SageMCTuner - anyone have this working with cablecard?

[xj-boonie]

Originally Posted by babgvant

Yes

I'd more than than willing to help out with the beta

[Mythikal]

Originally Posted by babgvant

Yes

Now THAT'S exciting!

[Sparhawk6]

Wonderful. If this works reliably, I will be purchasing the Ceton card. I need to be running Windows 7 for the Ceton card to work, correct?

[tmiranda]

Originally Posted by babgvant

Yes

My hero! I've been waiting for the HDHRPrime so I did not have to mess around with WMC. I'll also put my hand up as a potential beta tester.

[jason531]

Originally Posted by babgvant

What kind of NIC are you using?

My NIC is motherboard-based PCIe, which shows up in device manager as "Realtek PCIe GBE Family Controller." It has a property on the advanced tab of the properties for "interrupt modulation" which is enabled. Installing the latest driver reduced my DPC/ISR CPU usage from around 40% to about 32%. I've considered enabling bridging but that might cause other problems and might not help -- I have no idea.

I wonder if others have the same issue and whether a different NIC would help. I'm sure I have a gigabit NIC lying around, but it is PCI not PCIe. I guess I could test that.

(BTW, I found this issue because SysInternals Process Explorer was reporting the DPCs and Interrupts as using a lot of CPU. I then followed this guide to narrow it down to ndis.sys. I mention this in case anyone else wants to troubleshoot this or similar issues.)

[babgvant]

Originally Posted by jason531

My NIC is motherboard-based PCIe, which shows up in device manager as "Realtek PCIe GBE Family Controller." It has a property on the advanced tab of the properties for "interrupt modulation" which is enabled. Installing the latest driver reduced my DPC/ISR CPU usage from around 40% to about 32%. I've considered enabling bridging but that might cause other problems and might not help -- I have no idea.

I wonder if others have the same issue and whether a different NIC would help. I'm sure I have a gigabit NIC lying around, but it is PCI not PCIe. I guess I could test that.

(BTW, I found this issue because SysInternals Process Explorer was reporting the DPCs and Interrupts as using a lot of CPU. I then followed this guide to narrow it down to ndis.sys. I mention this in case anyone else wants to troubleshoot this or similar issues.)

I haven't noticed any issues w/ resources during my testing, but the system I have the card in is pretty high-end (for a HTPC).

FWIW - I'm a big fan of Intel NICs. Had several issues with Realtek in the past.

[bollockz]

SageTV tuning the Ceton card without 7MC proxied.....? I am super excited

Can't wait to get rid of 7MC and hopefully cut down on the tuning delay

If you need any more testers I would be willing!

[bollockz]

I was able to obtain the beta firmware from Ceton and have it installed (with my card serial registered)

[kmp14]

Anyone having minor weirdness with commercial skipping of Ceton recorded shows? I have ShowAnalyzer .97 and the 1.0 release installed, and both exhibit this behavior: The commercial skipping drifts. The first commercial segment is marked perfectly, but each subsequent commercial segment gets marked as a couple seconds earlier then it should, and, logically, ends a couple seconds earlier than it should. It gets a little worse with each segment. I also have an HDHomerun for the local channels, and those recordings get marked perfectly. Minor, but annoying.....

[Fuzzy]

Originally Posted by kmp14

Anyone having minor weirdness with commercial skipping of Ceton recorded shows? I have ShowAnalyzer .97 and the 1.0 release installed, and both exhibit this behavior: The commercial skipping drifts. The first commercial segment is marked perfectly, but each subsequent commercial segment gets marked as a couple seconds earlier then it should, and, logically, ends a couple seconds earlier than it should. It gets a little worse with each segment. I also have an HDHomerun for the local channels, and those recordings get marked perfectly. Minor, but annoying.....

That is an issue with the fact that your hour long recording is actually 59:50 or so (due to the long tuning time), but sage 'scales' the timeline to make it look like a 60 minute show. The problem is the Comskip UI sees the scaled timeline. There's a feature added to v7 to disable this time scaling. in the sageclient.properties (I believe it's videoframe/disable_timescaling_on_seek). It can also no be set in the comskip playback UI mod configuration: Detailed Setup -> Customize -> Comskip Playback Options -> Operation Options -> Scale Timeline. Set it to No and your skips should be more accurate.

[Chriscic]

Noticed this post on Missing Remote website:

http://www.missingremote.com/taxonomy/term/36

Sounds interesting. Don't know how many channels are "copy freely" though.

* merged *

[Fuzzy]

Originally Posted by Chriscic

Noticed this post on Missing Remote website:

http://www.missingremote.com/taxonomy/term/36

Sounds interesting. Don't know how many channels are "copy freely" though.

Unfortunately, it depends on your carrier. The premium channels are guaranteed to NOT be copy freely - the others seems random.

[gcomrie]

Can't wait to get my hands on this.

[Clift]

GRRrrrrrr Brighthouse Networks.... grumble grumble

=(

[jason531]

Originally Posted by babgvant

I haven't noticed any issues w/ resources during my testing, but the system I have the card in is pretty high-end (for a HTPC).

FWIW - I'm a big fan of Intel NICs. Had several issues with Realtek in the past.

Well, I finally got around to testing a new Intel PCIe NIC after getting my card working with Comcast again. I had some missing channels so the rep "fixed" it by wiping out my entire pairing configuration. It took several calls/chats until I finally got someone who understood how to configure a CableCARD. Anyway, it's all working again.

Sadly, the Intel NIC performs slightly worse than the Realtek on my MB in terms of DPCs/Interrupts when recording 4 channels simultaneously. I suppose it is just a fact of life since the Ceton communicates via the network. It isn't killing me, since I still have plenty of CPU and seldom use this PC for anything else. I guess I'm just a tweaker (as most of us probably are) and wanted to weed out any inefficient CPU use.

Here are the details:
http://hoocanhelp.com/htpc/perf/cpu_...omparison.html

Oh, and as promised, here is a comparison of various RAID0 configurations I tried. I was paranoid about I/O bottlenecks, so I tried a pair of SSDs. They are still way too expensive per GB for my tastes, and I chose a 4x500GB SATA configuration instead. I/O is not a problem so far :-)

http://hoocanhelp.com/htpc/perf/raid0_comparison.html

[xj-boonie]

Originally Posted by spencerw

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!

I copied SBEConvert over, but it kept giving me an error when I started it. I had to install .NET 4.0.30319 and now it works. Not sure if it auto deletes yet. I'll let you know.

[babgvant]

SageDCT is public. For those in the private beta, this rev contains updates not in the last private release.

[jason531]

Great work, Andy! Thank you.

With regard to "known issue #1 - video streams not recognized," does the fix work for the extenders now?

(Sorry I haven't had time to test it yet, but I've been sidetracked by testing three potential Drobo replacements. There can be only one! The other two will go back to Amazon while the Drobo is bound for eBay.)

Very best regards and thanks again. I still think Ceton owes you money -- I wouldn't have bought their card without SageMCTuner/SageDCT!

[babgvant]

Originally Posted by jason531

With regard to "known issue #1 - video streams not recognized," does the fix work for the extenders now?

The files I've tested have worked on the HD300, if you have issues with the updated rev LMK it's very likely that more changes will be required.

I rewrote the class that writes the TS packets, which should help with some of the playback issues.

[QueOnda]

very nice work. Were you also working on (at one time) a program were WMC recorded the show and you took out of their encrypted file and converted it to a sagetv format unencrypted?