IPv4 multicast to HTTP relay

Relay an IPv4 multicast group out on a HTTP connection. Multicast group and port are specificed in the HTTP URL.

Running

$ /usr/local/bin/mcast2http 0.0.0.0 8080

Usage

usage: mcast2http.py [-h] [-v] [--fork] [--pidfile PIDFILE]
	     [--mcastip MCASTIP] [--timeout TIMEOUT] [--debug]
	     listen port

mcast2http - multicast to HTTP relay.

positional arguments:
listen             HTTP server listen address. (Examples: "0.0.0.0", "::")
port               HTTP server listen port. (Example: 8080)

optional arguments:
-h, --help         show this help message and exit
-v, --verbose      Be verbose.
--fork             Daemonize process.
--pidfile PIDFILE  File to write process identifier to when daemonized.
--mcastip MCASTIP  Source IPv4 address to join multicast groups from. NOTE!
	     If unset, a short TCP connection to google.com will
	     determine the local address.
--timeout TIMEOUT  Time out requests after this long. (Default: 2000
	     [milliseconds])
--debug            Enable debugging output.

Relay multicast data to HTTP clients.

Client example

$ curl http://localhost:8080/239.255.0.10/1234

This will send any data received from the group 239.255.0.10 on port 1234 to the HTTP client (in this case curl.)

Typical usage is for viewing DVB (MPEG2 TS) streams multicasted outside of your control (MuMuDVB, other head-ends) on a network without multicast routing.

A sample .m3u playlist file for VLC, XBMC/Kodi or similar players is included.

Back of envelope performance evaluation indicate that this will serve 100-500Mbit/s on recent hardware. Good enough for now.

Known issues

• There is no authorization or authentication.
• Content-Type is always application/octet-stream, should be configurable.
• The finishing log statements are never run, since SocketServer throws a socket.error with pipe closed when the client hangs up.

Installation

For now a simple Makefile will install (and overwrite) the daemon.

$ pip install daemon
$ sudo make install

The daemon is usually run under systemd with the service file included. It can also run standalone with --fork on non systemd systems.

Contact

Issue tracking on the github issue tracker.

Author: Lasse Karstensen <lasse.karstensen@gmailNO_SPAM_PLEASE.com>, November 2014.