BM1000-HDMI (HDMI Encoder) Review

[SHS]

Originally Posted by tmiranda

What website did you purchase it from? This one? http://www.aliexpress.com/item/MPEG-...856597088.html

The link you where just at there buy buttom

[EnterNoEscape]

Originally Posted by tmiranda

What website did you purchase it from? This one? http://www.aliexpress.com/item/MPEG-...856597088.html

That's the one I bought. I wish I had noticed this one: http://www.aliexpress.com/store/prod...597507323.html that claims to actually support encoding to 1080p60. I would really like to be able to capture the 1080p60 output from my computer.

[valnar]

Originally Posted by EnterNoEscape

That's the one I bought. I wish I had noticed this one: http://www.aliexpress.com/store/prod...597507323.html that claims to actually support encoding to 1080p60. I would really like to be able to capture the 1080p60 output from my computer.

OK, just read this thread for the first time.

So if I have an existing HD-PVR/USB-UIRT installation fed from my Cable provider's STB, and I wanted to buy this as a drop-in replacement, is it a viable alternative? I've been lucky with my HD-PVR since I bought one - never need to reboot it due to heat or anything else (it's a late-model build).

[EnterNoEscape]

Yes, this can be used as a drop in replacement, but you need to be willing to live with 2 channel audio and SageTV does not directly support it. I have added support to OpenDCT. If you are happy with your current setup, there's no reason to buy this.

[KryptoNyte]

Originally Posted by EnterNoEscape

That's the one I bought. I wish I had noticed this one: http://www.aliexpress.com/store/prod...597507323.html that claims to actually support encoding to 1080p60. I would really like to be able to capture the 1080p60 output from my computer.

The purchase history on that device is interesting ... one person bought one on January 21st, and apparently liked it so much they bought 16 more about a week later!

[EnterNoEscape]

They make these in large rackmount configurations too, but it's cheaper per capture device to go with the individual ones.

I wrote a PowerShell script for the Windows crowd to handle the roughness of channel resolution changes. It basically tracks the things I've noticed that change when the detected input resolution changes, but the video hasn't caught up yet and it also maintains a channel list of known channel resolutions, so if the device is already on the right resolution, it returns immediately after tuning the new channel. Writing this script made me realize that the transition takes 20 seconds. This is more of an issue if you tune live TV a lot.

Note that you can just change the channel to another channel with a different resolution abruptly and SageTV will deal with it, but you get the visual artifacts I mentioned in my review. This script pretty much eliminates those transitions from making it into the recording.

[TechBill]

Originally Posted by EnterNoEscape

That's the one I bought. I wish I had noticed this one: http://www.aliexpress.com/store/prod...597507323.html that claims to actually support encoding to 1080p60. I would really like to be able to capture the 1080p60 output from my computer.

Will this BM3000 work the same as the BM1000 on OpenDCT or additional code will be needed for the BM3000?

I have a question about channel tuning, right now I am using fixed resolution at 720p from my DirectTV boxes and Ethernet http channel tuning via Colossus cards ...

Would I just be able to replace the Colossus with this BM3000 and still keep my channel tuning via Ethernet using OpenDCT and change the DirectTV resolution to 1080i ?


Bill

[EnterNoEscape]

Originally Posted by TechBill

Will this BM3000 work the same as the BM1000 on OpenDCT or additional code will be needed for the BM3000?

I have a question about channel tuning, right now I am using fixed resolution at 720p from my DirectTV boxes and Ethernet http channel tuning via Colossus cards ...

Would I just be able to replace the Colossus with this BM3000 and still keep my channel tuning via Ethernet using OpenDCT and change the DirectTV resolution to 1080i ?


Bill

The support for these kinds of devices is very generic in nature and I intentionally set it up that way in OpenDCT. I see no reason why that one wouldn't work just as well.

I believe the way you're tuning is just running an executable/script. If that's true, the transition would be fairly smooth for your setup. You would just need to do a little manual configuration in OpenDCT because these devices can't be detected, but it won't be anything tricky.

[SHS]

Originally Posted by EnterNoEscape

That's the one I bought. I wish I had noticed this one: http://www.aliexpress.com/store/prod...597507323.html that claims to actually support encoding to 1080p60. I would really like to be able to capture the 1080p60 output from my computer.

BM3000-HDMI mini Video Encoder
Video
Input 1x HDMI (1.4) HDCP
Resolution 1920x1080@60p/50p, 1920x1080@60i/50i, 1280x720@60p/50p, 720x576i/480i
Encoding H.264/AVC Baseline/Main/High Profile Level 4.2
Encoding Output FPS 1080P60 (only input 1080P60)
Data Rate 0.16Mbps~32Mbps
Rate Control CBR/VBR
GOP Structure IBBP
Advanced Pretreatment De-interlacing, Image Enhancement, Noise Reduction, Sharpening
Latency Time 300ms

Audio
Encoding AAC/AAC+/MP3
Sampling rate 44100/48000 Hz
Bit-rate 32K/48K/64K/96K/128K/160K/192K/384K
Sampling precision 24 bit

[SHS]

Originally Posted by TechBill

Will this BM3000 work the same as the BM1000 on OpenDCT or additional code will be needed for the BM3000?

I have a question about channel tuning, right now I am using fixed resolution at 720p from my DirectTV boxes and Ethernet http channel tuning via Colossus cards ...

Would I just be able to replace the Colossus with this BM3000 and still keep my channel tuning via Ethernet using OpenDCT and change the DirectTV resolution to 1080i ?

Bill

Bill being there are IPTV device it should make any diff on who or which model you get as they all have fellow the same basic HTTP, RTSP, RTMP, HLS, UDP Unicast/Multicast network protocols.
So what ever EnterNoEscape write should work with all them
There should be no reason why DirectTV Ethernet http channel tuning won't work as before.
I can't believe how much they come down in last years as they where running at $500 then even the H265 are come way down in cost.

[EnterNoEscape]

I wasn't really sure where to put this, so here it is.

This script should work on most IPTV encoders since the web interfaces usually have the same XML data. This script will tune the desired channel, and monitor for evidence that the resolution is about to change, if it looks like it will change, then it will poll the web interface until it has changed. After that, the channel is saved with its resolution to speed up future tuning then the script exits. This script requires PowerShell 3.0+. This script can be adapted to other executables, but is not required. It basically just keeps you from recording the video resolution transitions.

This script defaults to the default IP address of the IPTV device as well as the username and password. The following command should work to execute this script to change a channel from OpenDCT 0.5.3+:

PowerShell.exe -File C:\Full\Path\TuneChannel.ps1 %c% 192.168.1.168 username password code_file_name.txt

Hint: If you don't want your username and password showing up in the OpenDCT logs, change the default values inside of the script instead of specifying them on the command line.

I found a C# wrapper for USB-UIRT and whipped up a C# based command line executable that allows you to send multiple IR blasts in one execution. It's much faster than uutx.exe which is the only other method I know of to tune with this device from the command line.

Edit: Updated script to allow the code file to be specified.

[SHS]

Kind of dumb thing to ask EnterNoEscape but is there an reasom why one would need your Tuning Script (USB-UIRT) vs the one that all ready build in to SageTV that has USB-UIRT support ?.

[EnterNoEscape]

I wish you could use what's built into SageTV, it would make my life a little easier, but when I tried presenting the network encoder as an analog device, SageTV said that I needed to configure the tuning remotely. In other words network encoders can't use anything that's built into SageTV.

[stuckless]

Originally Posted by EnterNoEscape

I wish you could use what's built into SageTV, it would make my life a little easier, but when I tried presenting the network encoder as an analog device, SageTV said that I needed to configure the tuning remotely. In other words network encoders can't use anything that's built into SageTV.

Maybe you could incorporate something like gentuner into the network encoder. Gentuner is an irtuner plugin for sagetv (I use it for CommandIR, but you can use it with lirc or any other command line tuning solution).

It would be handy if the network tuner, channel tuning, was compatible with sagetv's IR tuner plugin mode, to make it easier to migrate tuning solutions into your network encoder.

[EnterNoEscape]

Originally Posted by stuckless

Maybe you could incorporate something like gentuner into the network encoder. Gentuner is an irtuner plugin for sagetv (I use it for CommandIR, but you can use it with lirc or any other command line tuning solution).

It would be handy if the network tuner, channel tuning, was compatible with sagetv's IR tuner plugin mode, to make it easier to migrate tuning solutions into your network encoder.

What I should be able to do is provide the network encoder to SageTV as an analog HDMI device and SageTV should allow me to select from it's own built in tuning plugins. Any other method will not have a GUI and might as well just be script/executable driven (OpenDCT currently supports analog devices by running an executable of your choosing). I just checked back in on this from my previous experiment in telling SageTV that the network encoder was an analog device and it let me change the tuning device to a plugin. I'll play around with this more, but the impression I got when I set the device up was that SageTV was not going to do me any favors.

[EnterNoEscape]

This is what you get when you present an analog capture device to SageTV as a network encoder:



It doesn't provide me with any way to have SageTV assist in tuning at all. I don't know how much work it would be to change this option so that you can choose between a local tuning control, remote tuning control or no tuning control.

[SHS]

Originally Posted by EnterNoEscape

This is what you get when you present an analog capture device to SageTV as a network encoder:



It doesn't provide me with any way to have SageTV assist in tuning at all. I don't know how much work it would be to change this option so that you can choose between a local tuning control, remote tuning control or no tuning control.

I see maybe you could ask jeff for insight on the matter.

[EnterNoEscape]

Btw, if anyone is planning on capturing playback from an Android device, you will want to get one of the models that actually says that it can encode 1080p60.

[wayner]

We need something like this that can capture 4K video as 4K is starting to roll out with some cable and satellite companies, especially for sports. All Toronto Blue Jays home games are available in 4K this season.

[EnterNoEscape]

Originally Posted by wayner

We need something like this that can capture 4K video as 4K is starting to roll out with some cable and satellite companies, especially for sports. All Toronto Blue Jays home games are available in 4K this season.

No argument here, but I can only imagine how much those encoders will cost. I also can't imagine that if you're streaming it from an STB, that it can't be scaled down to 1080p as an interim solution. I understand this may defeat the point for many people, but if the goal is just getting the DRM'd recording, I think this currently the only affordable way to do it.