed stereo then 64kbit/sec was the bare minimum, without noticing poor sound.

I've calculated that at maximum bandwidth on our lan a PC of that calibre could in theory stream to 300 + clients at the same time, realistically the client count will be much lower in the low 50s I should imagine, but you do need the extra grunt if a lot of people hit the server at the same time.

I've yet to implement this but my tests so far have shown that it works very well. So once I've successfully implemented this I will come back and post my configs and setup and some real world figures to back up my theory......


Watch this space !!!


Update

I've since implemented this configuration and successfully streamed to over 75 clients and the CPU barely got above 25% across all cores, and was streaming to all of those clients at 1Mbit so the Gigabit backbone peaked at around 65 - 70Mbits and with a theoretical limit of 125Mbits on a Gigabit switch.... I suspect it would support at least 100 clients comfortably........


If anyone requires help on implementing this solution please leave a comment and I'll get back to you with the configuration and streaming profiles