That is interesting. ffmpeg is doing all of the heavy lifting on identify and converting streams. PrimeNetEncoder is just a middleman between HDHomeRun ffmpeg and SagTV. It is supposed to pass the streams as they are without modification. I wonder if for some reason it is having an issue identifying the mono first stream.

Did you check a recording that was done with PrimeNetEncoder after the fact to see what streams are in the file?

Received this from KTVU this afternoon to a query about their mono broadcast:

Thanks for the email. You are correct. We have an issue with an audio device that will be repaired soon.

So that answers that. 😀

Now the question is, what is the reason PrimeNetEncoder is having issues with that mono stream?

Yep I have, on a few recordings. There is always only the one secondary stream. They are marked usually as Spanish and in stereo, but are English and often have the descriptive commentary. But I imagine that has something to do with their temporary audio equipment and how they have it configured.

Curious though, if there are multiple streams usually, why doesn't ffmpeg encode them all?

Hey guys,

Can I get a fresh set of eyes on this? Been at it 17 hours straight trying to get everything to work. A little background: we have two HDHomeRun "Tech" units (commercial). Essentially each one is two HDHomeRun Prime CC units in a single chassis. Server is running on Ubuntu 16.04.

HDHomeRun app and VLC can tune and play all channels in the lineup without issue. With the same lineup and EPG Sage isn't able to tune or render anything. It was briefly able to shortly after initial setup but hasn't done anything in quite some time. Clients have been configured on both Windows and Linux clients without improvement.

Here's the output of one of the tuner's PNE files that seems to indicate the specific issue PNE is having, if anyone can make sense of it I'd be very grateful:

"BUFFER" is the command sage uses when previewing the channels in the lineup, but it is not used for normal recording.. as such, I don't think PNE ever supported the buffer command. You'd need to configure it and go out to the guide and try to watch something there for sage to issue the proper START command to get it to start recordings, then check the log for that to see what is going on.

The TECH units are discovered by Sage off the bat. I don't know if this is true of consumer Primes as well.

I think initially we built using a 9.0.x .deb and we got signal and were even able to record. Then we realized that the OSS EPG plugin has been abandoned and the feature rolled into Sage proper, so we had to upgrade to the newest client and server (9.1.6 I think?). The tuners are still discovered by Sage immediately despite being network devices that operate off of RDP streams.

I came to PNE in the thought that maybe like the Cetons and SageDCT, Sage will see the tuners but not be able to use the RDP stream they produce.

If you configure the tuners themselves without PNE mediating, you get some of those config lines you see here:


Which makes me wonder if something is just not configured as it should be by default? Happy to post my entire Sage.properties file if someone could help me puzzle through it.

Sage does not have native support for any cable card tuners. However, the Prime can also act like a clear QAM tuner (if your cable co broadcasts any clear QAM channels still), and Sage flies support those natively.

To use CC tuners like the Prime with Sage (or really any other special type of capture device that Sage doesn't know about), you need an external piece of software called a Network Encoder. The network encoder acts like a gateway and communicates to a sage in a standard way. There are at least three network encoders that people have written for CC tuners and posted on these forums: Prime Net Encoder, SageDCT, and OpenDCT.

All of these seem to work, but they are not all exactly the same. OpenDCT seems to be the best supported one right now and it has the most extra features, but it is also a little more complicated because there are a lot of configuration opens that can be adjusted and they are all done via configuration files. The author, EnterNoEscape, is very active on these forums and has been contributing a lot to the Sage Open Source development.

Getting closer
 

Okay, so I decompiled PrimeNetEncoder.jar because I got the following message on one of the tuners:

So it seems like either I've misconfigured my PrimeNetEncoder.properties file or the syntax for set /tuner<n>/lockkey is off in tuner.class, more likely the former. hdhomerun_config is definitely compatible with this tuner, I've run the commands on it manually with no issues.

Here's my properties file, jvl711, what am I screwing up here that's making it complain about the getset value? Is it the tuner numbers? Why am I getting an error for the BUFFER command?

Cool. I'll check OpenDCT out as well...just asked a pretty long question with lots of code and realized that TunerNumber is relative to the individual device, not absolute. So each one is 0, 1, 2 even if it's your 7th tuner overall. Going to give that a swing and see how it goes.

Does OpenDCT offer integration with ffmpeg and transcoding to h.264?

Yes.

I know this thread is stale ;) but does anyone know if PrimeNetEncoder has ever supported ATSC sub-channel/program tuning? I'm trying to use this with the new Silicondust Connect Quattro (ATSC 3.0 tuner) and I keep getting errors like this

10/12/2020 14:24:22 - Switch channel: 33-65-2
10/12/2020 14:24:22 - Using Lockkey: 1650899869
10/12/2020 14:24:22 - Command output: ERROR: invalid virtual channel

I've looked at the docs for hdhomerun_config and it seems to imply that you first need to select the channel and then the program with a separate command i.e.

does PNE do that?

I may have to set up OpenDCT instead if I can't get this to work.

thanks.

I would take the plunge and move over to OpenDCT if I were you. I haven't even thought of Prime Net Encoder since OpenDCT has come along. OpenDCT still has active support, many folks are using it, and you can get most any question answered in the OpenDCT thread.