OpenDCT: An open source digital cable tuner.

[technazz]

Originally Posted by EnterNoEscape

Seeing what sage logs have to say might help a little. I was just going on your signature about the SageTV version.

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I haven't updated my signature in years!


Ok I captured some logs. I recorded a show and it wouldn't play live, just a blank screen. I checked that it was recording something and it was.

I just let it sit there and when the recording ended it started playing in the mini client.

I've attached both logs can you have a quick look when you can?

Thanks

Chris

[EnterNoEscape]

Originally Posted by technazz

\\

I haven't updated my signature in years!


Ok I captured some logs. I recorded a show and it wouldn't play live, just a blank screen. I checked that it was recording something and it was.

I just let it sit there and when the recording ended it started playing in the mini client.

I've attached both logs can you have a quick look when you can?

Thanks

Chris

SageTV spent the entire recording not being able to detect the video stream, so this is actually a problem on the SageTV side of things. If you can share with me a 2-5 minute clip (you can PM me if you want), I'll see if I can figure out why.

[technazz]

Originally Posted by EnterNoEscape

SageTV spent the entire recording not being able to detect the video stream, so this is actually a problem on the SageTV side of things. If you can share with me a 2-5 minute clip (you can PM me if you want), I'll see if I can figure out why.

PM sent.

thanks

Chris

[EnterNoEscape]

Originally Posted by technazz

PM sent.

thanks

Chris

Because of how SageTV internally detects the video stream, it is trying to determine something about the stream that is DVB specific and it ultimately causes the detection of the video to fail. Even though parsing of the video stream has failed, the returned information does not indicate that the stream is only audio and it only returns information about the audio stream. If it indicated that it was audio only, that would cause SageTV to use FFmpeg for stream detection which should always work for this situation.

Setting the following property could fix the problem for you while we figure out why it doesn't work correctly the normal way. The only problem I think of is that it might prevent you from watching live.
skip_internal_format_parser=true

[technazz]

Originally Posted by EnterNoEscape

Because of how SageTV internally detects the video stream, it is trying to determine something about the stream that is DVB specific and it ultimately causes the detection of the video to fail. Even though parsing of the video stream has failed, the returned information does not indicate that the stream is only audio and it only returns information about the audio stream. If it indicated that it was audio only, that would cause SageTV to use FFmpeg for stream detection which should always work for this situation.

Setting the following property could fix the problem for you while we figure out why it doesn't work correctly the normal way. The only problem I think of is that it might prevent you from watching live.
skip_internal_format_parser=true

I set it and your right i cannot play live video. All the streams that used to work now get "No signal Detected". I recorded 5 minutes with the new setting and it wouldn't play back after. It played back in vlc ok.

I've attached the sage log.

Thanks

Chris

[EnterNoEscape]

Originally Posted by technazz

I set it and your right i cannot play live video. All the streams that used to work now get "No signal Detected". I recorded 5 minutes with the new setting and it wouldn't play back after. It played back in vlc ok.

I've attached the sage log.

Thanks

Chris

All I can say is that it worked for the one recording you sent me. Your use case is definitely atypical since you're not actually using a normal broadcast source which is more than likely why SageTV is ill-equipped to deal with this content. Since I know transcoding the video to the same format works, it would suggest that they are doing something just strange enough that SageTV doesn't know how to deal with it.

[Fuzzy]

Originally Posted by EnterNoEscape

All I can say is that it worked for the one recording you sent me. Your use case is definitely atypical since you're not actually using a normal broadcast source which is more than likely why SageTV is ill-equipped to deal with this content. Since I know transcoding the video to the same format works, it would suggest that they are doing something just strange enough that SageTV doesn't know how to deal with it.

If the ffmpeg transcode is enough to make it work, would changing to the ffmpeg consumer in opendct be enough to clean up the stream so sage can deal with it?

[technazz]

Originally Posted by EnterNoEscape

All I can say is that it worked for the one recording you sent me. Your use case is definitely atypical since you're not actually using a normal broadcast source which is more than likely why SageTV is ill-equipped to deal with this content. Since I know transcoding the video to the same format works, it would suggest that they are doing something just strange enough that SageTV doesn't know how to deal with it.

I take that back. My HD300's and Miniclient play the video. I was using my server with its sage client that gave me the exception. So i have few streams that I can't play Live but I can record and play it back after the recording is complete.

I also tried to change the consumer to FFMPEG (sagetv.device.69883752.consumer=opendct.consumer.FFmpegTransSageTVConsumerImpl) and it didnt change anything.

Would be nice to see it working. I have several IPTV programs and VLC that play all the streams without any issues but recording the streams in them is like a generic timed recording which makes me feel like im in the 80's setting the vcr.

Thanks

Chris

[EnterNoEscape]

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

If the ffmpeg transcode is enough to make it work, would changing to the ffmpeg consumer in opendct be enough to clean up the stream so sage can deal with it?

It isn't. That's what was being used before. Everything was detected correctly, but the video was throwing the internal format detection off. The detection was picking up a hint that the stream was DVB which is incorrect and then it became fixated on pursuing that path resulting in no video. The video actually needs to be re-encoded for internal detection to work. The audio doesn't appear to be causing any issues. Remuxing the stream is not enough to fix this.

[technazz]

Originally Posted by EnterNoEscape

It isn't. That's what was being used before. Everything was detected correctly, but the video was throwing the internal format detection off. The detection was picking up a hint that the stream was DVB which is incorrect and then it became fixated on pursuing that path resulting in no video. The video actually needs to be re-encoded for internal detection to work. The audio doesn't appear to be causing any issues. Remuxing the stream is not enough to fix this.

Since Sage is now open source who on the forums may be able to help? I'm an Automation Controls guy, I wouldn't immediately be able to help myself until i do a bit of research.

Thanks

Chris

[EnterNoEscape]

Originally Posted by technazz

Since Sage is now open source who on the forums may be able to help? I'm an Automation Controls guy, I wouldn't immediately be able to help myself until i do a bit of research.

Thanks

Chris

What should be done is an issue should be opened on the repository on GitHub. I was planning on doing this eventually after getting better details about the characteristics that make this video encoding different, but I don't see any reason you can't create an issue with logs from SageTV and a public link to a video that has the problem. The people most likely to fix this issue or at least provide better insight into how to fix it are all there.

[technazz]

Originally Posted by EnterNoEscape

What should be done is an issue should be opened on the repository on GitHub. I was planning on doing this eventually after getting better details about the characteristics that make this video encoding different, but I don't see any reason you can't create an issue with logs from SageTV and a public link to a video that has the problem. The people most likely to fix this issue or at least provide better insight into how to fix it are all there.

Done.

Thanks

Chris

[videolog]

Lately I am getting "no signal" when I go to use sage in the morning. I had been rebooting and then everything would work. This morning I just stopped the Sage service, stopped OpenDCT, restarted OpenDCT and restarted Sage service. Everything worked. I noticed above normal cpu usage before I shut down the services. After they were shut down cpu usage was nil. Upon restarting the services cpu spiked a bit for openDCT then went back down, and spiked all the way for Sage services then went back down to nil. Not really sure what is getting hung up. I have attached the logs. If anyone could take a look and give me an idea what might be going on it would be great.

[EnterNoEscape]

Originally Posted by videolog

Lately I am getting "no signal" when I go to use sage in the morning. I had been rebooting and then everything would work. This morning I just stopped the Sage service, stopped OpenDCT, restarted OpenDCT and restarted Sage service. Everything worked. I noticed above normal cpu usage before I shut down the services. After they were shut down cpu usage was nil. Upon restarting the services cpu spiked a bit for openDCT then went back down, and spiked all the way for Sage services then went back down to nil. Not really sure what is getting hung up. I have attached the logs. If anyone could take a look and give me an idea what might be going on it would be great.

You might want to verify that your hard drive is ok. I'm seeing mostly the circular buffer completely filling up, then deferring to the queue buffer, then dropping data. It does write out several MB before this happens, but it could be a specific location on the disk causing issues.

[videolog]

Originally Posted by EnterNoEscape

You might want to verify that your hard drive is ok. I'm seeing mostly the circular buffer completely filling up, then deferring to the queue buffer, then dropping data. It does write out several MB before this happens, but it could be a specific location on the disk causing issues.

Okay, thanks I'll check it out. Didn't think of a hard drive problem based on what I was doing to reset it.

[technazz]

I saw RTSP ports listed in the config. Is OpenDCT capable of using my Security cameras?

rtsp.new.default_impl=opendct.video.rtsp.DCTRTSPClientImpl
rtsp.port_high=8500
rtsp.port_low=8300


I use rtsp://192.168.0.25:554/live in VLC to view video.

Thanks

Chris

[EnterNoEscape]

Originally Posted by technazz

I saw RTSP ports listed in the config. Is OpenDCT capable of using my Security cameras?

rtsp.new.default_impl=opendct.video.rtsp.DCTRTSPClientImpl
rtsp.port_high=8500
rtsp.port_low=8300


I use rtsp://192.168.0.25:554/live in VLC to view video.

Thanks

Chris

It isn't. The code was able to do some basic RTSP negotiation, but it was very specific to the InfiniTV and HDHomeRun devices. That was ditched in favor of more direct manipulation which is much faster. I don't have plans to add that support back at this time.

[Fuzzy]

Originally Posted by EnterNoEscape

It isn't. The code was able to do some basic RTSP negotiation, but it was very specific to the InfiniTV and HDHomeRun devices. That was ditched in favor of more direct manipulation which is much faster. I don't have plans to add that support back at this time.

That said, with the new PIPE functionality, you MAY be able to use ffmpeg to pipe the rtsp stream to STDOUT for OpenDCT to send to sage.

[jm9843]

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

So, I created a docker template for OpenDCT. As far as I can tell on my end, it's working okay (only tested media server mode - because I can't see a reason to use anything else). If anyone wants to give it a try, the repository for it should be at:

https://github.com/crazifuzzy/opendct-docker

In unRAID, add that to your docker repositories, and you can probably create a new container using all defaults.

I'm playing with Docker a bit, but not on unRAID, and am having trouble getting HDHomeRun discovery to work when running console-only from the running container (crazifuzzy/opendct image used). What defaults does unRAID use for networking? Are any explicit port mappings required for HDHomeRun and/or SageTV communication? The latter using stuckless' recommendation to run the SageTV container in 'host mode'.

Thanks.

[Fuzzy]

Originally Posted by jm9843

I'm playing with Docker a bit, but not on unRAID, and am having trouble getting HDHomeRun discovery to work when running console-only from the running container (crazifuzzy/opendct image used). What defaults does unRAID use for networking? Are any explicit port mappings required for HDHomeRun and/or SageTV communication? The latter using stuckless' recommendation to run the SageTV container in 'host mode'.

Thanks.

HDHomeRun discover depends on UDP Broadcasts, which will only reach the same subnet. Because of this, opendct needs to be attached directly to the host network, and cannot reside behind a NAT from the host's network. I know on unraid, the container is configured as HOST mode, but I don't know if that's possible on other docker configurations.