BATC Forum

As my shack is impossible for my partner to access, I attempted to demonstrate QO100 reception on PD4 using remote control from her laptop using WiFi.

The remote control screen worked fine & I selected the beacon & streaming. I opened VLC on her laptop for the network stream & was pleasantly surprised to be able to watch & hear the beacon. I'm always surprised when something works on a computer, especially a computer on a network.

Looking at the Goonhilly band monitor, I selected an SR333 signal & it locked for decode fine, but nothing came through to VLC. I tried another SR333 signal & that decoded fine too, but nothing on VLC again. I tried the beacon again & it worked.

Why no other VLC play except from the beacon?

Graham

Did you reset VLC (stop and play) after selecting each station? VLC gets confused when the video coding changes. The beacon is H.264, so if the SR333 stations were H.265, VLC would not show the H.265 video until reset.

Brian

I tried restarting the network stream in VLC and I tried restarting VLC and the network stream, but got nowhere with the SR333 signals.

I'm guessing it might be a capacity issue with the WiFi. There is also a WiFi "booster" which presumably reduces the WiFi capacity further. What puzzles me is that a big fat signal like the beacon works fine and the narrower signals don't.

I'll have another try when there are more stations on the band and see if I can make sense of it. I have tried local network streaming with just hard wired Ethernet before and it seemed to work, but I didn't make notes about the types of signals I tried.

I'll make a note of the video coding the next time I try it.

73 Graham

Hi Graham

I think that the most likely culprit is VLC on the laptop; unlikely to be network issues.

Is it the latest version?

Have you seen it play H265 video before?

Even stop and start sometimes does not reset VLC completely. Close and re-open normally does.

H265 can take a while to start playing, so the best thing would be to try a long stable signal. Perhaps try watching tonight's (Thursday evening) net at 8pm?

Dave G8GKQ

I didn't make notes about whether H265 worked.

The PD4 software version is the latest.

I'll have another go with VLC and restart it from scratch.

Thanks for the advice.

73 Graham

I have tried an SR333 H264 signal from Mike G1LWX today and remote VLC decoded that fine, sound and vision. His H265 decoded sound only. On the laptop I was using, the version of VLC is 2.1.6.

On another PC with VLC ver 3.0.10, I just decoded DEL9DAC using SR250 H265, sound and vision fine.

So perhaps I have a problem with the older version of VLC? Looks like you were quite right Dave!

73 Graham

That version of VLC is 7, yes, 7 years old. How old is the laptop?

I don't recall how old the laptop is. Older than the VLC I guess!

73 Graham

Another way to watch something on a windows computer is to use Remote Desktop. This will allow you to control a remote computer. Both computers need to be running Windows Pro and be on the same network. If you have a computer in you shack viewing the output at the moment then it should be possible to see on the other laptop. (provided they are Windows pro not home) You also have to enable it in settings.

Martin G8LCE

Martin,

I have used it in the past and it worked very well.

I mostly run Linux these days after mounting frustration with Windows. I have kept one Windows PC for Minitioune though.

73 Graham