Utility: Web Radio and TV Encoder

[michaeldjcox]

Originally Posted by pjpjpjpj

I hear what you are saying, but some of those feeds seem to be direct. Some are from other sites - you can see that by mousing over the link and looking at the URL at the bottom. But the ones that are simply "http://www.channelsurfing.net/watch-XXXX.html", I have in the past copied that URL, opened the Windows Media Player separately, did "File/open URL" and pasted the line in, and it worked. So even though, from the website directly, they do pop up a window, I hoped that those particular streams were the Windows Media streams you were looking for.

I did try pasting a few of those into VLC but they did not work. I'll give it a go in windows media player too.

I reckon that some may be blocked by region e.g. NBC's website doesn't let me view any of their content citing location as a reason.

Do try opening those URLs in VLC.

If they work in the VLC media player then 90% sure this plug in can play them.

Regards,

Michael

[latino]

Good morning Michael,

Is me again. everything is working but i don't know why only the tv station are working but the radio station not.

please if you have any answer of this.

thanks

[michaeldjcox]

Not sure but if you could send the encoder.log please.

Also - have you tried restarting the encoder plus, in sagetv, go to set up video sources and select the web feed encoder source to force sagetv to reconnect.

Regards,

Michael

[latino]

this is the encoder.log
i restarted the encoder and nothing only tv station are working.

thanks for your help

[michaeldjcox]

Originally Posted by latino

this is the encoder.log
i restarted the encoder and nothing only tv station are working.

thanks for your help

The encoder log looks fine. mpg files are created and are growing.

Did you try restarting SageTV?

Also - have you changed anything on your SageTV installation?

Do you have logging turned on in sageTV?

I'd better have a look at the SageTV log for a failed run.

Michael

[latino]

Originally Posted by michaeldjcox

The encoder log looks fine. mpg files are created and are growing.

Did you try restarting SageTV?

Also - have you changed anything on your SageTV installation?

Do you have logging turned on in sageTV?

I'd better have a look at the SageTV log for a failed run.

Michael

Thanks you for your help.
yesterday one of the radio station was working, but i saw that when i have the signe (not signal) and i change station then i see the icon of that station.
this was similar of the problem i had before but before i listen for some seconds the station.

thanks for your help and sorry for my English.

[michaeldjcox]

Hi,

Another thing to check is whether (when you are not watching or listening to a channel) that in windows task manager there are no vlc.exe sessions running.

If there are kill them.

Occasionally they refuse to be killed.

Michael

[latino]

Originally Posted by michaeldjcox

Hi,

Another thing to check is whether (when you are not watching or listening to a channel) that in windows task manager there are no vlc.exe sessions running.

If there are kill them.

Occasionally they refuse to be killed.

Michael

thanks i will check

[kha]

Hi Michael,

Thank you very much for developing this very useful plugin! I tried it for both radio and internet TV streaming and it works very well on the extender. However, as noted in the "Known problems" section, I found that it provides very choppy live playback on the PC hosting SageTV.

When the playback is choppy I do not see either CPU, or memory reaching its limits on my machine. Once the program is recorded I can watch it on PC and the recording has decent quality.

Do you have any recommedations on how to eliminate choppiness in playback?

For internet TV stations, is there a way to save stream as is without transcoding (assuming this is the source of the problem)?

Thank you very much for your help!

Best Regards,
Michael K.

[michaeldjcox]

Originally Posted by kha

Do you have any recommedations on how to eliminate choppiness in playback?

Not as yet - but I haven't given it much attention as:

1. Apart from me and you not many have noticed this problem.
2. My main goal has been good playback on extenders

The next release is about easy install and config. Then I plan to do a bug fix release to address some of these issues.

Originally Posted by kha

For internet TV stations, is there a way to save stream as is without transcoding (assuming this is the source of the problem)?

Yes. VLC can do this. I'm not sure of the receipe but I can work it out.

Michael

[~flatlined~]

Nice plugin
I tested this out, it all ran fine as per the instructions. Of course I didn't want any of the included radio sources, but instead my own. Setting those up took a bit of messing around, but I got there in the end.
I tested out playing on the server pc, in my case quad core with lots of spare everything, and experienced the choppiness.
My use case is on my extender, so it's all working fine for me.

The detune/stop radio service batch/script fails at some point because it doesn't have "s around the path it fires off. Easily fixed.

Some setting I set made this try to execute "null.windows.commands" instead of "tune.radio.windows.commands" ... unfortunately for reporting the issue, I fixed it but I don't recall what it was. I think I was trying to set a group as a setting in one of the files, but it didn't like it.

Thanks for the work on this -)

[michaeldjcox]

Originally Posted by ~flatlined~

Nice plugin
I tested this out, it all ran fine as per the instructions. Of course I didn't want any of the included radio sources, but instead my own. Setting those up took a bit of messing around, but I got there in the end.
I tested out playing on the server pc, in my case quad core with lots of spare everything, and experienced the choppiness.
My use case is on my extender, so it's all working fine for me.

The detune/stop radio service batch/script fails at some point because it doesn't have "s around the path it fires off. Easily fixed.

Some setting I set made this try to execute "null.windows.commands" instead of "tune.radio.windows.commands" ... unfortunately for reporting the issue, I fixed it but I don't recall what it was. I think I was trying to set a group as a setting in one of the files, but it didn't like it.

Thanks for the work on this -)

Thanks for trying it out.

The windows .command files need quotes around file paths. This is a bug.

I think the null.windows happens when the channel ids in the lineup.props are not in the format group/channelId where group refers to a .props file e.g. radio.props OR where the tune and detune properties in any custom group file do not have values that refer to a tune/detune command file.

config/lineup.props containing

channel1.id=<group>/<channel id>

refers to..

channels/<channel id>.props

and

config/<group>.props containing

tune=tune.<group>
detune=detune.<group>

refer to...

commands/tune.<group>.windows.commands
commands/detune.<group>.windows.commands

All this is advanced customisation so most likely the channel id in the lineup is not of the correct format.

Michael

[michaeldjcox]

Originally Posted by robogeek

I downgraded VLC to 0.9.8a and still see some type of memory leak. Looks like the VLC process that is generating the mpg that is constantly growing.

I have a fix for the VLC memory leak now.

You need to remove this argument from the VLC command line:

--fake-file-reload=5

so that means editing:

commands/tune.radio.windows.commands
commands/tune.radio.unix.commands

if you are using the latest version or encoder.props if you are using an earlier version.

and deleting that text where you find it.

Regards,

Michael

[kha]

Originally Posted by michaeldjcox

Not as yet - but I haven't given it much attention as:

1. Apart from me and you not many have noticed this problem.
2. My main goal has been good playback on extenders

The next release is about easy install and config. Then I plan to do a bug fix release to address some of these issues.

Thank you. Look forward to future release

Originally Posted by michaeldjcox

Yes. VLC can do this. I'm not sure of the receipe but I can work it out.

I am definitely interested in this option as long as the original video stream can still be played on SageTV server PC and an extender.

Regards,
Michael K.

[michaeldjcox]

Originally Posted by robogeek

I know the 'Hang Detected' problem is a known problem, but I seem to encounter it fairly frequently. When it happens, the MVP extender becomes unresponsive where not even power cycling it will work and it appears other clients lose their connection with the server as well. As documented, the only way to recover is to restart the SageTV service.

The encoder currently attempts to cheat SageTV into thinking that a partial recording file exists of size 200 when it is in fact not yet created. This was pretty much copied from an existing SageTV network encoder implementation.

Thanks to robogeeks testing it appears that this cheat is responsible for the Hang Detected message seen in SageTVs logs.

In the latest release setting

emptyFileSize=0

in encoder.props should fix this problem if you are experiencing it.

Thanks again to robogeek for your efforts here.

Michael

[infocus13]

Awesome plugin, thanks for all your hard work Michael - this is exactly what I've looking and waiting for with sagetv!!

got it working fine with 5 tv stations - one persistently doesnt work, still trying to figure out what the issue is there.

can't wait for the next version - keep up the excellent work.

[kha]

Hi Michael,

Do you (or someone else) have a working example of channel configuration, which uses generic grabber for collecting data from a webpage that contains a schedule for a full week? An example in the distribution for "Kiss FM 105" seems to be outdated.

Regards,
Michael K.

[michaeldjcox]

Originally Posted by dkatchalov

Awesome plugin, thanks for all your hard work Michael - this is exactly what I've looking and waiting for with sagetv!!

got it working fine with 5 tv stations - one persistently doesnt work, still trying to figure out what the issue is there.

can't wait for the next version - keep up the excellent work.

Thanks for the feedback - its nice to hear that it works as well as doesn't work occasionally.

Michael

[michaeldjcox]

Originally Posted by kha

Hi Michael,

Do you (or someone else) have a working example of channel configuration, which uses generic grabber for collecting data from a webpage that contains a schedule for a full week? An example in the distribution for "Kiss FM 105" seems to be outdated.

Regards,
Michael K.

Hi,

KissFM105 has revised its web pages and made the schedule flash driven.

Flash seems to be the kiss of death for html scraping code :-(

However, HeartFM is also an example of generic grabber as is WMNF in the channels/samples directory

Regards,

Michael

[michaeldjcox]

Originally Posted by clarenceb5

Hi I am wondering if webfeedencoder will work with a local feed from windows media encoder? I want to view in SageTV the captured video from my web cam which can be setup with windows media encoder. Thanks.

You can turn you web cam or other capture device into a channel.

Add the following ".commands" files to your installation commands directory

Add the "device.props" config file to your installation config directory.

In the lineup.props refer to your channel:

channel.<channel number>.id=device/<channel name>

e.g.

channel.25.id=device/WebCam

(which is refering to a channel props file channels/WebCam.props)

Create a channel props file in the channels directory with a url property like:

dshow:// --dshow-vdev="Logitech QuickCam Communicate STX"

(substitute in the name of the device. You can find this by running up the VLC media player and choose open capture device)

I have attached my example channel config WebCam.props.

If you are using the XMLTV importer you will need to edit your XMLTV channel lineup in the usual way.

Michael