I’m an Australian living in Germany, I’d like to build a router primarily for IPTV use in order to receive TV from the UK, US, AU and to also just provide a local VPN tunnel for Germany too. I have a number of Smart TVs around the home, as well as kids watching on tablets and some FireTV sticks etc.
I want to control all aspects of foreign TV at router level. That way i can just open one app populated with all the m3u lists for live TV and that all the smart tv apps (Hulu, BBC, Nine.com.au etc) all just work on the TV with no other interaction (switching VPNs etc)
The home network is all running AVM Fritz gear, its solid and has no issues with connection on a 300MB Cable link.
I’d like to build an inline router specifically to manage the IPTV functions of the home. It would need to be able to:
1/ Maintain 4 x OpenVPN tunnels, each pointing to UK, AU, DE and US
2/ Route the TV request URLs to the relevant Tunnels using “VPN and WAN Routing Policy” https://docs.openwrt.melmac.net/vpn-policy-routing/
I already made some simple tests using an OrangePi R1 (that i already had lying around) and it seems to work and route, but of course I only had one port to test with and there were no VLAN functions available in the OpenWRT build for that device. Now I need to select a good router with 4 or more ports so I can setup a port for each OpenVPN and to enable VLANS as per this doc:
Without looking deep I had mistakenly ordered a TP-Link WR940N from Amazon for just Euro20, but when it arrived and I looked deeper I found this: https://openwrt.org/toh/tp-link/tl-wr940n so I returned it without opening or testing as I assumed it would not allow me to:
3/ Run Luci
4/ Have capability for OpenWRT future releases
5/ Be able to run more functions if I were to add them.
So My question is:
What would be a good router for my purpose without needing to spend a lot of money?
I am considering this: Edgerouter X https://openwrt.org/toh/ubiquiti/edgerouter_x_er-x_ka
It seems to have a good amount of Flash and RAM and costs about 50 Euros and I don't need any wireless functions (wired only keeps this simple for me too). But I’d love to hear opinions of others or whether anyone has this setup working well and on what hardware.