[deleted]
Hi, I have an openvpn bridged (tap) network between two homes. I am looking for help with tivos and related accessories. My openvpn setup is running on linux (within vmware on two macs, one at each home). I used the basic instructions on the openvpn tutorials. Not to get into too much detail on tivos, but here is what I have:
2 Tivo Premieres (main DVR product) - one is an XL4 (4 tuners) in Home 1 and the other is in Home 2
1 Tivo Stream (allows you to stream from a tivo to an ipad) - in Home 2
1 Tivo Mini (allows you to stream recordings and live TV from an XL4 to another TV) - in Home 2
Tivo has two ways of using their devices across a network - one is to transfer the actual recording and the other is to stream it. I have used openvpn for over a year to transfer shows between the two tivo premieres. However, I have never been able to stream them from home to home. I have been able to stream a show from a tivo in Home 1 to the Tivo Stream in Home 2 to an ipad in Home 2 (but with spotty quality). My bandwidth between homes is ~30Mbps. Ultimately, I am trying to get the Tivo Mini in Home 2 to stream from the Tivo in Home 1.
Based on my internet research, the tivo products seem to discover each other using Bonjour. I have also found in various discussions that a bridged OpenVPN setup may not pass Bonjour correctly (mDNS issues). However, my devices all see each other fine. I've tried to find out more about how Tivos stream but people dont seem to know. Does anyone have any thoughts on what might be missing from my VPN to get streaming to work?
Thanks for any help!
janjust
why run openvpn inside a vm on a mac? you can run it natively on the Mac as well - and esp the combination of bridging+vmware (or any kind of virt machine manager) can cause problems.
[deleted]
Thanks for your reply. When I set this up originally, I couldn't find any instructions on implementing a bridged VPN using macs. I looked again and still can't seem to find anything. Is there a way to do it? If not is there any way to check if the virtual machine is the problem? How confident are you that this is the case? Thanks again.
stb
Did you ever get the Tivo mini to play content from the remote Tivo? I'm trying the same here, and I can neither use Live TV nor play any programs, even those in standard def. (Main Tivo is a Roamio Pro.)
A Tivo mini next to the Roamio Pro is working just fine.
From various threads on the Tivo forums, it seems Tivo has implemented latency checks to explicitly stop use over VPN, but I'm not certain that that is really the main problem.
I can copy shows off the main Tivo to my desktop with better than realtime performance, usually at around 3 MBytes per second.
OpenVPN 2.3.4 is running on a Linux and on a FreeBSD system, respectively, with lots of horsepower for encryption.
[deleted]
Hi, I was never able to get I to work. Since this post I have modified the setup to have two native Linux systems, one at each home. Also upgraded bandwidth at both homes - home 1 has 75mbps down and 50 up, home 2 has 50 down and 5 up (wonder if the up in home 2 could be a problem, but I am just trying to stream down from home 1 to home 2). I don't think it is latency, as I am able to get it to pretty low levels (40ms if I recall) with this setup. I am still convinced that the answer lies in some type of service that is not adequately passed through the bridge.
I recently just started thinking about this again. I actually don't know much about Linux so I am trying to read up on iptables to see if that might help. Also, although I haven't tried it recently, the fact that I was able to stream to an ipad makes me think there should be a solution to this. If you have any ideas, I'd be happy to tinker w setups with you to see what might work. Regardless, please let me know if you make progress. Getting fios this summer in home 2 so that should address the upstream bandwidth issue.
