MyTheatre DVB Network Encoder Plugin

[stuch]

I have also been using the plugin for at least a year now, and It works great, not a hiccup.

Something I have been thinking would be nice:

Is there any way to get multiple instances of The Plugin running on different ports(6969, 6970 etc) in a Single instance of MT, using a single tuner card, and different (unique) favorite lists.

The thought is that then in Sage you could use the Zap2it listings for standard channels (on one Virtual Tuner), and possibly XMLTV inputs (using the "virtual tuners") pulled in from other sources (MT, etc) Allowing a fully converged (and complete) EPG in Sage

Thanks for all you efforts. Keep up the great work.

Ted

[peterjb]

Here is a new test version of the Plugin which offers the following:

* Enables TS recording functionality for MT 3.38.2
* Enables MT 4.X Beta Recording functionality
* Fixes UI Bugs related to specifying MT Favourite & SageTV TCP/IP Port
* Add new network encoder definitions for TS & PS to

You can choose to use TS recording functionality from within the plugin UI ( or edit the ini file ). I've added an updated version of the network encoder definitions for TS or PS which now only contain the property values required for SageTV 6.X. There are currently some issues with the MT4.x beta where channel changes from plugins take @10 seconds to process and the video/sound capture is still not quite 100% yet. You can still record PS from the MT 4.x beta, but I believe that functionality will eventually be removed

This version of the plugin works well for me with my rig in MT 3.38.2, your mileage may of course vary

Cheers

Peter

[herrdude]

Let me be the first to say thanks! Not only did you shave off a few seconds you cut the time in half. Normally I would select the channel, I would get the no signal from sagetv and then about 5-6 seconds after that it would tune into the channel. So about 15 seconds per channel change.

Now, I can say happily, I never see the No signal from sagetv. A channel change is about 5-6 seconds.

A thousand thank you's!

[peterjb]

Originally Posted by herrdude

A thousand thank you's!

Thanks it's good to get some feedback on this version. I'm ( hopefully ) working on the documentation this weekend. When I finish it I'll update the first post with this version of the plugin and new documentation.

As an aside, I've also previously provided SageTV with samples of the TS files from both MT 3.X & MT 4.X to validate that SageTV shouldn't have any problems playing them..

Cheers

Peter

[herrdude]

Peter,

if ever you are looking for a beta-tester, i would be more than willing to be a guinea pig. I would be more than willing to help out for the benefit I have gained from your plugin...

As i was thinking about this, and certainly I dont want to burden you, one thing that would be really cool, is something that can go through the channels.db and make it sage friendly. I did it with MS Access one channel at a time and it was unpleasant (think 500+ channels). I have to scan again since some of the channels have been moved around, I dont look forward to redoing that again by hand....

Food for thought!

[Nadim]

I am trying this new version of the plugin. Using PS, it is the same for me channel changes in exactly 11 seconds. What is wierd is that when I use TS is channel changes can range from 6 seconds to like 30 seconds with no pattern whatsoever.

Also the TS stream seems to be a little jumpy, it speeds up and down with my placeshifter setup, still need to test with my hd-1000 and the hauppage PVR players. Will do more tests. Thanks for your work, I really aprecieated it. I can help you out to test. Been using your plugin for some time and it always been perfect.

Keep up the good work

[peterjb]

Originally Posted by Nadim

What is wierd is that when I use TS is channel changes can range from 6 seconds to like 30 seconds with no pattern whatsoever.

That's a bit odd, I haven't touched any of the tuning logic for the plugin at all.. Can you turn on Debug logging and post your log? As for the issues with jumpy playback, Have you tried different video decoders? I haven't seen any thus far on my rig (fingers crossed), except in the MT 4 Beta..

I've updated the documentation & fixed a couple of UI related bugs which I will post some time today - Work permitting!!

Cheers

Peter

[iammike]

Hi,

First I want to thank the author of this plugin for a very nice piece of software! It's really cool being able to use MT with my Technotrend card to get dvb-s and dvb-s2 channels. I have a c-band dish, and there's a lot of great channels I'm able to get into Sage using the plugin.

I am experiencing an issue however. It seems to happen at random times to not communicate the channel changes to MT. I'm using MT 4.0 beta 3. The problem seems to manifest itself most often when the channel change requires the dish to move. Once it has the issue, it seems to foul things up until I restart MT. When I look at the commands sent from Sage to the plugin, it shows the channel number but MT never changes channels. I am getting this message in the card1.log a lot:

9/27/2008 11:51:36 AM: ERROR - Exception : IdCommandHandlerStart : Access violation at address 114A14C5 in module 'MTSageTV.dll'. Read of address 1469EDFE

In attempting to debug the issue, I came across another weird problem. I turned on all the logging and then stopped and restarted MT, and when it came back up it started to change channels almost at random. It's also not recognized as functioning in Sage, however the channel changes are all showing up in the log. I'm thinking that it may have been playing back all of the channel changes from the previous run. When I edited the .ini file and turned off logging, it stopped doing it.

Since I'm using the MT4 beta, I know there's a good chance the problem could lie there however I thought I'd run this by you. Any ideas?

Thanks,
Mike

[peterjb]

Originally Posted by iammike

9/27/2008 11:51:36 AM: ERROR - Exception : IdCommandHandlerStart : Access violation at address 114A14C5 in module 'MTSageTV.dll'. Read of address 1469EDFE

The exception is being thrown in the routine that handles the processing of START commands from SageTV. It would be interesting to see what the Commands from SageTV look like in the Indy Log at the same time- Do you happen to have a copy? I haven't changed any of this logic in the current plugin, and the version of Indy included is the same as it has always been. As such I'm not sure of the possible root cause of the issue. It might be worth checking your AntiVirus/Firewall settings just to see that something is not blocking the requests or that MyTheatre is allowed to talk to the network. It might be also worth setting the previous value of seeker/fast_mux_switch=true to false, to see if that has any impact.

There are some serious issues ( even in my simple rig ) with the time taken for the plugin to receive a channel change processed message from MyTheatre 4.x. This is particularly noticeable when MDWrapper is in use.. Some channel change requests are taking 13 seconds when they take less than 3 under MyTheatre 3.3X.. I've been experimenting a bit on being able to determine why.. From my testing it doesn't seem to matter what MD plugins are in use, just using MDWrapper itself seems to introduce the delays.. I've been trying to find some time to investigate this further but have come up short thus far..

Cheers

Peter

[iammike]

Peter,

I'm at work this morning, but will look for the indy log tonight. There shouldn't be any firewall issues, as I have it disabled on this PC. I'm not using MDWrapper. The only plugin I'm using is yours. My channel change times in general are better than what you're seeing. When I change channels, and the dish doesn't have to move, they will usually take 3 or 4 seconds when the dish doesn't have to move. Incidentally, would a long move time cause any issues? I do have channels mapped on about 15 or so different sats. If I go from the western most 135 to the eastern most 72, the move time can be close to 30 seconds. When I've seen the issue happen the most is during the longer moves.

Thanks for your help!
Mike

[iammike]

I don't watch that much TV during the week, so it took a few days for the problem to reappear. I got the same error this morning. I'd turned on the indy option, however it didn't report any errors just informational messages, at the time the problem started. Any other thoughts?

Thanks,
Mike

[iammike]

Peter,

It just happened again. It was another channel change that required a dish move. I doubt this will be much help, but here's the relevant sections from the card1.log:

10/4/2008 11:06:44 AM: SageTV - NOOP
10/4/2008 11:06:45 AM: SageTV - NOOP
10/4/2008 11:11:45 AM: SageTV - NOOP
10/4/2008 11:14:36 AM: SageTV - START
10/4/2008 11:14:36 AM: Debug - Request Channel Details from MyTheatre DB
10/4/2008 11:14:36 AM: Channel change request - SageTV Channel No : 2018 MyTheatre Channel No. :2018 Channel ID :8914 Channel SID :4 Channel Name : 0004
10/4/2008 11:14:36 AM: Debug - Retrieved Channel Details from MyTheatre DB
10/4/2008 11:14:36 AM: Debug - Request TP_INFO Details
10/4/2008 11:14:40 AM: Debug - TP_INFO Details Retrieved
10/4/2008 11:14:40 AM: ERROR - Exception : IdCommandHandlerStart : Access violation at address 119414C5 in module 'MTSageTV.dll'. Read of address 14DEEDFE
10/4/2008 11:14:40 AM: SageTV - GET_FILE_SIZE
10/4/2008 11:14:40 AM: SageTV - GET_FILE_SIZE - Return GetFileSize : 0
10/4/2008 11:14:40 AM: SageTV - GET_FILE_SIZE
10/4/2008 11:14:40 AM: SageTV - GET_FILE_SIZE - Return GetFileSize : 0

and the card1_Indy.log

Stat Disconnected.
Recv 10/4/2008 11:06:45 AM: NOOP<EOL>
Sent 10/4/2008 11:06:45 AM: OK<EOL>
Stat Disconnected.
Recv 10/4/2008 11:11:45 AM: NOOP<EOL>
Sent 10/4/2008 11:11:45 AM: OK<EOL>
Stat Disconnected.
Recv 10/4/2008 11:14:36 AM: START MyTheatre DVB-S Plugin Card 1 Digital TV Tuner|2018|2446266553660|K:\Sage Recordings\DinosaurKing-DinosaurAmour-6681544-0.ts|MPEG2 Max Quality<EOL>
Stat Disconnected.
Recv 10/4/2008 11:14:40 AM: GET_FILE_SIZE K:\Sage Recordings\DinosaurKing-DinosaurAmour-6681544-0.ts<EOL>
Sent 10/4/2008 11:14:40 AM: 0<EOL>
Stat Disconnected.
Recv 10/4/2008 11:14:40 AM: GET_FILE_SIZE K:\Sage Recordings\DinosaurKing-DinosaurAmour-6681544-0.ts<EOL>
Sent 10/4/2008 11:14:40 AM: 0<EOL>
Stat Disconnected.

Thanks,
Mike

[peterjb]

Mike,

Apologies for not getting back to you sooner.. I've been on holidays.. From looking at your log output I noticed a couple of things. The first is that it would appear that you're not running the latest version of the plugin.. As the current version of the plugin doesn't use 'Request TP_INFO Details' when you're running MT 4.x - As it incurs significant processing overheads in MT 4.x that it doesn't have in MT 3.X. I'm yet to check the latest MT 4.x Beta 3 to see if Saar has managed to fix it yet..

The attached version of the plugin has some more debug code in the START command handler which should assist in pin pointing the cause of the problem.. I'd appreciate it if you could do some testing with it..

Cheers

Peter

[iammike]

Peter,

No problems on the delay. Considering what I paid for the plugin, I'm very happy with the support you're providing. It's much appreciated. I'll load up the new version of the plugin when I get home tonight and give it a go.

Thanks,
Mike

[herrdude]

Originally Posted by grooves12

I had the same problem... and am using this to resolve it.

http://www.r2.com.au/software.php?pa...how=startdelay

You can start and stop Mytheatre without issues while Sage is running most of the time (In fact I have a script do this daily to clear Mytheatre's EPG data and clear some memory leaks that Mytheatre has.) But, if it doesn't see the Network Encoder on startup it disables the tuner.

If you are using SageTV service, and you want to pause SageTV service long enough so MyTheatre can load first. You could put a batch file like this one in your startup folder (after downloading Windows 2003 Resource Tool Kit with sleep.exe).

color 9f
@echo off

rem Checking service state
NET START | FIND "SageTV" > nul
IF errorlevel 1 GOTO :s_not_running
IF errorlevel 0 GOTO :s_running

:s_running
Rem Stopping the service
NET STOP "SageTV"

:s_not_running
Rem Pausing 2 minutes 
c:\sleep.exe 120
NET START "SageTV"

Exit

[blwegrzyn]

Hello,

thx for writing this great plugin. It works great although changing channels take some time (10-15 sec)

I noticed that many times I get this error:

"There was a Playback error in playback. Details:
sage.PlaybackExeption: ERROR (-1,0x800401f0): There was an
problem using DirectX for playback. Please install latest version of DirectX.
If you already have , please reinstall"

i tried to reinstall directx and I am still getting it.
If i tune into channel directly through mytheatre then i dont have that problem.


any ideas how to fix it?

thx

Bart

[rickgillyon]

Just had a quick test of v4 Beta (it's taking some time to get out of beta!), and the "multiple offline Cardn profiles" has gone. Any idea how this works with this plugin? If I have 4 cards, can I get them all working with v4? Currently I have card1.ini to card4.ini.

Thanks!

[peterjb]

Damn Good Question.. I don't quite know the answer at the moment, but I'll have a look into it post haste.. I had actually changed the code within the plugin to work around some issues with the previous Beta, so I'll look at those as well..

It is taking a long time to get out of Beta, but the current Beta is much more stable & reliable than some of the previous ones.. I'd already given SageTV copies of the TS produced by V4 and the required TS splitter changes had been incorporated into SageTV 6.5, so hopefully we shouldn't have any playback issues..

Cheers

Peter

[rickgillyon]

Thanks Peter. I searched around at the MyTheatre support forums, but couldn't find mention of how multiple cards are supported - except for the fact that you can specify one each of DVBS, C and T now. No multiple profiles, and you still can't rename and run 4 versions of the executable...

[peterjb]

I've done some testing tonight and did manage to get two separate instances of the MyTheatre Beta running concurrently honouring the /cardn command line parameter on two different cards.

To do this I setup my cards in the initial install of MT ( DVB-S card defaulted to card1 - DVB-T defaulted p card 2 ). I then copied the initial MT install folder to two locations, created a shortcut for each specifying the appropriate /cardn parameter. When I started MT from each of the shortcuts it started two instances of MT with the appropriate plugin parameters ( I validated this by specifying different Ports and Favourites for each card ).

I'll raise a query in the MT developers forums to see if I can get some feedback from Saar..

Cheers

Peter