Utility: Web Radio and TV Encoder

[zakrzep]

I just installed Webfeedencoder, followed all of the instructions. I added 1 radio station and nothing shows in the SageTV guide. Is that where it should be?

Thanks

Edit: Never mind, I found out what I did wrong.

[n9cqs]

Michael,
Last fall you posted a note asking if further development of this add-on was worth it. I would whole heartedly support and say that it is.... I have been interested in such an add on for Sage for a long time. Indeed, after going to Karneval in Cologne in 2003, I have wanted to be able to watch the Karneval happenings via WDR without looking at a "postage stamp" sized screen as part of my computer screen. Also, being able to record radio programs as simply as we can TV shows is a real plus. I like talk radio, and recording those as standard MP3 files means that it does not play on sage in the nice fashion that I can listen for a while, stop it and go back to it like a TV show. (Replay Radio has been a great companion to Sage for grabbing that kind of media, but not nearly as "integrated" as one would like).

I installed your plug-in last fall, and my sage system had several problems with it and I had to uninstall. I have not had the time to look at it but have been watching your development with interest.

I just installed a new copy on a fresh SAGE install on a totally separate computer to try it out before incorporating it to my main MEDIA machine. So far, tests are promising. My own manual add of WDR Fernsehen has proven to work (though with no schedules... have not gotten that far).

I did notice that the schedules for a couple of local radio stations were correct when I first installed them, but now are a number of hours off. I am not sure what that is all about.

I do have a question in all this. What sort of processing power do you recommend for transcoding to work smoothly? I have been running it on a Dell with 2.8 GHz single core and 2 GB memory, and audio (radio) works fine, but video is choppy even on extenders.

Please keep this project going. I am eager to get it to work well.

Jeff

[n9cqs]

One question that I do have right away is... on the configuration tool, there is a place to set a time zone. What time zone is set there? Mine, or the place where the radio/tv station is?

It seems that I run into trouble with the program schedules when I put in a station from Europe and set the time zone to European.

Thanks again for a great plug-in. I think it has only to get better!!
Jeff

[kha]

Originally Posted by michaeldjcox

Hi,

I think the time format is wrong:

timeformat=HH:mm

should be

timeformat=MMM dd, yyyy HH:mm

or possibly we need to add:

timestart.1=
timestart.2=
timestart.3=


Michael

Hi Michael,

The website from where I was succesfully getting schedules for the past few months has changed time format from "MMM dd, yyyy HH:mm" to UNIX timestamp (e.g., 1266373800) Does Webfeeder understand UNIX timestamp format automatically? How would the timeformat line look like?

Regards,
Michael.

[n9cqs]

I know that Michael is on vacation, but I am posting this either for when he gets back or if there is someone else out there who can help.

My EPG data is now at the right time, but as I get to the end of the week, I found Saturday programs starting today (Friday) and further investigation revealed that the EPG data is an entire day ahead. Any ideas on how to fix?

Thanks.
Jeff

[michaeldjcox]

Originally Posted by n9cqs

Michael,
Last fall you posted a note asking if further development of this add-on was worth it. I would whole heartedly support and say that it is.... I have been interested in such an add on for Sage for a long time.

Thankyou for the encouragement!

Originally Posted by n9cqs

I just installed a new copy on a fresh SAGE install on a totally separate computer to try it out before incorporating it to my main MEDIA machine. So far, tests are promising. My own manual add of WDR Fernsehen has proven to work (though with no schedules... have not gotten that far).

Cool

Originally Posted by n9cqs

I did notice that the schedules for a couple of local radio stations were correct when I first installed them, but now are a number of hours off. I am not sure what that is all about.

Are these added from www.radiotime.com or are they your own manual adds?

If they are radiotime compare the schedules with those listed on the radiotime web site for the station. Do they agree with webfeedencoder? Do they agree with the stations own published schedule?

Originally Posted by n9cqs

I do have a question in all this. What sort of processing power do you recommend for transcoding to work smoothly? I have been running it on a Dell with 2.8 GHz single core and 2 GB memory, and audio (radio) works fine, but video is choppy even on extenders.

I did most of the work on a dual core 1.8Ghz laptop with 2Gb of RAM and a 3Ghz single core pentium with 8Gb RAM. In both cases the use of CPU has been 20% at most when viewed in windows task manager.

I find that sometimes certain stations stutter or cannot be played. This is the internet and much of it is broken much of the time and is never going to be as reliable as regular radio. If the stuttering occurs across all your stations then its more likely to be related to your setup.

For example, whats your broadband connection like?

Also I have found that one of the parameters in the delivered tune.tv.windows.commands and tune.radio.windows.commands files is a bit extreme and was responsible for choppiness on the server. Edit those files and changes the "4000" to "800" and see if it makes a difference.

Hope this helps.

Let me know how you get on.

Michael

[michaeldjcox]

Originally Posted by n9cqs

One question that I do have right away is... on the configuration tool, there is a place to set a time zone. What time zone is set there? Mine, or the place where the radio/tv station is?

It seems that I run into trouble with the program schedules when I put in a station from Europe and set the time zone to European.

Thanks again for a great plug-in. I think it has only to get better!!
Jeff

The timezone should be the timezone that the schedules are published in.

So if you are pulling schedules from www.radiotime.com then that website usually presents schedules in your local time - unless you have asked it to do otherwise. It usually says in the top right what timezone the times are in. Your channels should have that timezone.

If you are getting schedules from anywhere else then it should just be the timezone the station schedule is published in - very likely to be the stations home timezone.

Michael

[michaeldjcox]

Originally Posted by kha

Hi Michael,

The website from where I was succesfully getting schedules for the past few months has changed time format from "MMM dd, yyyy HH:mm" to UNIX timestamp (e.g., 1266373800) Does Webfeeder understand UNIX timestamp format automatically? How would the timeformat line look like?

Regards,
Michael.

Hi Michael,

I assume you mean here the format of the start and stop times in the schedule rather than part of the URL to go to the schedule data.

The choices are:

Letter		Date or Time Component		Presentation	Examples
G	        Era designator			Text		AD
y		Year				Year		1996; 96
M		Month in year			Month		July; Jul; 07
w		Week in year			Number		27
W		Week in month			Number		2
D		Day in year			Number		189
d		Day in month			Number		10
F		Day of week in month		Number		2
E		Day in week			Text		Tuesday; Tue
a		Am/pm marker			Text		PM
H		Hour in day (0-23)		Number		0
k		Hour in day (1-24)		Number		24
K		Hour in am/pm (0-11)		Number		0
h		Hour in am/pm (1-12)		Number		12
m		Minute in hour			Number		30
s		Second in minute		Number		55
S		Millisecond			Number		978
z		Time zone			Gen timezone	Pacific Standard Time; PST; GMT-08:00
Z		Time zone			RFC822 timezone	-0800

1266373800

looks like seconds since 1st Jan 1970

to parse that try a time format string of

s

When I use that 1266373800 converts to Wed Feb 17 02:30:00 GMT 2010.

Let me know how you get on.

Michael

[michaeldjcox]

Originally Posted by n9cqs

My EPG data is now at the right time, but as I get to the end of the week, I found Saturday programs starting today (Friday) and further investigation revealed that the EPG data is an entire day ahead. Any ideas on how to fix?

Hi Jeff,

I need some further details to help.

Is this a radiotime station or a custom station?

If its the latter can you reply to this forum with the channel properties file for this station from your channels directory.

If its the former can you give me details of the station id e.g. s9999.

I will try to reproduce

Thanks,

Michael

[n9cqs]

Michael,

Thanks so much for your work. This plug-in is GREAT!!!!

I have gotten it working, solved all the problems I previously posted.

Most of my stations are coming right off of radiotime, so far. I am glad to know how to properly set the time zone, because knowing a bit of PHP, I am about to "translate" the WDR4 schedule using a PHP routine on my internal website so that your EPG harvest program can read it.

I have discovered a problem... which maybe you already know about. I have DISH network, which lists local stations and EPG information for TV stations all over the country. Two of the radio stations that I took from "Radiotime" are WLS Chicago and WSB Atlanta. Both of those stations have a TV station with the same call letters. When I first inserted them, the station EPG information inserted correctly. However, after the next EPG update, the TV station with the same call letters (WSB, WLS) put EPG information from the TV broadcast schedule in for the radio station. I was able to solve it by going to your configuration tool and rename the radio station call letters (WLS-AM and WSB-AM). I was surprised when I got home to find that SageTV told me that the Kim Komando show I recorded last night from WSB had been changed to a simple "timed recording" and did not understand why until I looked on the WSB schedule and found a bunch of TV shows!

Another question: When I look at "devices", I see only TV tuners listed. Any way to have those also include the inputs from sound cards? I have a local radio station that I would like to record, but it is not streamed. I would like to be able to use a tuner to dump audio into one of the "line in" ports of the computer and then use it the same way as a streamed radio station. I suppose I could use a different computer and set VLC to stream the station to the Sage computer, but that sounds like lots of extra work!

Thanks again. Keep up the good work. I really like this plug-in.

Jeff

[michaeldjcox]

Originally Posted by n9cqs

Thanks so much for your work. This plug-in is GREAT!!!!

You're welcome.

Originally Posted by n9cqs

I have discovered a problem... which maybe you already know about.

Yes I think that one was reported before. I think I advised changing the radio station callsign as you have done here. I'm still a bit unclear - did that completely solve the problem for you?

Originally Posted by n9cqs

Another question: When I look at "devices", I see only TV tuners listed. Any way to have those also include the inputs from sound cards? I have a local radio station that I would like to record, but it is not streamed. I would like to be able to use a tuner to dump audio into one of the "line in" ports of the computer and then use it the same way as a streamed radio station. I suppose I could use a different computer and set VLC to stream the station to the Sage computer, but that sounds like lots of extra work!

This is not possible at the moment as I deliberately filter out audio only devices from devices.

Head-slap moment!

What I should do instead is allow audio only devices and treat them like radio stations and provide a logo in the video stream.

As a consequence this will probably mean my FM tuner stick could be used too.

This is going to be simple to do so I will definitely include this in the next version.

Many thanks for your feedback.

Michael

[n9cqs]

Originally Posted by michaeldjcox

Yes I think that one was reported before. I think I advised changing the radio station callsign as you have done here. I'm still a bit unclear - did that completely solve the problem for you?

Yes, that took care of it. Thanks!

Originally Posted by michaeldjcox

This is not possible at the moment as I deliberately filter out audio only devices from devices.

Head-slap moment!

What I should do instead is allow audio only devices and treat them like radio stations and provide a logo in the video stream.

As a consequence this will probably mean my FM tuner stick could be used too.

This is going to be simple to do so I will definitely include this in the next version.

Many thanks for your feedback.

Michael

Well, regarding audio sources... I have several computers in my house, some Linux, some Windows. I could also use VLC to stream the tuner from the line-in on one of those machines to my SageTV machine, if I could figure out the command line commands to get VLC to stream the Line-IN. Then, I could actually set up a RadioTime input, change the URL to my local machine that is doing the streaming and it would be all set. RadioTime lists lots of stations that do not currently live-stream... and they even give the schedules of those stations. It would be a simple matter to change the URL to a local stream from another machine. I suppose a session of VLC could even do it on the same machine as SageTV, but that sounds like an invitation for trouble considering the use of VLC for the WebEncoder.

Thanks again for your work!
Jeff

[michaeldjcox]

Major breakthrough on the IP camera front this morning.

(thanks for Jabroni for the test URL).

Finally got your webcam image on SageTV!

Does not require any additional software other than SageTV and webfeedencoder.

Some small changes are required to webfeedencoder. I plan to ship a new release with just this change and the n9cqs's issue which involves a fix in the same area.

The release should also allow latest version of VLC to be used and reduces the number of VLC sessions required for radio to one rather than two.

Michael

[n9cqs]

Michael,

Well, I was able to stream the output of a radio tuner via another computer running VLC on my LAN to WFE/SageTV. The station has an entry on RadioTime, allowing easy access to the other information, but does not do live-streaming. I set up the station using RadioTime (using the "RadioTime number"). I then replaced the RadioTime generated tuner URL with my internal LAN URL carrying the stream from the tuner in the other room and it works great.

So my idea is... if WFE could be used to commands to the tuner, the following would be possible:

Each station could be set up individually, just like now. The tuner that supplies the stream would always be the same, but WFE would send a signal to the tuner telling it to change to the appropriate station. It is very much like SageTV tunes satellite tuners now such as Dish Network... the same tuner is used, but each station is an individual channel with the appropriate program information.

Keep up the good work. Thanks for all you are doing. I'm really enjoying this plug-in!

Jeff

[michaeldjcox]

Originally Posted by n9cqs

Each station could be set up individually, just like now. The tuner that supplies the stream would always be the same, but WFE would send a signal to the tuner telling it to change to the appropriate station. It is very much like SageTV tunes satellite tuners now such as Dish Network... the same tuner is used, but each station is an individual channel with the appropriate program information.

The tune and detune operations are stored in the "commands" directory. You can generate new ones and generate a new "type" of channel that uses those tune and detune commands. The command files can be made to do just about anything.

I've tried to make this all as flexible as possible.

Michael

[SteveW]

Originally Posted by michaeldjcox

Major breakthrough on the IP camera front this morning.

(thanks for Jabroni for the test URL).

Finally got your webcam image on SageTV!

Does not require any additional software other than SageTV and webfeedencoder.

Some small changes are required to webfeedencoder. I plan to ship a new release with just this change and the n9cqs's issue which involves a fix in the same area.

The release should also allow latest version of VLC to be used and reduces the number of VLC sessions required for radio to one rather than two.

Michael

Can't wait to give it a go! Thanks for the effort you put into that Michael. Appreciate it....

[dhodgesnvl]

Hi - I have a 64 bit mac os 10.6. SageMC runs fine but I can't get the webfeedencoder to install. java -jar webfeedencoder_v0_9_5.jar pops up an errox box saying "error in opening zip file"

Is there a way to install this on MAC?

the log says"
cat webfeedencoder_0_9_5.log
Feb 28, 2010 5:56:44 PM main uk.co.mdjcox.installer.Installer main INFO: Beginning installation Web Feed Encoder 0.9.5
Feb 28, 2010 5:56:44 PM main uk.co.mdjcox.installer.Installer main INFO: Java version 1.6.0_17
Feb 28, 2010 5:56:44 PM main uk.co.mdjcox.installer.Installer main SEVERE: Failed to install
java.lang.RuntimeException: Failed to establish installation details
at uk.co.mdjcox.installer.config.InstallationDetails.<init>(InstallationDetails.java:175)
at uk.co.mdjcox.installer.config.InstallationDetails.getInstance(InstallationDetails.java:73)
at uk.co.mdjcox.installer.Installer.main(Installer.java:63)
Caused by: java.util.zip.ZipException: error in opening zip file
at java.util.zip.ZipFile.open(Native Method)
at java.util.zip.ZipFile.<init>(ZipFile.java:114)

Thanks - Doc

[michaeldjcox]

Originally Posted by dhodgesnvl

Hi - I have a 64 bit mac os 10.6. SageMC runs fine but I can't get the webfeedencoder to install. java -jar webfeedencoder_v0_9_5.jar pops up an errox box saying "error in opening zip file"

Is there a way to install this on MAC?

Hi,

I don't have access to a Mac and there are too few Mac/SageTV users out there who have tried WFE.

It should work but is not well tested on that platform.

Generally its java and should run everywhere OK. But there are points where operating system specifics become an issue e.g. like specify file paths. Furthermore if you look in the "commands" directory you will see that there are tuning commands for windows and unix but not mac. It will probably decide your machine is linux - which isn't that well tested either.

A trailblazer is badly needed here.

If you have the motivation and the time I will fully support you getting it working. I also fully understand if its more than you bargained for and you'll come back later.

If you can help further please let me know the full directory path where the installation jar file is located.

Michael

[scanner95]

Hello,

I'm about to try your plugin, and I have a question. I'm trying to integrate IPTV channels from my operator into Sage. The channels are transmitted in a form of UDP IP multicast streams. VLC plays them just fine; here is what I enter in VLC/Media/Open network stream:
udp://@238.10.10.15:1234

How do I enter in into your plugin? Everything I tried gives me java error...

Thanks a lot!

[michaeldjcox]

Originally Posted by scanner95

Hello,

I'm about to try your plugin, and I have a question. I'm trying to integrate IPTV channels from my operator into Sage. The channels are transmitted in a form of UDP IP multicast streams. VLC plays them just fine; here is what I enter in VLC/Media/Open network stream:
udp://@238.10.10.15:1234

How do I enter in into your plugin? Everything I tried gives me java error...

Thanks a lot!

Hi,

When you add the channel with the config just add the above as the tuning url.

The device type should be tv.

Use the test feature on the channel dialog to test the channel and paste the log info from the tabs on the display here so I can see what exception you are getting.

Michael