Sage 9 on Ubuntu 16.04 w/OpenDCT

[chairmanmao]

I successfully installed v9 on Ubuntu 16.04 using the install script, which also set up OpenDCT for me as well. But I ran into a few problems, including the fact that currently I cannot see any video from within Sage .

I understand from other posts that getting everything to work on 16.04 is problematic. I'll downrev to 14 if necessary, but before I do I thought I'd check in and see if anyone else has gotten 16.04 to work.

Questions:

1) My setup involves two HdHomeRun Primes. When OpenDCT gets set up, either by the Sage installation script or manually (I've done it both ways), it only seems to detect one of the Primes. At least, there's only one dct_hdhomerun.properties file in /etc/opendct/conf/lineups, and all its http references are to a single Prime.

Does OpenDCT support multiple Primes? If so, how do I configure the additional Primes?

2) When I say I can't see any video, I suspect the problem is that Sage can't "find" the channels. I let Sage do a channel scan, in the course of setting up one of the Prime tuners (on the Prime which OpenDCT had found), but it found only a very small number of channels (26, after getting halfway through the scan, at which point I aborted it).

I know the Prime can "see" hundreds of channels, because it serves my older Sage v7 setup. Also, when I go to the Prime's webpage, it lists hundreds of channels. So I think the problem is somewhere in how Sage is interacting with the Prime via OpenDCT.

This surfaced vague memories of having to do something involving copying a Prime-generated channel scan into v7 of Sage for it to work...but I don't remember the details. But I do remember that the default Sage options, during tuner configuration, of "basic cable" and 'extended basic cable' (I'm on Comcast in the Bay Area) weren't quite right.

Are there additional steps I need to go through to configure Sage to recognize Comcast's channel lineup?

- Mark

[tmiranda]

Originally Posted by chairmanmao

I understand from other posts that getting everything to work on 16.04 is problematic.

Note to self: Check forums before updating Ubuntu development machine.

My machine is updating to 16.04 as I type.....

Edit: No issues running OpenDCT with 16.04

[chairmanmao]

Originally Posted by tmiranda

Note to self: Check forums before updating Ubuntu development machine.

My machine is updating to 16.04 as I type.....

Edit: No issues running OpenDCT with 16.04

Did you do anything unusual to get Sage's channel scan to work?

[EnterNoEscape]

Originally Posted by chairmanmao

I successfully installed v9 on Ubuntu 16.04 using the install script, which also set up OpenDCT for me as well. But I ran into a few problems, including the fact that currently I cannot see any video from within Sage .

I understand from other posts that getting everything to work on 16.04 is problematic. I'll downrev to 14 if necessary, but before I do I thought I'd check in and see if anyone else has gotten 16.04 to work.

Questions:

1) My setup involves two HdHomeRun Primes. When OpenDCT gets set up, either by the Sage installation script or manually (I've done it both ways), it only seems to detect one of the Primes. At least, there's only one dct_hdhomerun.properties file in /etc/opendct/conf/lineups, and all its http references are to a single Prime.

Does OpenDCT support multiple Primes? If so, how do I configure the additional Primes?

OpenDCT will support as many Primes as any normal user would want. It will by default only create one lineup for all of them based on the first one it discovers. If it wants to tune over HTTP, it will change the IP address to the one of the device it's actually trying to tune. If the URL doesn't work on that device it tries to tune using the native protocol instead which results in using RTP.

Originally Posted by chairmanmao

2) When I say I can't see any video, I suspect the problem is that Sage can't "find" the channels. I let Sage do a channel scan, in the course of setting up one of the Prime tuners (on the Prime which OpenDCT had found), but it found only a very small number of channels (26, after getting halfway through the scan, at which point I aborted it).

I know the Prime can "see" hundreds of channels, because it serves my older Sage v7 setup. Also, when I go to the Prime's webpage, it lists hundreds of channels. So I think the problem is somewhere in how Sage is interacting with the Prime via OpenDCT.

This surfaced vague memories of having to do something involving copying a Prime-generated channel scan into v7 of Sage for it to work...but I don't remember the details. But I do remember that the default Sage options, during tuner configuration, of "basic cable" and 'extended basic cable' (I'm on Comcast in the Bay Area) weren't quite right.

Are there additional steps I need to go through to configure Sage to recognize Comcast's channel lineup?

- Mark

It's odd that the channel scan took any significant amount of time. It should be passing the lineup from the HDHomeRun Prime directly into SageTV excluding DRMed channels. If you can post the logs from both SageTV and OpenDCT after a channel scan, I can probably give you a better idea of what's going on. The OpenDCT logs are under /var/log/opendct.

[chairmanmao]

Thanx, I'll post them later tonight or tomorrow after doing another channel scan.

Can you tell me where the sage logs are stored?

[tmiranda]

Originally Posted by chairmanmao

Did you do anything unusual to get Sage's channel scan to work?

I didn't do a scan. I had it working before the upgrade.

[chairmanmao]

I ran a complete channel scan, and it discovered a small fraction of the available channels. Interestingly, it took a very long time (probably about 20 or 25 minutes), and the channels it found didn't look anything like normal channels (e.g., their names looked like the raw channel IDs I seem to recall seeing while messing around with the HDHomeRun config software).

Here are the logs. Let me know what else I can do to help figure this out.

- Mark

[EnterNoEscape]

Originally Posted by chairmanmao

I ran a complete channel scan, and it discovered a small fraction of the available channels. Interestingly, it took a very long time (probably about 20 or 25 minutes), and the channels it found didn't look anything like normal channels (e.g., their names looked like the raw channel IDs I seem to recall seeing while messing around with the HDHomeRun config software).

Here are the logs. Let me know what else I can do to help figure this out.

- Mark

Are you completely sure you have selected the capture devices provided by OpenDCT? The SageTV log doesn't show anything useful; it might have rolled over right after you did the channel scan. I don't see any evidence in the opendct.log file that a channel scan ever happened. The capture devices should look a little like this:

DCT-HDHomeRun Prime Tuner 131F5955-1 on 10.0.0.34:9000

[chairmanmao]

I played around some more with trying to get opendct and sage to talk to each other. In the course of that I re-installed opendct and re-configured opendct based on the instructions on its github page (I used the latest stable version).

Along the way I noticed one of the problems I had, I think: I was using pre-systemd commands to start, stop, and set for launch on boot...which is why neither opendct nor sage launched on boot.

Using the right commands for Ubuntu 16.04 got me a different set of messages in the opendct log file when I ran console-only. In particular, it no longer complained about not having anything in the uPNP registry (or some such).

Unfortunately, the channel scan in Sage is still taking forever, and not finding any channels

I've attached the latest log files, as well as Sage.properties (it's in the zip archive). I've also attached a screen shot of what I'm seeing in Sage when I select what I think is an opendct-provided tuner.

- Mark

[Fuzzy]

Originally Posted by EnterNoEscape

It's odd that the channel scan took any significant amount of time. It should be passing the lineup from the HDHomeRun Prime directly into SageTV excluding DRMed channels. If you can post the logs from both SageTV and OpenDCT after a channel scan, I can probably give you a better idea of what's going on. The OpenDCT logs are under /var/log/opendct.

FWIW, I don't think I've ever successfully had a scan from in sage do what you describe with openDCT. I've always had to configure channels manually.

[tmiranda]

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

FWIW, I don't think I've ever successfully had a scan from in sage do what you describe with openDCT. I've always had to configure channels manually.

+1. I've never done a scan. OpenDCT gets the complete lineup and enables all channels by default. All I had to do was disable the channels I wasn't interested in.

[EnterNoEscape]

Originally Posted by chairmanmao

I played around some more with trying to get opendct and sage to talk to each other. In the course of that I re-installed opendct and re-configured opendct based on the instructions on its github page (I used the latest stable version).

Along the way I noticed one of the problems I had, I think: I was using pre-systemd commands to start, stop, and set for launch on boot...which is why neither opendct nor sage launched on boot.

Using the right commands for Ubuntu 16.04 got me a different set of messages in the opendct log file when I ran console-only. In particular, it no longer complained about not having anything in the uPNP registry (or some such).

Unfortunately, the channel scan in Sage is still taking forever, and not finding any channels

I've attached the latest log files, as well as Sage.properties (it's in the zip archive). I've also attached a screen shot of what I'm seeing in Sage when I select what I think is an opendct-provided tuner.

- Mark

That screenshot is not showing any tuners being provided by OpenDCT. Are you certain that discovery on the SageTV side of things is enabled? Make sure network_encoder_discovery=true is in Sage.properties.

[chairmanmao]

Originally Posted by EnterNoEscape

That screenshot is not showing any tuners being provided by OpenDCT. Are you certain that discovery on the SageTV side of things is enabled? Make sure network_encoder_discovery=true is in Sage.properties.

Yes, I check that each time I install or reconfigure opendct. I'll check it again, though, just to be sure.

This reminds me of something, though: when I look at the screen, in Sage, for a tuner after I've added it, the parameter "network encoder" shows as false. Which seemed odd, since these are HDHomeRuns we're talking about.

What else is involved in the discovery process? Is there a way to set a more detailed logging level in Sage so I can see what it's doing, or not doing?

[chairmanmao]

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

FWIW, I don't think I've ever successfully had a scan from in sage do what you describe with openDCT. I've always had to configure channels manually.

How do you do that?

[Fuzzy]

Originally Posted by chairmanmao

How do you do that?

The EPG gets the channel list for my area, I just to in and ensure that only the channels that I want and are available are enabled (all done in sage). an actually channel scan is not required for cablecard, as the map of logical channels to actual tuning is handled by the cablecard/tuning adapter itself, not by sage or opendct.

[EnterNoEscape]

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

FWIW, I don't think I've ever successfully had a scan from in sage do what you describe with openDCT. I've always had to configure channels manually.

You had a unique situation whereby the ID of your HDHomeRun was being converted into an IP address by some logic I was unaware of in the Java API itself. The IP addresses should now be resolving correctly and you should be able to do normal channel scans.

[chairmanmao]

This morning I tried blowing away sage and re-installing it directly from the bintray deb file.

Still no luck. It's still taking forever to do a channel scan, and the resulting "channels" aren't really channels.

Has anyone gotten this setup -- opendct and sagetv on Ubuntu 16.04 -- to work?

What next steps can I try to figure out what's wrong?

[chairmanmao]

A thought: is it possible that my HDHomeRun Primes are "locked" to my v7 Sage server, which runs on a different computer?

I'm just puzzled why my v9 Sage server is "seeing" Prime tuners that OpenDCT isn't making visible, and not seeing the ones that OpenDCT is supposedly making visible.

[Wrx4me]

For what its worth I am in the process of moving to V9 on an Ubuntu 16.04 VM running in unRaid. I just finished installing my server and all tuners were detected even though my Win7 server was still online and mapped to those tuners.

What you show in your screenshot I also saw when I initially installed 16.04 while testing. My issue was that I did not stop Opendct after installation and run console-only from the CLI. I went into the Sage.properties file deleted all the mmc/enconder lines ran console-only and all my tuners including those on an adjacent 14.04 test VM were detected. Make sure you run console-only with opendct stopped and as has been mentioned no channel scan is needed.

[chairmanmao]

I could've sworn I had opendct not running when I ran console-only...but maybe not.

So I redid everything, starting with deleting all the tuners from Sage.properties.

I made absolutely positively sure that opendct wasn't running. Nor was sage. And then ran console-only.

It appeared to run fine...but the same old same old: same "unusual" tuners listed in Sage, same too long channel scan, and no video.

I'm beginning to think I'm trapped in hell, where even when you follow the instructions nothing works

Other thoughts? Is there an alternative to opendct that runs on Linux? I'm about ready to throw in the towel on this experiment, 'cause nothing seems to work. Or provide any information on why it isn't working, either