R5000-HD proxy utility

[guho]

I've been having some frustrations (along with sufficient enjoyment!) with my two R5000HDs. I have the multi-instance software and use them with SageTV 6.4.8 in service mode. The issues I have been seeing is that recordings get restarted in the middle because SageTV thinks the network encoder died. Network encoders must respond within 15 seconds to any NOOP or GET_FILE_SIZE requests and the R5000 sometimes fails to do so. When I only use one R5000 I do not have a problem but with two it is once every two days that I miss the 1st half of a recording due to these bugs. To counter this I developed the attached proxy program. It catches all the NOOP and GET_FILE_SIZE and processes them so they do not stress out the R5000 software. On my setup (Core i7, Vista 32) it helps make things much more stable. Another thing is that the handles of the R5000HD.exe process (in task manager, add that column to see handles) keep increasing especially when watching LiveTV. This proxy addresses it as well. To use it set R5000HD app to listen at another port and use a command window to run the attached exe as: R5000HDProxy <input port> <output port>. The 1st arg is the port # SageTV talks to, the 2nd arg is port# R5000HD.exe listens at. Repeat this for every R5000HD instance in your setup.

Hope it helps anyone. The R5000HD software needs some improvement but this can help out in the meantime.

[briands]

Just saw your post over at AVS and thought I'd give this a go since my R5000 flakes out on some recordings...

Wanted to give this a try...

What sequence for migrating to this? Obviously I need to change the port in one of the two places. Do you run this before starting Sage and r5000?

Thanks!

[guho]

The ideal sequence of startup is R5000HD.exe, R5000HDProxy.exe and finally SageTV. I am fairly sure it is robust enough to deal with other sequences though.

Originally Posted by briands

Just saw your post over at AVS and thought I'd give this a go since my R5000 flakes out on some recordings...

Wanted to give this a try...

What sequence for migrating to this? Obviously I need to change the port in one of the two places. Do you run this before starting Sage and r5000?

Thanks!

[pilotguy7ca]

Thanks for the util. Will this allow us to use UNC with the r5000 units & livetv? I've never had them miss half a show, but they have occasionaly missed only the first 5 minutes of a show, should this help with this as well?

[guho]

Yes it will allow UNC. There is actually an optional third argument to the proxy (defaults to localhost), in case the R5000HD.exe runs on another machine than the proxy.

If the file does not grow for 5 minutes, SageTV restarts the recording. Occasionally I've seen it happen that R5000HD.exe gets a start command and the screen shows speed (kb/s) but the file stays at 0 bytes. This is a bug that only nextcomwireless can fix, unfortunately. The proxy mainly fixes the case where the recording is going on fine, but then SageTV thinks the encoder is dead due to non-responsiveness and restarts the recording.

Originally Posted by pilotguy7ca

Thanks for the util. Will this allow us to use UNC with the r5000 units & livetv? I've never had them miss half a show, but they have occasionaly missed only the first 5 minutes of a show, should this help with this as well?