MyTheatre DVB Network Encoder Plugin

[technazz]

Im using S2Emu and Mdwrapper and your plug in. Ive tried with these two unintalled and same thing. Ill try installing to a different directory and see what happens. The exception is too small for me to read when I have my resoluition at 1080 on my 34" Ill try to get a creen capture of it..

Thanks

Technazz

Edit: Update Removed my USB Starbox and replaced it with a vp1020 and all is well so far!

[peterjb]

Excellent! I must admit that I've had more than a few problems with the drivers and power requirements for my DVICO usb DVB-T device.

When it works it's great but when it doesn't it's a nightmare. Thankfully the latest Dvico driver update appears to have sorted it out.. ( Fingers crossed! )

Cheers

Peter

[xred]

Originally Posted by peterjb

I knew I was setting myself up for a fall by asking you guys to RTFM - because of course the documentation is incomplete

Yeah.. I had posted for help on the Mytheatre forum since the knowledge base article up there is not complete on how to get it setup with multiple cards. Good news is that with Insomniacs' and your help I am up running with both cards now.

Originally Posted by peterjb

Thanks for your offers of payment - I appreciate it! If I do end up getting some recompense for my efforts - It will upset my wife! She thinks I spend too much time on my 'little project' it as it is!

Can you setup your wife with a Paypal account? =) I am sure we could try and make up for some of the time she's "lost" to your work on the plugin... somebody should get something for all the TV I am watching =)

[kha]

Hi,

I am using MyTheatre 3.33.3 and start evaluating SageTV 4.0 and MyTheatre DVB Network Encoder Plugin. The plugin looks very promising.

However, I am running into a Power Management problem. When a recording is scheduled without myTheatre running SageTV can successfully wake up my computer from a stand-by state, do a recording and then put the computer back into a stand-by. With myTheatre running, however, SageTV does wake up the computer but after the recording it never goes into stand-by.

Has anybody observe this problem? How do you force computer go into stand-by automatically with myTheatre running?

Regards,

Michael.

[ASiDiE]

Peterjb, how hard would it be to convert this plugin to work with media portal? The progress on getting the DVB to work in the states is going really slow and MT works like a charm. In your eyes, would there be a lot of extra coding? Media portal is a open source project and it's improving by leaps and bounds. It's freeware and its worth checking out. I personally would donate to the cause just like everyone else has.

Currently I am running media portal but I have MT record all my shows. It would be Sweet to finally have a all in one solution.

Let me know what you think.

Link to Media portal: http://mediaportal.sourceforge.net/

[peterjb]

MT does not deal with Suspend/Resume particularly well . This is partly by design and partly due to vendors hardware support ( or lack thereof ). As an example, Technotrend's BDA drivers for their various DVB devices were notorious for not being able to deal with Suspend/Resume at all ( I haven't bothered to test the latest version - hopefully they've fixed it ).

What I have done in this situation, is use the MT command line interface to stop and start MT at suspend and resume. I use HIP ( http://www.byremote.com.au ) to provide MCE remote control of my SageTV boxes - It provides a hook into windows power management to allow the running of commands prior to a suspend and post resume. With some playing around with HIP delays between commands this works very well for me ( and it's free - but if you do use it make a paypal donation! )

Of course your mileage may vary.

Cheers

Peter

[kha]

Peter,

Thank you for your reply.

So I understand that you shut down and start myTheatre every time you go into stand by / resume to prevent power management problems. I can see that I can do it either with HIP or with girder.

What about the situation when you want to perform a scheduled recording from myThetare using your plugin and computer is in the stand by mode. For me the computer would wake up, do the recording. When the recording is over, myTheatre would continue running and, as a result, SageTV/Windows will not put the computer into the stand by automatically.

How do you deal with this situatiuon? Is it possible to automatically shut down myTheatre when the recording is over?

Also I believe I noticed that if myTheatre is not running prior to scheduled recording, SageTV cancells this recording. So, if I exit myTheatre before going into stand by mode, I don't believe SageTV will wake up the computer for a scheduled recording. Any thoughts on that?

Regards,

Michael

[peterjb]

I don't use MT to schedule any recordings - I let SageTV do all the work. When I put my Sage TV box to sleep via the remote or by my power management settings, Hip runs the MT commands that I've specified for suspend. When SageTV wakes the machine, Hip runs the MT commands to start the instances of MT that I've specified for resume. Once the SageTV recording finishes, MT has stopped recording and is effectively doing nothing - as such my power management settings appear to kick in. Hip then runs the commands I've specified for suspend and my machine sleeps.

SageTV does check the availabilty of the network encoder and will disable recordings if it detects that the network encoder is not available. On resume, this will come down to a sensitive timing issue - To be honest, I've never had this happen to me - Yet ( fingers very crossed ). S3 suspend and resume does appear to be problematic to get working effectively.

On the a glib note you could install a pentium m system ( That's what I'm currently thinking of doing - but it's an expensive exercise! ) or simply build a server and leave them on!

Cheers

Peter

[kha]

Peter,

Once again thank you for your reply.

I would really like to avoid running my HTPC 24/7.

Basically I am trying to do exactly what you are doing: I don't use MT to schedule any recordings, I would like to let SageTV do all the work. When I put my SageTV computer to sleep via the remote girder shuts down the MT and when SageTV wakes the machine, girder starts the MT in the background mode.

The difference in the behavior of our set-up's comes once the SageTV recording finishes. You say that once MT has stopped recording and is effectively doing nothing your power management settings appear to kick in.
This is not the case for me. If I have MT running in any mode (/offline, background, tuned or untuned to a channel) Windows power management never kicks in. As a result I end up with the situation that once my recording is over, my computer never goes into the stand-by mode. I am using Twinhan's 1030A DVB-S card, but I don't think it is the primary reason for preventing Windows to go into stand-by. MT does not let Windows go into the stand-by even if I start MT with the /offline option and all MT plugins disabled.

I checked MT's settings and settings.ini file but could not find anything that would contribute to my problem. Obviously this is more the question about MT, which I asked at MT forum, but so far did not get any response.

Another solution for me (aassuming MT is not easily fixable) would be to shut down MT and force the computer into stand-by once the recording is over. Do you know how can I detect when recording is completed in SageTV? Does your plugin allow the execution of additional commands at the end of the recording? This way I would be able to send a girder event once recording is completed and then force coimputer into the stand-by.

Regards,

Michael.

[vuego]

Originally Posted by peterjb

I'm assuming that MT renders the channels correctly within it's own native UI using the same video codec? If so - I'd report it as a bug to SageTV.

Cheers

Peter

Hey again
I tried changing between channels with different resolutions in Sage 4.0.0 and it has the same bug

When starting to watch a channel Sage detects the resolution correctly and ffdshow OSD shows Input and Output size = 720x576. When changing to a channel with a resolution of 544x576 ffdshow says Input size = 544x576 and Output size = 720x576 Now the picture is all messed up and changing to a third resolution will crash Sage.
What Sage needs to do is detecting the source file resolution on every channel change and not just on startup!

All channel changes works perfect in MT and even Sage if closing the file before changing channel. I did report this to SageTV about a month ago and got the reply that it would be passed to the developers. Haven't heard anything from them since then though.

Can anyone think of a work around?

[xred]

Originally Posted by vuego

Hey again
I tried changing between channels with different resolutions in Sage 4.0.0 and it has the same bug

When starting to watch a channel Sage detects the resolution correctly and ffdshow OSD shows Input and Output size = 720x576. When changing to a channel with a resolution of 544x576 ffdshow says Input size = 544x576 and Output size = 720x576 Now the picture is all messed up and changing to a third resolution will crash Sage.
What Sage needs to do is detecting the source file resolution on every channel change and not just on startup!

All channel changes works perfect in MT and even Sage if closing the file before changing channel. I did report this to SageTV about a month ago and got the reply that it would be passed to the developers. Haven't heard anything from them since then though.

Can anyone think of a work around?

Do you have video in Mytheatre turned off while Sage is trying to use it as a source?

[vuego]

Yep I use Display->Video On/Off to disable video in MT.

Does anyone use this plugin with different resolutions on different channels?

[ben_gb]

Hi,

I'm planning to try this DVB encoder with a SageTV installation in the UK.

Does anyone have any recommendation as to the best DVB-T card to get?

I was thinking of the Hauppauage one, because I already use their PVR-150. Is that a good one to choose?

Thanks for any suggestions!

Regards,
Ben

[xred]

Anyone able to get AC3 sound out of Mytheatre and in to Sage? I set MyTheatre to automatically use the AC3 PID if available, but I can't get Sage to play it back, so I get no audio.

I've tried setting Sage to use AC3Filter as its audio decoder, and followed the suggestions of other posts on how to adjust its settings, but still no joy. All I want is for my PC to output the AC3 track straight out to my receiver which will do the decoding.

Anyone had any luck getting this to work?

[Alfiegerner]

First of all let me say this plugin is the best thing sliced bread, so a big thanks for your work peterjb

I'm having a problem trying to setup my windows firewall. I've got my theatre running a dvb-t card succesfully on another machine on a local network. I've tried openeing 6969 on both udp and tcp on the machine running sage. The machine running my theatre is currently not firewalled. If I leave my windows firewall on the sage machine off everything runs fine. If i turn it on even with 6969 opened I get no signal.

Am I missing a port?

Apologies if this is obvious ....

[peterjb]

Apologies for my lack of appearance of late - I manged to lose my subscription to this thread and wasn't checking up for any updates! Plus work has kind of got in the way

I'm reluctant to recommend any DVB-T cards over another. I have 3 types ( TwinHan VisionPlus, Dvico USB and NOVA-T ) in my rigs and they all have subtle nuances to their use. I'd do some research with the folks at http://forums.dvbowners.com/ and in the Hardware Support section at http://board.mytheatre.ru/.

I too have the same problem with AC3 sound on my HD channels It does not matter which filter I use - I get no sound when the track is AC3. I reported it as a bug under the SageTV 3 beta - But to date I've got no reply. You might like to report it as well - that way someone may look at it!

In regards to the firewall query, the only port used by the plugin is the one you specify in the configuration. SageTV itself uses a few different ports in relation to SageTV Client traffic but I can't see that it would cause a problem. I did have an issue with the NOVA-T's in my rig due to the fact that they appear as network adapters. Windows defaulted to firewalling these 'connections' which did cause me some runtime issues.

Cheers

Peter

[Alfiegerner]

Ah I think that explains it. Time to dig out sygate firewall again. Thanks for your help.

[xred]

Just an update to anyone using this plugin. There is a new tool up at the Mytheatre forums that lets you get the EPG data from MyTheatre and use it in SageTV using one of the many XMLTV plugins available for Sage.

By using the EPG data, you will be able to see all the EPG info from the Provider, including PPV events etc.

You can get the utility here http://www.dvbcore.com/Addons.html

Look in the XMLTV section, and then look for version 1.2.2 of xmltv2mtepg.

[CarlG]

I haven't had much time for the computer lately, but i sure have been dyin to try this sucker out. Sorry about the delay trying it out PeterJB, and I figure that if I was able to donate to the Cayars stv fund I sure as hell can donate to your dvb fund So if ya got a paypal account or whatever let me know so I can send ya some $$too.

I got a question here too - am I the only one that has trouble opening up the channels.mdb file? Tried everything, downloads, even tried installing my old Office97 to get it to work with no luck. It seems to be my Access, because i can't open any files with it, and i get the same error everytime, unrecognized format or somthing like that. BUT, that's after it was always giving me the Can't find the jeterhlp.35 file til i copied the file off my office cd and crap. Any help would be much appreciated

Carl

[xred]

Originally Posted by CarlG

I haven't had much time for the computer lately, but i sure have been dyin to try this sucker out. Sorry about the delay trying it out PeterJB, and I figure that if I was able to donate to the Cayars stv fund I sure as hell can donate to your dvb fund So if ya got a paypal account or whatever let me know so I can send ya some $$too.

I got a question here too - am I the only one that has trouble opening up the channels.mdb file? Tried everything, downloads, even tried installing my old Office97 to get it to work with no luck. It seems to be my Access, because i can't open any files with it, and i get the same error everytime, unrecognized format or somthing like that. BUT, that's after it was always giving me the Can't find the jeterhlp.35 file til i copied the file off my office cd and crap. Any help would be much appreciated

Carl

I use Access 2003 and it opens fine.