R5000-HD capture via USB2 & SageTV

[Kirby]

Yes you can get OTA recording to work, it takes some trickery to do so though, in order to get Sage to get the proper channels and tune properly.

As for which D* receiver to get, I cant help much there, as I have Dish receivers.

[briands]

Originally Posted by Kirby

Yes you can get OTA recording to work, it takes some trickery to do so though, in order to get Sage to get the proper channels and tune properly.

As for which D* receiver to get, I cant help much there, as I have Dish receivers.

Kirby, I am leaning toward Dish since they appear to have the better HD lineup... what receivers do you recomend (SD and HD?)

[Kirby]

I have a 211, 411, and 622. 211 and 411 are identical with the 411 lacking the ethernet port (future planned use, but dont hold your breathe). For SD receiver, I dont have a clue. I probably wouldnt screw with SD receivers. If you have 1 HD receiver, the second receiver fee is $5 if its SD, and $6 for HD. Might as well do the HD to get all the channels, at least thats what I do (did).

[briands]

I assume you have not had all of these receivers modded and are capturing some of them through SD capture cards. Are you using USB UIRT to tune the non-modded box(s)?

My plan would be to start out capturing via s-vid to my current 150, 250 and 500 cards until I can sneak the mod into one of the boxes.

[Kirby]

The 211 and 411 are modded. The 622 I use for standalone DVR usage, but might consider selling (bought before the whole Sage solution came about).

[briands]

If its something really important and you have guests to watch, do you use Sage or the 622?

[Kirby]

Sage.. I'm looking at selling the 622. Of course if we are talking right now, 622, because I am transfering to a new server machine,

[GKusnick]

One more question: given that the R5000-compatible DirecTV STBs don't receive MPEG4, is there a way to find out in advance what channels/programming I'll be missing with this? I.e. is there a list somewhere of which DirecTV channels are MPEG2 (and therefore recordable by the R5000) and which are MPEG4 (and therefore not recordable)? I wasn't able to find any information about this on the DirecTV website.

Thanks.

[Ron]

Originally Posted by GKusnick

One more question: given that the R5000-compatible DirecTV STBs don't receive MPEG4, is there a way to find out in advance what channels/programming I'll be missing with this? I.e. is there a list somewhere of which DirecTV channels are MPEG2 (and therefore recordable by the R5000) and which are MPEG4 (and therefore not recordable)? I wasn't able to find any information about this on the DirecTV website.

Thanks.

AFAIK, the DirecTV channels that are MPEG4 are the HD locals in your area and the Regional Sports Networks HD broadcasts. Everything else is MPEG2.

[dbfresh23]

Originally Posted by Ron

AFAIK, the DirecTV channels that are MPEG4 are the HD locals in your area and the Regional Sports Networks HD broadcasts. Everything else is MPEG2.

Unless you are in the NY or LA area which I think are the only two areas that are currently still broadcasting locals in MPEG2. Positive about NY - pretty sure about LA.

[Kirby]

Originally Posted by dbfresh23

Unless you are in the NY or LA area which I think are the only two areas that are currently still broadcasting locals in MPEG2. Positive about NY - pretty sure about LA.

They would have to be in LA too, or there would be plenty of HD Tivo west coasters fuming!

[Kirby]

So I havent been able to do much testing on this the past few days, but last night I did notice that when I had 2 recordings going, one was going to a local drive on the server (E: ) and the other to a UNC path over the network (\\library\dir1). In the R5000 app, the local recording showed a status of something like "6301, E:\BigBrother.mpg" whereas the UNC recording just had "6302, " instead of showing "6302, \\library\dir1\NFLPreSeason.mpg"

The last response I got from tech support at Sage indicated that there probably was no way to fix this issue, other than just to record locally, but this morning my creative juices got flowing and I wonder how a NFS mount would work? I know a Windows Mapped drive cannot interact with services, but what about NFS mounts? If they are service-friendly, then I might give that a shot and see how it works. Plus wouldnt the NFS system operate a lot faster for transferring files over the net? Its been years since I used NFS (back on some old HP mainframes) so I dont recall what the overhead is like.

[cejota3]

Kirby, I'll be the first to admit that I was only VERY QUICKLY skimming the past few posts to learn more about the R5000, so I'm not really sure what you are trying to do, but when I saw ...

Originally Posted by Kirby

I know a Windows Mapped drive cannot interact with services, but what about NFS mounts?

... and I thought, "No, that is not quite correct". Most Windows services use the "local system" account, and it is true that the local system account cannot utilize network resources (such as a mapped drive). However, if you change the "Log On As" property of the service to a user other than local system, then that service should be able to use network resources. Obviously, the user that you pick will need the proper permissions on the network resource you are trying to utilize.

To make this really simple (and please realize this could raise some security risks if you're not careful), just make sure the "administrator" account on both Windows machines (the client and the server) have the same password, because generally the administrator user has privlidges to do and use everything (again, this just makes things easy). Then obviously just set up a drive mapping, like "g:", "x:", or whatever on the client machine to the shared folder on the server, and make sure that it "automatically reconnects on login" (and have this drive mapping log on with the same user you used before with the service).

I can say unequivolically (sp?) that I have gotten this to work with other Windows services that I use everyday at work and have nothing to do with Sage, media center computers, etc.

Of course, I see your post is already from a few weeks ago so hopefully you got this solved by now.

[jlindborg]

I'm throwing in the towel on my entire HD escapade soup-to-nuts and going back to 4 analog capture cards with regular DirecTV service again. No mas! Had a melt down this last weekend and both me and the wife decided it's not worth the money, effort and frustration for a few extra pixels. Had enough of being on the bleeding edge, heading for the back bench for a while...

[pilotguy7ca]

Originally Posted by jlindborg

I'm throwing in the towel on my entire HD escapade soup-to-nuts and going back to 4 analog capture cards with regular DirecTV service again. No mas! Had a melt down this last weekend and both me and the wife decided it's not worth the money, effort and frustration for a few extra pixels. Had enough of being on the bleeding edge, heading for the back bench for a while...

I have only recently come across this thread and the R5000 mod and have read through most of it and was going to go ahead and get it done until this post yesterday. Is it not as good as it sounds, an all digital connection straight to capture of HD complete with seamless integration with Sage?

There haven't been many posts lately so those with this mod would you still do it again or recommend someone get into it? I'm just not satisfied with my current capture of SD material and lack of HD capture.

The one thing that did concern me was the length of time between channel changes and then the problem with UNC paths. Is there any update or developments on this?

[GKusnick]

I took the plunge on this a couple of weeks ago. Unfortunately my R5000 unit arrived the day after the season finale of The Closer, so all I've been using it for so far is to record a bunch of back episodes of Battlestar Galactica. I haven't watched very many of them all the way through yet but those I have watched seem fine. In fact at this point the R5000 is the most reliable HD capture device I have; my three OTA cards (FusionHDTV5 RT Lite) are giving me all kinds of grief, with maybe a 50/50 chance of actually getting a watchable recording off any of them. I'm about to yank them all and try replacing them with Vbox USB units. But the R5000 works fine for me so far, so it stays.

For what it's worth, I don't use UNC paths for my recording dirs. They're all local to the SageTV server with the R5000.

[camTexas]

I've had good luck, no missed recordings, for several months now. I do get an occasional burp in the R5000 capture software and have to restart it. Maybe once every 3-4 weeks. My only gripe right now is not about the R5000 specifically but with H.264 support in general. All my locals come in H.264 as well as a few other DISH stations. I can't view these in SAGE yet. I know some have been successful with workarounds but I'm waiting on Sage 5.11 which I was told (quite a while ago now) would have H.264 native support. I hope it made the cut as I haven't heard much on it lately.

Hope this helps.

[GKusnick]

For those considering this, I should mention two setup quirks I ran into:

1. When you install the software, there's a good chance that Windows will mis-identify the R5000 device as an HP Digital TV Tuner and install the wrong driver. (This is apparently due to faulty configuration info in the HP driver package, which somehow made it out onto Windows Update before anybody noticed the error.) The solution to this, which worked for me, is detailed here.

2. By default, the R5000 capture software does not load automatically on boot. You must manually put a shortcut to it into your Start Menu > Startup folder if you want SageTV to come up in a working state whenever you reboot.

[Kirby]

Originally Posted by GKusnick

For those considering this, I should mention two setup quirks I ran into:

1. When you install the software, there's a good chance that Windows will mis-identify the R5000 device as an HP Digital TV Tuner and install the wrong driver. (This is apparently due to faulty configuration info in the HP driver package, which somehow made it out onto Windows Update before anybody noticed the error.) The solution to this, which worked for me, is detailed here.

2. By default, the R5000 capture software does not load automatically on boot. You must manually put a shortcut to it into your Start Menu > Startup folder if you want SageTV to come up in a working state whenever you reboot.

Or if you have more than 1 r5000 unit like me, I created a batch file that does this:

1. Calls r5000hd.exe
2. pauses 15 seconds for the first instance to run
3. Calls r5000hd.exe again
4. pauses another 15 seconds
5. starts the sagetv service

The server is also set to auto login on boot up, so the server can be rebooted and automatically goes through and starts up everything.

This same setup would be good for any r5000 user though, since you can force start the r5000 app prior to the sage server starting, otherwise, if the server/service starts before the r5000 does, you may not have your "tuner" listed as functioning.

[bhyman1]

So this seems to be working pretty well for people? H.264 playback support in Sage aside.