PrimeNetEncoder - HDHomeRun Prime Network Encoder

[Gustovier]

Originally Posted by weeber

The past week or so, I've finally noticed Comcast starting to broadcast in h264 like they promised to do several months ago (Atlanta area). Good news... PNE 1.2.5 and HDHR Prime both seem to handle the streams without issue.

I've seen it being used on Comedy Central, FXX, and AMC. And Comcast is really making use h264. 1-hr episodes of the Walking Dead were 5.2 GB w/MPEG-2 are now 1.9 GB w/h264. I'm a little concerned Comcast may be taking things a little too far with the compression, but quality seems pretty good (maybe a little softer).

Anyways, no need to worry about capturing h264 streams on Comcast.

Looks like I might have to finally move away from sageDCT as a couple of days ago a few of my channels were convert to h264(Comcast Chicago area) and sage dct is not handling this for these channels well at all. At least I'm thinking the issue is with sage dct.

*edit looks like sage dct is actually working fine with h264 channels.

[jvl711]

Posted a new version 2.0.0. Only some very minor changes. The change list is on the first post. I am considering this version to be stable.

Josh

[nyplayer]

Originally Posted by jvl711

Posted a new version 2.0.0. Only some very minor changes. The change list is on the first post. I am considering this version to be stable.

Josh

It is not working getting no signal.

PrimeNetEncoder>Exception in thread "Thread-5" java.lang.IllegalThreadStateException
at java.lang.Thread.setDaemon(Unknown Source)
at jvl.primenetencoder.TunerOutput.run(TunerOutput.java:545)

[jvl711]

Originally Posted by nyplayer

It is not working getting no signal.

PrimeNetEncoder>Exception in thread "Thread-5" java.lang.IllegalThreadStateException
at java.lang.Thread.setDaemon(Unknown Source)
at jvl.primenetencoder.TunerOutput.run(TunerOutput.java:545)

You are always catching all of my errors

I put the wrong version of the JAR file in the upload. I just uploaded a new version. Let me know if that fixes it.

[nyplayer]

Originally Posted by jvl711

You are always catching all of my errors

I put the wrong version of the JAR file in the upload. I just uploaded a new version. Let me know if that fixes it.

Working ok now. Appears to be faster channel changes.

[nyplayer]

I tested both with mediaserver.transfer true and false and they both work. I am keeping it true to see how it performs.

Thanks

[jvl711]

Originally Posted by nyplayer

Working ok now. Appears to be faster channel changes.

I am seeing around 4 seconds for a channel change. Are you seeing roughly around the same?

[nyplayer]

Originally Posted by jvl711

I am seeing around 4 seconds for a channel change. Are you seeing roughly around the same?

About the same less on some channels. Some channels tune quicker than others but nothing really over 4 seconds.

[jvl711]

Originally Posted by nyplayer

About the same less on some channels. Some channels tune quicker than others but nothing really over 4 seconds.

Without some super speedups from ffmpeg, I do not know if we are going to get too much better than 4 seconds. You can see from the logs it takes on average 3750ms for ffmpeg to analyze the stream and determine the format, and start writing to file. Than Sage has to analyze the file itself before playing back.

[dranockcir]

Originally Posted by jvl711

Posted a new version 2.0.0. Only some very minor changes. The change list is on the first post. I am considering this version to be stable.

Josh

Working great on Ubuntu, faster channel changes as well. I have PNE installed on the same machine that SageTV 9 is installed on.

[Gustovier]

I wonder if there is truly a way to get rid of using ffmpeg. It's my understanding that this is used to clean up the mpeg2 or mpeg4(for channels that have converted to h264) stream coming off the prime?

[nyplayer]

Originally Posted by Gustovier

I wonder if there is truly a way to get rid of using ffmpeg. It's my understanding that this is used to clean up the mpeg2 or mpeg4(for channels that have converted to h264) stream coming off the prime?

Not quite if it was not for ffmpeg some of my mpeg2 channels sage would not be able to play them ... It was originally made to cleanup mpeg2 not h264. If you do not want to use FFMPEG you can use SagDCT with the dump option.

The only way I see this happening if SageTV had built in Prime support.

[nyplayer]

Originally Posted by jvl711

Posted a new version 2.0.0. Only some very minor changes. The change list is on the first post. I am considering this version to be stable.

Josh

I di have some halts setting mediaserver.transfer=True went back to false did not get any halts.

[jvl711]

Originally Posted by nyplayer

I di have some halts setting mediaserver.transfer=True went back to false did not get any halts.

I do not have 100% proof of this, but I believe the halts may be caused by the SageTV process doing a garbage collection. After trying everything under the sun, I can not get the transfer to be 100% smooth. I did some extensive analysis of how PrimeNetEncoder's memory is handled by the JVM, and with the new switches that I recommend for running the process I am confident that the pauses are not coming directly from PrimeNetEncoder.

I am not sure if there is any other network encoder that is currently using the Media Server transfer method for us to confirm. I do still feel this would be the preferred method for transferring video to Sage.

[SageWizdom]

When I was doing some troubleshooting (sorry, I don't think I have the log any more) I noticed that you auto stop recording when a certain time has elapsed with no data. What was this timeout based upon? Is it possible that there could be a network stack delay and the code pauses? Is it possible to extend the timeout delay?

[jvl711]

Originally Posted by SageWizdom

When I was doing some troubleshooting (sorry, I don't think I have the log any more) I noticed that you auto stop recording when a certain time has elapsed with no data. What was this timeout based upon? Is it possible that there could be a network stack delay and the code pauses? Is it possible to extend the timeout delay?

It does not stop the recording it resets the recording. In my testing i have seen occurancrs where HDHomerRun does not change channels after a command was sent to it. This appears to happen most often when there has been no activity for a long time. I can make this configurable in the future. Iwas not sure it was going to work when i first added, but i am pretty sure it is pretty effective. I think it is around 8-10 seconds now.

[Fuzzy]

Originally Posted by jvl711

I do not have 100% proof of this, but I believe the halts may be caused by the SageTV process doing a garbage collection. After trying everything under the sun, I can not get the transfer to be 100% smooth. I did some extensive analysis of how PrimeNetEncoder's memory is handled by the JVM, and with the new switches that I recommend for running the process I am confident that the pauses are not coming directly from PrimeNetEncoder.

I am not sure if there is any other network encoder that is currently using the Media Server transfer method for us to confirm. I do still feel this would be the preferred method for transferring video to Sage.

The only other Network Encoders that use the MediaServer method of writing the stream is SageTV itself (when run as a network encoder). Aside from that, it's also how Clients receive media (images, video, etc) from the server.

[weeber]

Do I need to have Sage rediscover the PNE tuners after going to v2.0.0 from 1.2.5? I can't get 2.0.0 to work. When I call up v2.0.0, start Sage and try to tune, the tuner light comes on, but the TV screen stays black and I get the "No signal" message. I can stop playback, but PNE doesn't let go of the tuner, and I have to power cycle it so it releases.

Switching back to calling v1.2.5 and everything works. What am I missing? I'm using the same PNE properties file too.

[jvl711]

Originally Posted by weeber

Do I need to have Sage rediscover the PNE tuners after going to v2.0.0 from 1.2.5? I can't get 2.0.0 to work. When I call up v2.0.0, start Sage and try to tune, the tuner light comes on, but the TV screen stays black and I get the "No signal" message. I can stop playback, but PNE doesn't let go of the tuner, and I have to power cycle it so it releases.

Switching back to calling v1.2.5 and everything works. What am I missing? I'm using the same PNE properties file too.

Wow... I have no clue. This was a very minor change... The only possibile thing I can think of is that you filled in the override ip address in the property file and it is an incorrect address. Besides that I am baffled. I just copied the new jar into my production system. No changes.

[RandyJohnson]

When adding a second Prime I am wondering how the properties files should be setup.

tuners.count = 6 ... is this total number of primes or physical tuners?

I am assuming that I would have tuner3 - tuner5 for the second prime.

Are the ".port" and ".transcode.port" just incremented 7003/5003?

Thanks in advance...

Randy