MyTheatre DVB Network Encoder Plugin

[johnnytyler]

Also any luck on the AC3 bug in the latest 4.16 beta???

[Motofreak75]

its been fixed


I set my video to use 1080I through its video drivers of my BFG 6600GTOC (through 3 video component output cables), and then I have a bare XP sp2 OS, with nothing installed but Nvidia's Purevideo decoder, and Xvid (for Mpeg4) thats all. And when I start a mpeg2 file with MEdia player the green nvidia icon shows up besides the clock. and from there you can set it. you might have a too many decoders installed and one of them is screwing up the others. I have tried cyberlink and it does a great job at quality but at the price of the cpu usage.

my htpc

3500+ AMD64/MSI K8N Neo4
1gig of ram
MCE 2005 KB & remote
BFG 6600GT
A180 HD tunner
Twinhan 1020a with a HH90 rotor
Trek 42 SAT antenna (with diplexer)
500 gig of space
60' LCD sony tv

Software
XP Pro SP2 (with no other updates)
Nvidia pure decoder 185 (nov 15 2005)
MT 3.33.3
Pete's plugin
MCE2005 rollup for KB use

[Motofreak75]

also if you have installed Twinhans own software Twinhan DTV 2.608a drivers it also registers certain ax files that will overwite other mpeg2 ax filters. And that also could be your problem. I used these drivers, but I install them first and then xvid > puredecoders..

[rsagetv99]

I am new to this plugin and have been playing around with it for the last few days. I seem to be getting DD 5.1 out of the channels that offer it which is cool, one thing I noticed though is that the SAGE video quality settings do not seem to make a difference. For instance, I bumped up the quality to Max MPeg Quality and it didn't look any different, and for a 2 hour program only took up about 2gb. My question is, how do I bump up the quality of the recordings? Is there a setting in MT?

[peterjb]

Originally Posted by rsagetv99

I am new to this plugin and have been playing around with it for the last few days. I seem to be getting DD 5.1 out of the channels that offer it which is cool, one thing I noticed though is that the SAGE video quality settings do not seem to make a difference. For instance, I bumped up the quality to Max MPeg Quality and it didn't look any different, and for a 2 hour program only took up about 2gb. My question is, how do I bump up the quality of the recordings? Is there a setting in MT?

The short answer is that you can't - The recording quality setting makes no difference to any type of Network Encoder. In the case of the Plugin, it will simply record your SD/HD DVB content at whatever quality it was originally transmitted by your provider.

Cheers

Peter

[dbdan]

Hi,

I'm having a problem going into standby mode in Windows XP. I have it so that my computer goes into standby (suspend) after a certain amount of minutes. I use girder to close mytheatre just before going into standby. However, if I have mytheatre running minimized, standby never gets triggered automatically. If I go into standby manually, it works fine. Anybody else have this problem?

Thanks.

[sverre]

When I try using this plugin it looks like SageTV can not communicate with MyTheatre. I think that is why Sage TV will not import my XML data.

From log file (also attached)

04-02-2006 16:38:40,402 SVT24 07-02-2006 00:30,15min: Rapport
04-02-2006 16:38:40,418 SVT24 07-02-2006 00:45,15min: Nöjesnytt
04-02-2006 16:38:40,527 TV4 06-02-2006 01:35,25min: Kalla fakta
04-02-2006 16:38:40,715 TV4 06-02-2006 02:00,50min: Nattöppet
04-02-2006 16:38:40,715 TV4 06-02-2006 02:50,25min: Sverige i veckan
(Retryable)Error communicating with encoding server:java.net.SocketException: Software caused connection abort: recv failed
(Retryable)Error communicating with encoding server:java.io.EOFException
Creating DirectX9 Texture from memory w=256 h=256
Creating DirectX9 Texture from memory w=161 h=44
Creating DirectX9 Texture from memory w=29 h=26
Creating DirectX9 Texture from memory w=29 h=26

When i do a netstat on the machine that runs mytheatre, nothing is listed for port 6969. But I guess it should?

Can anyone give me a hint about what might be missing?

[Motofreak75]

have you verifed that the plugin is installed correctly on the machine using MT ? also have you tried to open the plugin when MT is running (right click on the screen > plugin> MTsage decoder ?

[sverre]

Yes, in MyTheatre it sure looks like it's working. When I use netstat though I can not see port 6969 in the list of ports that are active.

I thought this might be a issue with windows firewall then (even though I use Sage and MyTheatre on the same computer) but MyTheatre.exe and port 6969 are opened in the Windows Firewall....

This is what my plugin (version 1.0.0) looks like in MyTheatre:

[sverre]

Is there anyone that can confirm wether anything for this plugin is displayed, when issuing a "netstat" command from the command prompt in windows?

I can't see it there but I guess it should be...

Please, anyone who has got this working? Can you check?

[Madcoder]

Hi. Good job on this plugin. It works flawlessly for me. Would it be possible to get the plugin to help with bringing the teletext screen for MyTheatre up over the top of Sage, so we can have easy Teletext too? I know there may be some screen manipulation issues from your plugins point of view if something other than Sage gets on the top, but I am willing to deal with that with Girder or something. The main thing that would be great is if you could have your plugin just at least LAUNCH the teletext plugin. Then we could use our own means (like Girder) to pull it to the top screen when needed. Or do you know some other way to automate the launch of the teletext plugin upon launch of MyTheatre?

[peterjb]

Just a short note to say that I've added the current plugin source code to the initial post in this thread. This is at the request of a number of people and due to my imminent move to Native DVB-T support. ( I hope! )

Madcoder - I'm not sure that it can be done. In that SageTV is playing back a recording, not interpreting the live DVB Stream. So I'm not sure how you could 'plug in' to that? Having said that, the plugin is not dependant on screen manipulation in any way. So if there is an existing teletext MT plugin, you could try it to see what happens.

UPDATE : I tried the MT Teletext plugin for the one station in Oz that has Teletext and it appears to work Ok. By that I mean it's concurent use did not impact the SageTV Network Encoder plugins functionality.

Cheers

Peter

[dbdan]

Is anybody using windows power management successfully with Sage and MyTheatre? I notice that when I have set up a recording in Sage, the recording finishes, but MyTheatre still continues to stream the channel that was recorded. My computer does not go into standby (S3) unless I switch to offline or shutdown MyTheatre.

I don't think there is a way to automatically shutdown MyTheatre when a sage recording ends, but is there a way to turn off the streaming channel in MyTheatre after a Sage recording to enable windows standby?

Thanks.

[kha]

dbdan,

Similar problems prevent me from using Power Management options in SageTV.

However, in my case, I found that even if I completely disable SageTV streaming plugin in MyTheatre and won't run SageTV at all, MyTheatre prevents computer from going into Standby/Hybernation after successfully tuning to any of the channels.

MK.

[technazz]

It seems Im getting the end of show bug again in 4.17.(feezing). can anybody else verify this. I went back to 4.16 and all is good.

Technazz

[Motofreak75]

it is important to email tech support about this matter. I will have time tomorrow to make a detailed email to Qian about this matter.


One step forward, three steps back........

[grooves12]

Ok, I may be a little slow... but I don't get what the point of setting up the Favorites list in Mytheatre, as I am not seeing any instructions in the walkthrough that are pointing to them from Sage. I am sure it must be somehow, as how else would it know how to change channels and what channel to change to... but I am just not getting it (which is why my configuration probably isn't working.)

Is it necessary to use an XMLTV pluging so that it can pull the channels from MT and know which provider they are from and their settings, etc?

[xred]

Originally Posted by grooves12

Ok, I may be a little slow... but I don't get what the point of setting up the Favorites list in Mytheatre, as I am not seeing any instructions in the walkthrough that are pointing to them from Sage. I am sure it must be somehow, as how else would it know how to change channels and what channel to change to... but I am just not getting it (which is why my configuration probably isn't working.)

Is it necessary to use an XMLTV pluging so that it can pull the channels from MT and know which provider they are from and their settings, etc?

The plugin requires it.... there is no setting on the Sage side for this. Basically only the channels you place in the "SageTV" favourites are made available to Sage. If you don't want to work on sync'ing the lists, you can do what I did and just add ALL your available channels to the SageTV favourite then use Sage to just enable / disable channels as you see fit.

[grooves12]

yeah, I figured it out... kind of. The part that threw me off is that the instructions say you can call the favorites list anything you like, and then doesn't tell you how to change the setting if you name it something else. But, I found it in the Card1.ini in the the plugin folder.

The other thing though, is that if I use the default Zap2it info in Sage, it does not have all the channels that I have... do I have to use some kind of xmltv plugin to get ALL of the channel information. I have seen some brief mention of it... but no thorough explanation of which one is the best to use, or specifically how to set them up.

[xred]

Originally Posted by grooves12

yeah, I figured it out... kind of. The part that threw me off is that the instructions say you can call the favorites list anything you like, and then doesn't tell you how to change the setting if you name it something else. But, I found it in the Card1.ini in the the plugin folder.

The other thing though, is that if I use the default Zap2it info in Sage, it does not have all the channels that I have... do I have to use some kind of xmltv plugin to get ALL of the channel information. I have seen some brief mention of it... but no thorough explanation of which one is the best to use, or specifically how to set them up.

Welcome to the current state of affairs. =)

If you look over on the MyTheatre forums, you wil see that there is a utility called XMLTV2MTEPG that provides the functionality of outputting the EPG data contained in MyTheatre out to an XMLTV file that Sage can then input using one of the many XMLTV plugins available here in the forums.

The good news is that you're going to get the EXACT channel list you have in MyTheatre, and the EPG data will contain the info for ALL the channels including all PPV channels.

The bad news is that you're quickly going to find out the XMLTV plugins aren't able to import the data from MyTheatre in such a way that they can extract important stuff like first run info, HD Channels etc. This makes recording managing favourites and generally getting Sage to record "the right shows" a lot harder.

Currently there are a bunch of threads trying to get the Sage guys to support using mixed data sources, so that we can use the internal EPG grabber for all the regular channels, and XMLTV for PPV / Sports channels the internal EPG doesn't grab data for. No joy to date.