SageMCTuner - anyone have this working with cablecard?

[David HVR1600]

Originally Posted by xj-boonie

So got that all figured out, but have a question : if I disable ehtray.exe in msconfig, will that mess up SageMCtuner?

ehtray is the tray icon service for media center so if you can kill it it shouldnt effect sage but it will probably come back eventually from media center launching it.

[xj-boonie]

Originally Posted by David HVR1600

ehtray is the tray icon service for media center so if you can kill it it shouldnt effect sage but it will probably come back eventually from media center launching it.

The reason I want to disable it is because I'm using a MCE remote, and when I hit guide on the remote, it brings up both SageTV's guide and Media Center guide. Same for pictures, etc.

I'm using a harmony remote so I've blanked out those buttons, but it would be nice to be able to use them.

[xj-boonie]

Mythikal,

I keep getting the following system (warning or error) message every once and a while:

"The device input "MCTuner2 on localhost:6970 Digital TV Tuner" stopped producing data while recording "Zoboomafoo" on KTCADT on physical channel 240. SageTV will try to reset the device. This may be caused by a channel that is no longer available."

It's not just that one show or channel. Any idea why it might happen?

It's usually just recording one show when it happens, and is recording to a WD Green drive. I've set it up so that MCE recordes to a WD Green Drive and then SageTV recordes to 2 different WD Green drives. Wondering if I should swap out the MCE-recording to WD Green Drive for a Black drive...

[Brent]

Anyone using SageMCTuner with a Ceton? If so I'd love to hear from you (send me a DM). Looking for someone to share their experience on GeekTonic. Thanks!

[xj-boonie]

Originally Posted by xj-boonie

Mythikal,

I keep getting the following system (warning or error) message every once and a while:

"The device input "MCTuner2 on localhost:6970 Digital TV Tuner" stopped producing data while recording "Zoboomafoo" on KTCADT on physical channel 240. SageTV will try to reset the device. This may be caused by a channel that is no longer available."

It's not just that one show or channel. Any idea why it might happen?

It's usually just recording one show when it happens, and is recording to a WD Green drive. I've set it up so that MCE recordes to a WD Green Drive and then SageTV recordes to 2 different WD Green drives. Wondering if I should swap out the MCE-recording to WD Green Drive for a Black drive...

I wonder if using the ip address of the computer would be better than localhost? ideas?

[Mythikal]

Originally Posted by xj-boonie

Mythikal,

I keep getting the following system (warning or error) message every once and a while:

"The device input "MCTuner2 on localhost:6970 Digital TV Tuner" stopped producing data while recording "Zoboomafoo" on KTCADT on physical channel 240. SageTV will try to reset the device. This may be caused by a channel that is no longer available."

It's not just that one show or channel. Any idea why it might happen?

It's usually just recording one show when it happens, and is recording to a WD Green drive. I've set it up so that MCE recordes to a WD Green Drive and then SageTV recordes to 2 different WD Green drives. Wondering if I should swap out the MCE-recording to WD Green Drive for a Black drive...

If you can recreate the problem, you might want to start by trying to watch the show in 7MC. It could be that your signal is weak and you really are losing the video feed. Also, watching it in 7MC will take quite a bit of load off the drive.

If you have no problems in 7MC, I would look at the drives. I had that problem at first too which is why I have so many drives in play right now. The drive that takes the most punishment will be the 7MC recording drive (especially when recording multiple streams). If your signal is good, try changing out that drive for something faster and see if it makes a difference.

You should also make sure that your drives aren't too fragmented. That could cause a write delay which may generate a tuner warning in Sage.

[Mythikal]

Originally Posted by xj-boonie

I wonder if using the ip address of the computer would be better than localhost? ideas?

localhost = 127.0.0.1 = ::1 = loopback address = the local machine. It doesn't get any more direct than localhost. Unless there's something really screwed up in your lmhosts/hosts file, localhost should be fine. If you don't want to use the netbios/dns name localhost, 127.0.0.1 is the IP address that localhost should resolve to. If you really want to use the IP address of the NIC on the local machine, make sure it has a static IP.

[xj-boonie]

Originally Posted by Mythikal

If you can recreate the problem, you might want to start by trying to watch the show in 7MC. It could be that your signal is weak and you really are losing the video feed. Also, watching it in 7MC will take quite a bit of load off the drive.

If you have no problems in 7MC, I would look at the drives. I had that problem at first too which is why I have so many drives in play right now. The drive that takes the most punishment will be the 7MC recording drive (especially when recording multiple streams). If your signal is good, try changing out that drive for something faster and see if it makes a difference.

You should also make sure that your drives aren't too fragmented. That could cause a write delay which may generate a tuner warning in Sage.

The signal is strong as far as I can tell, and the drive was 0% fragmented. One thing I noticed was that the 7MC files weren't deleted and I may not have had enough room left to record based on the settings in 7MC (keep X MB free). So I upped that and resstarted SageTV and SageMCTuner, which deleted the files. I also adjusted the handshake you suggested in your email.

The final thing I didn't get a chance to do yet is swap out the drive. It's a WD 1TB Green and I'm going to swap it for a WD 1TB Black 6.0 SATA drive. I'll post updates after I do that.

[spencerw]

Originally Posted by kmp14

A little more info. The WTV files are locked by SBEConvert.exe (part of the SageMCTuner process, I think). They stay locked by SBEConvert long after the recording is done. I am not sure how long, but currently, recordings completed yesterday are still locked.

After neglecting to restart my SageMCTuner service and running out of disk space due to this file locking issue I dove into the code to find the problem. babgvant quickly checked in a source code fix (available as revision 303 via SVN at https://babgvant.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/babgvant) which I built and confirmed does fix the issue. It has been working great now for over a month. I'll send babgvant a message to see if he can provide an official build via the SageMCTuner download button here: http://babgvant.com/files/folders/sa...s/default.aspx

[spencerw]

Originally Posted by spencerw

After neglecting to restart my SageMCTuner service and running out of disk space due to this file locking issue I dove into the code to find the problem. babgvant quickly checked in a source code fix (available as revision 303 via SVN at https://babgvant.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/babgvant) which I built and confirmed does fix the issue. It has been working great now for over a month. I'll send babgvant a message to see if he can provide an official build via the SageMCTuner download button here: http://babgvant.com/files/folders/sa...s/default.aspx

babgvant won't be able to do a build right away so he has given me the green light to attach a new sagemctuner.zip with my build of his changes to SBEConvert. The rest of the files in the .zip are unchanged from his package available at the link mentioned earlier. If you already have this service installed then simply stop it, copy the new SBEConvert.exe over the existing one and restart it. , Support questions should still go to babgvant. I only built the exe Enjoy!

[jason531]

Thank you for posting the update to SBEConvert!

I finally received my Ceton card last week after ordering it on 9/30/2010. I had a few minor issues getting it working, but it seems to be working great now. I had spent the past week doing a lot of tweaking and tuning since I haven't used Sage since the days of standard-def DirecTV. Instead I was using a pair of TiVo HD boxes for TV and a pair of extenders (1 each HD-100/200) for everything else.

I am glad to have everything back on Sage now -- it is great to finally have HDTV on my extenders. I ran a test tonight with four simultaneous HD recordings on the server and HD playback on both extenders. It seemed to work fine and I/O didn't seem to be an issue. Of course, I am using a RAID0 array of 4-drives. This isn't very fault tolerant, of course, but my plan is to make images of the OS every time it changes (seldom) and archive any recordings I want to keep to my Drobo.

I'll post more details about my configuration and RAID0 tests later, but for now I'm very pleased.

[Mythikal]

Originally Posted by spencerw

I only built the exe Enjoy!

Beauty playin', eh!

[gcomrie]

I got my Ceton card last week. Cable card is in and working. I can see lots of channels in 7MC. I have followed all the directions in the post, but keep getting the following error when I try to use the card from Sage:

Sun 1/23 22:36:37.145 [main@15b9e68] Processing new system dev:Ceton InfiniTV MOCUR (00-00-22-00-00-80-10-85), Unit #1
Sun 1/23 22:36:37.145 [main@15b9e68] Saving properties file to C:\Program Files\SageTV\SageTV\Sage.properties
Sun 1/23 22:36:37.747 [main@15b9e68] Capture device is found in BDA_RECEIVER_COMPONENT, but don't have a BDA_MPEG2_TRANSPORT pin, drop it!
Sun 1/23 22:36:37.748 [main@15b9e68] Capture device is found in BDA_NETWORK_TUNER, but don't have a BDA_MPEG2_TRANSPORT pin, drop it!
Sun 1/23 22:36:37.748 [main@15b9e68] Capture device Ceton InfiniTV MOCUR (00-00-22-00-00-80-10-85), Unit #1 (0) does not exist
Sun 1/23 22:36:37.748 [main@15b9e68] New sysdev failed the check

Any help getting this to work would be greatly appreciated.

[jason531]

Well, my initial excitement was tempered a bit this weekend when my recording failed and I missed the first 2 1/2 quarters of the NFC Championship game as a result. It turns out that there is a common problem which shows up when recording NFL games which results in the message "Recording of this content is prohibited by the content provider" showing up in the Media Center section of the Windows Event Viewer. After reading a long thread on TGB about the issue, I opened a ticket with Ceton and they quickly gave me access to the beta firmware which supposedly fixes the issue.

I've been pretty impressed with Ceton's support so far, but I think they need to put a note on their main support page to let people know they need the beta firmware to record NFL games. This firmware has been in beta since October, too, so I'm not sure why it hasn't been released.

My other issue is high DPCs/Interrupts usage of the CPU when recording 4 channels at once. During this time my total CPU usage is around 60% with 40% going to DPCs and interrupts. I ran some traces and it looks like NDIS.SYS is the culprit, even after upgrading my NIC drivers. My sage.properties entries for SageMCTuner are pointing to localhost, so I guess that is why NDIS.SYS is getting hammered, but it seems like it shouldn't really need the NIC to get to localhost. Anyone have any ideas here?

I'll post an update after I install the beta firmware, but there is only one NFL game left until September :-(

-Jason

Update: It doesn't look like SageMCTuner or localhost is a factor. I fired off 4 simultaneous recordings directly in MCE and see similar DPCs/Interrupts. It could have something to do with the Ceton card showing up as a network adapter. I might suspend any further testing until I get that beta firmware installed -- maybe everything will be magically fixed.

[babgvant]

Originally Posted by jason531

I've been pretty impressed with Ceton's support so far, but I think they need to put a note on their main support page to let people know they need the beta firmware to record NFL games. This firmware has been in beta since October, too, so I'm not sure why it hasn't been released.

CableLabs certification.

Originally Posted by jason531

My other issue is high DPCs/Interrupts usage of the CPU when recording 4 channels at once. During this time my total CPU usage is around 60% with 40% going to DPCs and interrupts. I ran some traces and it looks like NDIS.SYS is the culprit, even after upgrading my NIC drivers. My sage.properties entries for SageMCTuner are pointing to localhost, so I guess that is why NDIS.SYS is getting hammered, but it seems like it shouldn't really need the NIC to get to localhost. Anyone have any ideas here?

The MOCUR is exposed as a separate NIC on a discrete subnet. The reference to localhost is just to the network encoder. MC still has to talk to the device over the network.

[jason531]

Originally Posted by babgvant

CableLabs certification.



The MOCUR is exposed as a separate NIC on a discrete subnet. The reference to localhost is just to the network encoder. MC still has to talk to the device over the network.

Thank you for the clarification. I updated my post after I tested with MCE without SageMCTuner and saw the same DPC/ISR issue. Is this typical CPU usage or should I keep trying to tweak my drivers or something else?

Oh, and thank you so much for SageMCTuner! I am so glad to have HDTV working in Sage and I wouldn't be able to do that without your hard work. That reminds me, I need to go find your donation link and thank you properly. Thanks again.

[babgvant]

Originally Posted by jason531

Thank you for the clarification. I updated my post after I tested with MCE without SageMCTuner and saw the same DPC/ISR issue. Is this typical CPU usage or should I keep trying to tweak my drivers or something else?

What kind of NIC are you using?

Originally Posted by jason531

Oh, and thank you so much for SageMCTuner!

NP. Got a new network encoder coming that will interact directly with the DCT in the next few days.

[Mythikal]

Originally Posted by babgvant

Got a new network encoder coming that will interact directly with the DCT in the next few days.

Does that mean no more tuning by proxy through Media Center? Direct tuning of the card from Sage?

[babgvant]

Originally Posted by Mythikal

Does that mean no more tuning by proxy through Media Center? Direct tuning of the card from Sage?

Yes

[Fuzzy]

Originally Posted by babgvant

Yes

If only there was a way to know if a show was going to be flagged copy freely.. ;-)