Produkte | KAP | Kontakt

ZY Viewer

Downloads program data and plays video streams from Set Top Boxes in Windows.

This windows player is intended to work with all Set Top Boxes that are supported by those strange Android and Apple IOs apps that sometimes show up and disappear again... They stream video/audio from your STB to your iPhone or Android thing. Mostly they are intended to work with cheap Set Top Boxes.


Interlude - How it works and what it does and why not.

This is the situation we have: a Set Top Box (1), a PC/Notebook/Tablet/Phone/Device-Thingy (2) and this software (3) running on (2).

All zy viewer does is

  • query the STB which channels it knows and displaying this data to the user
  • waiting for the user to choose a channel (with some nice GUI sugar)
  • send a command to the STB to start streaming this channel
  • then keep the stream alive (a repeated "hey, keep it alive"-command) and
  • start a media player on (2) to display the stream.

To sum it up: zy viewer does almost nothing. Especially it does not create, transport, modify or in any other way touch the stream data.

So almost all problems are caused by the shitty implementation of the STB software. There is almost nothing documented. The command interface looks like seven monkeys on cold turkey. Real programmers would commit suicide if their name would become public being involved with that crap. Perhaps the reason why it is not documented. Any chance to get it fixed? Any chance to get the documentation?

And the player problems? Try all those phone apps. They all suffer from the same problems the PC player has. I never saw HD on my Android phone, I have some problems with "normal" streams, too. I'm not sure where the root of the problems is. It could be the crappy streaming server on the STB. It could be the missing experience on the player software developers side. I mean, DVB SAT streams and DVB HD SAT streams are fairly new stuff. We only have them for, like, since 1994 and 2005. So, new! You see?

VLC never managed to pick up anything. mplayer does it best to play normal streams, sometimes even fails on that. mplayer never played any HD stream. mvp works like VLC: nothing never. They all dump error messages that might help monks to meditate but not programmers to find reasons. I contacted support, they did not success in anything. So...

Conclusion? I don't know. It could be a big failure on my side. Too much vodca. Might be. But honestly: I think it is cheap chinese crap made to a state that is "enough to sell" and then forget it. Consumer stuff no one cares about after sale.

Make your own decision.

End of Interlude


As far as I see they all have one fact in common: there is no windows player support. So I think it is time for a change.

Tested Boxes

  • abcom Cryptobox 650H
  • You report will extend the list!

Installation / First start / Usage

Go to settings page and wait until the hostname appears. It should /be an URL. If it does not appear after 30 seconds there is a problem... STB turned on? In the same network segment? Try entering the address by hand.

Now the connect button should work. It will need some time to download all STB data. Wait! Don't click around. Red message shows that there is still some data pending. It turns green after downloading all data.

Now enjoy.

For streaming to the PC this application has to be running! Otherwise stream will stop after some seconds...

Installation

Create a folder, unzip the downloaded file(s) into it.

Creates some data in your user directory, no registry manipulation.

Download

zyviewer.zip

 

 

 

2006-04-21 | Ein quittengelb -Design