OpenDCT: An open source digital cable tuner.

[Taddeusz]

So, for whatever reason I ended up having to also set:

v.conf.t.always=true

For whatever reason setting v.conf.t.deinterlace_only=false by itself didn't work.

[EnterNoEscape]

Originally Posted by Taddeusz

So, for whatever reason I ended up having to also set:

v.conf.t.always=true

For whatever reason setting v.conf.t.deinterlace_only=false by itself didn't work.

That's because the content is already 720p. If you want it to transcode it anyway, that's what the always option is for.

[EnterNoEscape]

Originally Posted by Zogg

Attached is a log file from last night. Recordings starting at 7:00PM (19:00 in the log) failed. I do see some Java errors including OutOfMemoryError that may be related, but I have 8GB RAM in the system and there is free memory.

There are tasks scheduled but most run daily. I don't see any that coincide with the error.

Try this: https://forums.sagetv.com/forums/sho...postcount=2199

[Zogg]

Originally Posted by EnterNoEscape

Try this: https://forums.sagetv.com/forums/sho...postcount=2199

Thanks, I'll try it.

Sorry that I missed this as it was just a few pages back in this thread. I usually do more homework on this stuff and didn't this time.

[Taddeusz]

Just curious if you've gotten anywhere with implementing Intel QuickSync support? If you ever get to the point where you need this function tested I'd be happy to help.

I've been messing around with transcoding lately and have come to the conclusion that my CPU just isn't powerful enough to keep up with even a single stream. Even though the CPU is hitting about 50% I get occasional "glitches" where the video gets garbled. It's like the signal is bad but it's really just fine. I'm on unRAID and I've seen this before when I'm copying large files across the network. It was causing a live viewing to start breaking up in a similar way. Not sure if this has a similar cause?

[EnterNoEscape]

Originally Posted by Taddeusz

Just curious if you've gotten anywhere with implementing Intel QuickSync support? If you ever get to the point where you need this function tested I'd be happy to help.

I've been messing around with transcoding lately and have come to the conclusion that my CPU just isn't powerful enough to keep up with even a single stream. Even though the CPU is hitting about 50% I get occasional "glitches" where the video gets garbled. It's like the signal is bad but it's really just fine. I'm on unRAID and I've seen this before when I'm copying large files across the network. It was causing a live viewing to start breaking up in a similar way. Not sure if this has a similar cause?

I gave up on getting there because it's too much work to do it right. If we ever get it, it will be using the command line ffmpeg.exe.

[Zogg]

My setup uses 2 HDHomerun Primes and 2 original HDHomerun units, and I'm using OpenDCT for all of the tuners. I am running the original HDHRs with OTA signals, and the Primes with CableCARDs, with 2 different channel lineups.

I had a recording fail last night when it tried to use Tuner 0 on an original HDHR that I had in use by my laptop, watching with the HDHomerun View app, not realizing that I would be tying up the tuner that SageTV/OpenDCT would try to use.

Is there no way to failover to another tuner in this case? I'm pretty sure that Tuner 1 on this HDHR was actually sitting unused, as were both tuners on the other original HDHR, and they all use the same channel setup.

[nyplayer]

Originally Posted by Zogg

My setup uses 2 HDHomerun Primes and 2 original HDHomerun units, and I'm using OpenDCT for all of the tuners. I am running the original HDHRs with OTA signals, and the Primes with CableCARDs, with 2 different channel lineups.

I had a recording fail last night when it tried to use Tuner 0 on an original HDHR that I had in use by my laptop, watching with the HDHomerun View app, not realizing that I would be tying up the tuner that SageTV/OpenDCT would try to use.

Is there no way to failover to another tuner in this case? I'm pretty sure that Tuner 1 on this HDHR was actually sitting unused, as were both tuners on the other original HDHR, and they all use the same channel setup.

You can use tuner Pooling in OPENDCT.

Tuner Pooling.
This new feature enables OpenDCT to intelligently select a tuner based on merit and lock status in that order. It does two passes over the tuners. The first one tries to find the highest merit tuner that is not currently in use by SageTV; it checks each one in order to see if it's locked. If they are all either in use or locked, it then it goes through a shorter list of tuners not in use by SageTV, but locked and checks if it's allowed to unlock any of them forcefully. If it's not allowed on any of them, then it gives up. These locked checks are surprisingly fast. Since the InfiniTV devices do not have a locked indication like the HDHomeRun Prime devices, enabling pooling with only InfiniTV devices will just remap them based on merit.
To enable the pooling feature change the property pool.enabled from false to true.
Because of this new feature, the force unlock feature is now set per capture device. To enable forced unlocking, change the value of sagetv.device.<unique_id>.always_force_external_unlock to true for each device that you want this feature enabled on. The global setting no longer has any effect.
Merit is set by changing the value of sagetv.device.<unique_id>.encoder_merit. Higher numbers mean higher priority. This is also the merit that will be sent on discovery.
Pools are automatically assigned based on capture device type the first time you run OpenDCT. You can change the pools by changing the value of sagetv.device.<unique_id>.encoder_pool to another name for all of the capture devices that you want to put into a different pool. The name is case sensitive. Also be sure to not have any extra spaces. I highly do not recommend putting capture devices that cannot tune the same channels into the same pool. It will create a problem per paragraph two in the issue created for this feature.

[Zogg]

Originally Posted by nyplayer

You can use tuner Pooling in OPENDCT.

Thanks for reminding me about this feature. I remember seeing it when I was trying to get things up and going, but that was a few months ago and I had forgotten about it. I have now configured it so we'll see how it goes.

[LaoChe]

I have lost a few channels lately and now I have done something to lose them all. The cable company updated my cable card but a few were still missing. I thought maybe I should update to the latest version of OpenDCT but after doing that I now get no channels at all. I ran a channel scan and it found 170 channels but when I try to tune any of them they just show a black screen with a large "Copy Never" in the center. I modified the config file to not show the error video but now they are just blank when I try to tune them. I also tried stopping Sage as well as the opendct service and running it in console-only mode like a new install. That fixed all of the channel names in the setup (i.e. 799 HDNETMV vs just 799) but still nothing tunes.

It is probably something I did wrong but any ideas to point me in the right direction would be much appreciated. My kids are most unhappy with me right now

Thanks a lot.

This a linux server running the latest version of sage and now opendct. I have a HDHR with cablecard which was working mostly OK until now.

[AlphaCrew]

ENE, I need your help.

Long story short, I built up a new Windows 10 Pro machine and the InfiniTV 4 PCIe card eventually stops communicating with the system (Ceton diagnostic can't see the card either, but the web interface seems to work and device manager shows the card is 'working correctly').

Up until now, the only 'fix' was to reboot the machine as I would not let SageTV keep trying. This time I just let SageTV go to see if it could 'wake' the card. What seemed like 10 min it did to my surprise, (the first time it did but I didn't notice it)

This machines stays running 24/7 and all energy management (except for HDD) are turned off. I've moved the card to different PCIe slots, Reinstall software, etc..

I'm really hoping you can give me some suggestions.

I've attached all the logs, (I was messing around with them so hopefully I didn't screw them up and they paint a picture for you)

[LaoChe]

I am still not getting any channels in sage. I tried deleting all of the lineups again (stopping sage and opendct first) then I ran a scan using the HDDR software and it was able to tune all of the channels. I then ran opendct in console mode figuring it might reset the channel lineup. When that was done I restarted opendct service and sage, deleted on of my tuners and added it back with a separate channel lineup. Still nothing. The only thing that seems odd in the log is a warning that says SeekableCircularBufferNIO the buffer has 7863100 bytes left to read, has only 1219 bytes left for writing and 1316 bytes can not be added. The queue buffer is full at 31457664 bytes.

i guess my next step would be to remove opendct and install an earlier version since it had been working before upgrading but I don't really want to do that so any other suggestions would be great.

Thanks!

[Tiki]

Originally Posted by LaoChe

I have lost a few channels lately and now I have done something to lose them all. The cable company updated my cable card but a few were still missing. I thought maybe I should update to the latest version of OpenDCT but after doing that I now get no channels at all. I ran a channel scan and it found 170 channels but when I try to tune any of them they just show a black screen with a large "Copy Never" in the center. I modified the config file to not show the error video but now they are just blank when I try to tune them. I also tried stopping Sage as well as the opendct service and running it in console-only mode like a new install. That fixed all of the channel names in the setup (i.e. 799 HDNETMV vs just 799) but still nothing tunes.

It is probably something I did wrong but any ideas to point me in the right direction would be much appreciated. My kids are most unhappy with me right now

Thanks a lot.

This a linux server running the latest version of sage and now opendct. I have a HDHR with cablecard which was working mostly OK until now.

If it says Copy Never, then OpenDCT thinks that your cable company has marked the channels with DRM and you are not allowed to record them.

If you are using a HDHR prime , I would suggest ignoring OpenDCT for a moment and instead going to the diagnostics for your HDHR. Each HDHR has its own built in webpage where you can check status, logs, etc. you can do a channel scan from here. I would check here to make sure your cable card shows activated and paired and working. Then run the channel scan to make sure it can find your channels. Then look through the results of the scan and see if the channels you are interested in have a DRM symbol next to them (if they do, you won’t be able to watch them with just OpenDCT and Sage).

If everything looks good here, then you can start trying to troubleshoot OpenDCT and Sage. Otherwise the problem is with your HDHR or your cable card or your cable provider.

[EnterNoEscape]

Originally Posted by AlphaCrew

ENE, I need your help.

Long story short, I built up a new Windows 10 Pro machine and the InfiniTV 4 PCIe card eventually stops communicating with the system (Ceton diagnostic can't see the card either, but the web interface seems to work and device manager shows the card is 'working correctly').

Up until now, the only 'fix' was to reboot the machine as I would not let SageTV keep trying. This time I just let SageTV go to see if it could 'wake' the card. What seemed like 10 min it did to my surprise, (the first time it did but I didn't notice it)

This machines stays running 24/7 and all energy management (except for HDD) are turned off. I've moved the card to different PCIe slots, Reinstall software, etc..

I'm really hoping you can give me some suggestions.

I've attached all the logs, (I was messing around with them so hopefully I didn't screw them up and they paint a picture for you)

I'm not really sure what to make of the logs. The best I can make out is that there isn't enough information in some of the streams for OpenDCT to detect the video and audio streams. You would think that 32MB would be enough for any stream. You could try using the raw consumer to see if the channels come in that way. If that works, then that might mean we have a format that OpenDCT doesn't know how to handle.

[AlphaCrew]

Originally Posted by EnterNoEscape

I'm not really sure what to make of the logs. The best I can make out is that there isn't enough information in some of the streams for OpenDCT to detect the video and audio streams. You would think that 32MB would be enough for any stream. You could try using the raw consumer to see if the channels come in that way. If that works, then that might mean we have a format that OpenDCT doesn't know how to handle.

Do you think the fact that the Ceton diagnosis program cannot detect the card, but I can bring up the web interface means anything?

I have some recording schedule tonight to that will attempt to use the Ceton so I'll post up a new set of logs tomorrow (without me messing around int them...

[EnterNoEscape]

Originally Posted by AlphaCrew

Do you think the fact that the Ceton diagnosis program cannot detect the card, but I can bring up the web interface means anything?

I originally thought it might be a UPnP issue, but I'm not really sure. My thoughts would be that RTP isn't working because UDP isn't working which wouldn't prevent the web interface from working. UPnP uses UDP for discovery too.

[AlphaCrew]

Originally Posted by EnterNoEscape

I originally thought it might be a UPnP issue, but I'm not really sure. My thoughts would be that RTP isn't working because UDP isn't working which wouldn't prevent the web interface from working. UPnP uses UDP for discovery too.

Well to my utter amazement the 2 shows recorded last night. . I've not been able to get this working for more then 4-8 hrs and for some reason the stupid card worked last night.

How would one go about diagnosing an RTP,UDP,UPnP problem?

[mlcarson]

I'm having issues on some IPTV streams which I haven't been able to diagnose so far. I started with a generic HTTP source and moved on to a generic pipe using the latest version of FFMPEG for windows. Both sources work on some streams but fail on others.

Working:
INFO | jvm 1 | 2018/02/15 02:12:52.992 | Input #0, mpegts, from 'input-mpeg-ts.ts':
INFO | jvm 1 | 2018/02/15 02:12:52.992 | Duration: 00:00:06.74, start: 1.400000, bitrate: 1866 kb/s
INFO | jvm 1 | 2018/02/15 02:12:52.992 | Program 1
INFO | jvm 1 | 2018/02/15 02:12:52.992 | Metadata:
INFO | jvm 1 | 2018/02/15 02:12:52.992 | service_name : Service01
INFO | jvm 1 | 2018/02/15 02:12:52.992 | service_provider: FFmpeg
INFO | jvm 1 | 2018/02/15 02:12:52.992 | Stream #0:0[0x100], 21, 1/90000: Video: h264 (Baseline) ([27][0][0][0] / 0x001B), yuv420p, 1280x720, 29.97 tbr, 90k tbn, 180k tbc
INFO | jvm 1 | 2018/02/15 02:12:52.992 | Stream #0:1[0x101], 31, 1/90000: Audio: aac (LC) ([15][0][0][0] / 0x000F), 48000 Hz, stereo, fltp, 144 kb/s
INFO | jvm 1 | 2018/02/15 02:12:52.992 |
INFO | jvm 1 | 2018/02/15 02:12:52.992 | 02:12:52.961 [FFmpegTransSageTVConsumerImpl-143:TNT] INFO FFmpegContext - Primary:
INFO | jvm 1 | 2018/02/15 02:12:52.992 | Output #0, mpegts, to 'E:\Recorded TV\TNTon1270019000HDMI-0.mpgbuf':
INFO | jvm 1 | 2018/02/15 02:12:52.992 | Stream #0:0, 0, 1/0: Video: h264, yuv420p, 1280x720, q=2-31, 180k tbc
INFO | jvm 1 | 2018/02/15 02:12:52.992 | Stream #0:1, 0, 1/0: Audio: aac, 48000 Hz, stereo, fltp, 144 kb/s
Not working:
INFO | jvm 1 | 2018/02/15 02:10:06.028 | Input #0, mpegts, from 'input-mpeg-ts.ts':
INFO | jvm 1 | 2018/02/15 02:10:06.028 | Duration: 00:00:08.41, start: 1.400000, bitrate: 4081 kb/s
INFO | jvm 1 | 2018/02/15 02:10:06.028 | Program 1
INFO | jvm 1 | 2018/02/15 02:10:06.028 | Metadata:
INFO | jvm 1 | 2018/02/15 02:10:06.028 | service_name : Service01
INFO | jvm 1 | 2018/02/15 02:10:06.028 | service_provider: FFmpeg
INFO | jvm 1 | 2018/02/15 02:10:06.028 | Stream #0:0[0x100], 9, 1/90000: Video: h264 (Main) ([27][0][0][0] / 0x001B), yuvj420p(pc, bt709), 1920x1080, 30 tbr, 90k tbn, 180k tbc
INFO | jvm 1 | 2018/02/15 02:10:06.028 | Stream #0:1[0x101], 12, 1/90000: Audio: aac (LC) ([15][0][0][0] / 0x000F), 48000 Hz, stereo, fltp, 166 kb/s
INFO | jvm 1 | 2018/02/15 02:10:06.028 |
INFO | jvm 1 | 2018/02/15 02:10:06.028 | 02:10:06.009 [FFmpegTransSageTVConsumerImpl-116:TNT] INFO FFmpegContext - Primary:
INFO | jvm 1 | 2018/02/15 02:10:06.028 | Output #0, mpegts, to 'E:\Recorded TV\361_89_0215_0207-1.ts':
INFO | jvm 1 | 2018/02/15 02:10:06.028 | Stream #0:0, 0, 1/0: Video: h264, yuvj420p(pc, bt709), 1920x1080, q=2-31, 180k tbc
INFO | jvm 1 | 2018/02/15 02:10:06.028 | Stream #0:1, 0, 1/0: Audio: aac, 48000 Hz, stereo, fltp, 166 kb/s

VLC will play the file generated; SageTV will not.
The only difference I see besides the 1920x1080 res is the yuvj420p vs yuv420p.

Here's the generic pipe source:
sagetv.device.83226.streaming_executable=C\:\\ffmpeg\\ffmpeg.exe -y -i http\://abc.xyz\:2052/live/%c%.ts -acodec copy -vcodec copy -f mpegts pipe\:1
Here's the generic http source:
sagetv.device.2254313.streaming_url=http\://abc.xyz\:2052/live/%c%.ts

I tested this manually via channel 89 which isn't working:
ffmpeg.exe -y -i http://abc.xyz:2052/live/89.ts -acodec copy -vcodec copy -f mpegts "test.ts"

Test.ts plays fine in VLC as did the file created by SageTV. I can also play in VLC directly via the network stream.

I've tried both Raw and FFMPEG consumers:
sagetv.device.83226.consumer=opendct.consumer.RawSageTVConsumerImpl
sagetv.device.83226.consumer=opendct.consumer.FFmpegTransSageTVConsumerImpl

I'm assuming that my basic setup is right with the sources or all channels would fail and that there's just something weird with this source stream.

This is what VLC says about the test.ts file:
Stream 0
Original ID: 256
Codec: H264 - MPEG-4 AVC (part 10) (h264)
Type: Video
Video resolution: 1920x1080
Buffer dimensions: 1920x1088
Decoded format:
Orientation: Top left
Color primaries: ITU-R BT.709
Color transfer function: ITU-R BT.709
Color space: ITU-R BT.709 Range
Chroma location: Left
Stream 1
Original ID: 257
Codec: ADTS
Type: Audio
Channels: Stereo
Sample rate: 48000 Hz
Bits per sample: 32
Service01 [Program 1]
Status: Running
Type: Digital television service
Publisher: FFmpeg

Do you experts see anything amiss here or is more information needed?

[edit]
sagetv.device.83226.streaming_executable=C\:\\ffmpeg\\ffmpeg.exe -y -i http\://abc.xyz\:2052/live/%c%.ts -acodec copy -vcodec libx264 -preset ultrafast -f mpegts pipe\:1

This works but spikes my CPU to 99% for a bit and then backs down to 55%. I assume that it's doing a complete reencode of the live video on the fly. It seems to confirm that SageTV definitely hates the video stream though.

[technazz]

I use

sagetv.device.2060898.streaming_executable=C\:ffmpeg\\ffmpeg.exe -i http\://p-c-xyz.net\:80/live/Login/Password/%c%.ts -c

\:a copy -c\:v copy -f mpegts pipe\:1

Did you use the latest FFMPEG?


Chris

[mlcarson]

Yes to the latest version of FFMPEG. My understanding of the FFMPEG syntax is that what you and I have are functionally equivalent but I'll try that this evening and let you know.
[edit]
As expected, no difference. Both variations of syntax do the same thing but mine required fewer colons and the preceding backslashes.
Can anybody confirm that yuvj420p format is supported by SageTV?