Utility: Web Radio and TV Encoder

[kha]

Originally Posted by michaeldjcox

I am an idiot

I hard coded to test your problem in my environment and left it in.

Will fix later today

Hi Michael,

No problem!

I also noticed that the grabber stops working if channel number is larger than 199. To keep different lineups straight and not to remap them in SageTV I have few channels with numbers 1001 and above. These channels can be tuned fine with your plugin encoder, but grabber does not seem to like these large numbers. Is it possible to overcome this limitation and increase maximum channel number to, say 9999.

Regards,
Michael.

[michaeldjcox]

Try this one.

You may find 9999 channels makes it slow to start the way its currently coded.

See how you get on.

Michael

[kha]

Originally Posted by michaeldjcox

Try this one.

You may find 9999 channels makes it slow to start the way its currently coded.

See how you get on.

Michael

Hi Michael,

Thank you. I finally had a chance to try your new patch.

It definitely allowed me to move forward. When dates are hardcoded in the web page links, I can get program listings. However, once I use _DATE_ variable, I am not getting anything. Has something changed in the implementation of _DATE_ variable? I know it used to work for me in the past. Could you please check?

Also, I noticed that now the grabber works even with large channel numbers. You hinted that the start time may be long. Are you referring to the time it takes to change channels or something else. I noticed that channel change time for me is quite long, but I did not debug this issue any further to see if a delay is attributed to SageTV itself or webfeedencoder.

Regards,
Michael

[michaeldjcox]

Hi,

On the date thing - I feel there is a fix I made that may have got lost while I was setting up a code branch to maintain 0.9.3.

My previous version control strategy has let me down and I cannot find what that was.

We will need to debug from scratch.

Is there anything useful in the grabber.log for a failed run with _DATE_ please?

Please reply with that and your channel properties.

Thanks,

Michael

[kha]

Originally Posted by michaeldjcox

Hi,

On the date thing - I feel there is a fix I made that may have got lost while I was setting up a code branch to maintain 0.9.3.

My previous version control strategy has let me down and I cannot find what that was.

We will need to debug from scratch.

Is there anything useful in the grabber.log for a failed run with _DATE_ please?

Please reply with that and your channel properties.

Thanks,

Michael

Hi Michael,

Channel properties file is attached.

The log file contains the following lines:
Jul 31, 2009 10:21:25 PM main uk.co.mdjcox.utils.TmpFileManager$1 run INFO: Tidy up file C:\webfeedencoder\tmp\channel.1056.day.6.html
...

I do see the files being created in tmp directory but they do not contain any information and it's unclear to me if _DATE_ variable gets resolved properly.

Thank you for your help.

Regards,
Michael.

[michaeldjcox]

Sorry Michael been on away on holiday for last two weeks.

Will take a look at this.

Michael

[kha]

Originally Posted by michaeldjcox

Sorry Michael been on away on holiday for last two weeks.

Will take a look at this.

Michael

No problem,

Thank you very much for your help!

Regards,
Michael.

[michaeldjcox]

Hi Michael,

Originally Posted by kha

Hi Michael,
However, once I use _DATE_ variable, I am not getting anything. Has something changed in the implementation of _DATE_ variable? I know it used to work for me in the past. Could you please check?

Its a config problem with your properties:

urlDateFormat=ddmmyy

should read

urlDateFormat=ddMMyy

(lower case mm means minutes - not months)

Sorry for not spotting this weeks ago.

Regards,

Michael

[kha]

Originally Posted by michaeldjcox

Hi Michael,




Its a config problem with your properties:

urlDateFormat=ddmmyy

should read

urlDateFormat=ddMMyy

(lower case mm means minutes - not months)

Sorry for not spotting this weeks ago.

Regards,

Michael

Hi Michael,

Thank you very much! This fixed my problem. I don't know how I missed that myself

Once again, thank you very much for your help!

Best Regards,
Michael.

[kha]

Originally Posted by kha

Hi Michael,

Thank you very much! This fixed my problem. I don't know how I missed that myself

Once again, thank you very much for your help!

Best Regards,
Michael.

Hi Michael,

Now, as the grabber started working for me, I noticed a discrepancy in the downloaded schedule and the created xmltv file.

My channel property file contains lines
day0.url=http://192.168.2.11/xml-epg.php?id=163&date=_DATE_
day1.url=http://192.168.2.11/xml-epg.php?id=163&date=_DATE_
...

I was expecting that day0 would correspond to Sunday, day1 to Monday etc. Instead, I noticed that day0 downloads Sunday schedule but gives it today's date (html file in tmp directory) and writes out xmltv file with shifted schedule: day1 becomes current date + 1, etc.

Could you please check if you observe the same behavior from your side?

Regards,
Michael.

[michaeldjcox]

In your props

startday=1

tells it that the the day0 URL is Sunday, day1 URL is Monday etc...

however because you have specified a _DATE_ this means that the day0 URL will be considered to be today, day1 tomorrow

I think unexpected behaviour will result from using both _DATE_ and startday.

I could be wrong as I'm not looking at the code at the moment bu I reckon using startday is not appropriate for you as the exact dates are being specified.

Regards,

Michael

[kha]

Originally Posted by michaeldjcox

In your props

startday=1

tells it that the the day0 URL is Sunday, day1 URL is Monday etc...

however because you have specified a _DATE_ this means that the day0 URL will be considered to be today, day1 tomorrow

I think unexpected behaviour will result from using both _DATE_ and startday.

I could be wrong as I'm not looking at the code at the moment bu I reckon using startday is not appropriate for you as the exact dates are being specified.

Regards,

Michael

Hi Michael,

Thank you for looking into this.

I have removed startday statement. However, downloaded information is very strange... If I look in the tmp directory, 7 downloaded files (grabber ran on Aug25th) have the following assigned dates: day0 - today - Aug 25, day1 - tomorrow - Aug 26, day2 - Aug 28, day3 - Aug 31, day4 - Sep 4, day5 - Sep 9, day6 - Sep 15. As you can see, day shift increases in progression. Do you know what the problem may be?

Regards,
Michael.

[michaeldjcox]

Originally Posted by kha

I have removed startday statement. However, downloaded information is very strange... If I look in the tmp directory, 7 downloaded files (grabber ran on Aug25th) have the following assigned dates: day0 - today - Aug 25, day1 - tomorrow - Aug 26, day2 - Aug 28, day3 - Aug 31, day4 - Sep 4, day5 - Sep 9, day6 - Sep 15. As you can see, day shift increases in progression. Do you know what the problem may be?

Hi,

That has the smell of a bug. Can't understand why I haven't seen that one with my own channels. I shall look into it and get back with a patch . Will try and put some more debug output in to so we can get more info from the logs.

Michael

[kha]

Originally Posted by michaeldjcox

Hi,

That has the smell of a bug. Can't understand why I haven't seen that one with my own channels. I shall look into it and get back with a patch . Will try and put some more debug output in to so we can get more info from the logs.

Michael

Thank you very much for your help!

Michael.

[michaeldjcox]

Fix for the date substition problem...

[wayner]

Is it possible to use this to view IP cameras through Sage? I have two IP cameras that I would love to be able to watch on extenders, Placeshifters, etc? These IP cameras are from different manufacturers and typically use Java or ActiveX within a Web browser to view the video.

If not an IP camera then how about a webcam?

And as a last case scenario can you get VLC, or other apps, to stream/encode whatever shows up on your PC screen over the net? If so could you then set up your PC so that it has browser windows and webcam windows open and viewing the cameras?

[michaeldjcox]

Originally Posted by wayner

Is it possible to use this to view IP cameras through Sage? I have two IP cameras that I would love to be able to watch on extenders, Placeshifters, etc? These IP cameras are from different manufacturers and typically use Java or ActiveX within a Web browser to view the video.

If not an IP camera then how about a webcam?

And as a last case scenario can you get VLC, or other apps, to stream/encode whatever shows up on your PC screen over the net? If so could you then set up your PC so that it has browser windows and webcam windows open and viewing the cameras?

Hi,

I've got my webcam working.

The same principal to any device that considers itself to be a DirectShow device.

I think SageTV logs print out such devices on start up. Also the VLC gui can be used to provide a list under the "File->Open capture device" Be worth seeing if your devices appear there.

VLC also has a screen capture mode and forwards that as video

If VLC can do it then I reckon webfeedencoder can do it.

I don't have any IP cameras but try googling VLC and IP cameras.

As for the screen - I'm going to try that tomorrow.

Michael

[wayner]

Thanks Michael - I will try to play around and see if I can make it work.

So you are saying that as long as you can set up a network stream in VLC then you should be able to use webfeedencoder to view it, correct?

One more thing - I guess your webcam has to be connected to the PC running VLC - you wouldn't be able to connect to remote webcams on your lan, correct? But I guess you could solve this by running VLC on every PC with a webcam and streaming to a different port?

[kha]

Originally Posted by michaeldjcox

Fix for the date substition problem...

Hi Michael,

Thank you very much for the fix. It worked!

Best Regards,
Michael

[michaeldjcox]

Originally Posted by wayner

Thanks Michael - I will try to play around and see if I can make it work.

So you are saying that as long as you can set up a network stream in VLC then you should be able to use webfeedencoder to view it, correct?

One more thing - I guess your webcam has to be connected to the PC running VLC - you wouldn't be able to connect to remote webcams on your lan, correct? But I guess you could solve this by running VLC on every PC with a webcam and streaming to a different port?

Screen is harder than I had hoped. Seems vlc only knows how to pipe screen to MP4 , or WMV file. Sage cannot seem to read the file size even though it is growing. Different encoder needed I guess to make this work.

On your other question - I don't think so - although VLC can stream to a host port in a variety of formats. So what you say could be possibly.

I have not found anything with VLC that I haven't had to struggle to get right though...

Michael