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| Hardware Support Discussions related to using various hardware setups with SageTV products. Anything relating to capture cards, remotes, infrared receivers/transmitters, system compatibility or other hardware related problems or suggestions should be posted here. |
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#104
01-06-2006, 04:26 PM
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salsbst,
I've been looking a lot into how to manipulate the MyHD card for a different project. The nature of the work is similar in scope to yours though, so I figured I might chime in here and hopefully help you out and learn a thing or two. After messing around with things a fair amount today, I've come to the conclusion that the TCP mechanism is only being used to send commands from the remote control. It was a bit tricky to sniff any traffic since there's no straightforward way to do so with a loopback device in Windows. What I ultimately ended up doing was using a hex editor to change the port the MyIRC process binds to. I then used netcat to bind to the old port (so the MyHD process would still connect to something) and then telnetted the MyIRC process's port, so I could see what it was sending out. It was a fair amount of work to find out that nothing was being sent unless the remote was being used . . . It appears that the MyHD process uses some other mechanism to determine whether the MyIRC process is running. Indeed, even when it connected to my netcat server, it noted upon closing that the MyIRC process was not running. Even in this set up where the MyIRC and MyHD processes had not established connections to one another, the MyHD process was given the info necessary to start a recording. Anyway, not sure if you had noted that or not. The consequence of this seems that you could run both MyIRC (patch it to bind to a different port) and start up whatever server you'd like to send the MyHD process commands. You'd have to proxy between your server and the MyIRC process in order to use the remote as normal. Is it your intention to use your own scheduler to start and stop recordings. Based upon previous posts, this seems to be the case, but I wasn't totally following. If not, have you figured out how scheduled recordings are currently handled? I've been having a bit of a run in with this. My best guess right now is that it's all done through the registry. MyHD has a local Access DB it keeps around that looks like it has a table for recordings, but it's always empty. I haven't seen the MyIRC process actually access this DB either, yet it clearly knows about scheduled recordings. Well, that's all I have for now. Any thoughts would be appreciated. -- Kevin 
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#105
01-06-2006, 04:38 PM
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If I may speak for salsbst
 Quote:
I don't think currently the plans were to actually schedule recordings.
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#106
01-06-2006, 10:41 PM
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#108
01-26-2006, 10:16 PM
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Quote:
I've spent some time ltrying to figure out how MyHD does it's recording tricks, too, and indeed it uses the registry to store all recording schedules. I've got the format pretty much worked out. I'd also concluded that there wasn't much traffic between MyIRC and MyHD--mostly thru empirical evidence (I too ran into the problem of not being able to capture packets on localhost, but never would have thought of trying to find the port address and editing it!). MyIRC will start MyHD if it's not running, so that a recording will go off--but if MyHD is running and is aware of a recording entry (e.g., it was either in the registry at the time of MyHD's startup, or the entry was made by the MyHD app or TitanTVHelper), then the recording will start, even if MyIRC isn't running. So...this got me thinking that a really simple, dumb, clumsy (but doable!) way to do a Sage network encoder interface for MyHD would be, for each time you want to tune in something to watch/record: 1. Create the appropriate registry entry 2. Stop the MyHD app if its running 3. (Re)start MyHD Or, if you can suss out how to run the TitanTV app (I think sengsational said he'd done that in the past), you could probably invoke it to poke the new entry in and avoid the start-stop thing. Likely a lot cleaner. This approach would leave MyHD available to be used outside of Sage--if that's something you'd want to do (I probably would), as the network encoder would be acting like an automated user--e.g., just another user. I don't have a development environment installed at home, nor have I been able to find the time to do so; it's also hard to find info about the network encoder interface specs (although I did download source for one network encoder, and it looks pretty simple). Plus, I spend too many hours at work and am lazy! Otherwise, I'd fiddle around with this approach. Salsbst wouldn't be interested in this approach, because it all assumes that the MyHD system is going to be running "logged in", which works for me (my htpc logs in as part of its bootup sequence)--he wants (needs, I think) to run headless. His solution will be much more elegant and general, assuming he can overcome the problems he's outlined above (which he very patiently explained, thanks again for bearing with me). And, again, since he's actually working on it, and I'm not, I'm rootin' for him! Go Salsbst!!! Lonndoggie
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#109
01-27-2006, 03:04 PM
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FYI, maybe some colaboration is in order:
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=635175
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#110
01-27-2006, 03:50 PM
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lonndoggie,
If you'd like, please check out my site I've set up for my project and see if the registry entries validate with what you think they are. Some I still hadn't quite figured out yet (they're marked with ???). I agree that some collaboration may help everyone involved. Like I said, I'm not actually using SageTV, but rather another program. I think the general approach here could be useful in both cases though. We could actually probably even share code. I have stuff that will schedule MyHD recordings in the registry right now. It's being sourced from my app's scheduler, but there is a clear separation here. The project is to be ASL 2.0, although I need to actually release the code / set up the repository (you can browse the code via the trac instance though). Anyway, just figured I'd throw that out there to prevent duplicated work (which it looks like we already have done to a certain degree) and help all of us MyHD owners start taking advantage of our cards. Link: http://www.negativetwenty.net/projects/btv_myhd/ -- Kevin
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#111
01-27-2006, 05:04 PM
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Quote:
But, from that, I do have these observations: 1. All the "reserved" chunks you list may well be, but to me it appears as if all the values that the MyHD folks write are actually DWORDS--e.g. they occupy 4 bytes. I think this is borne out by the few where they use negative numbers (they cover four bytes, mostly "F"s). Thus, for example, the first field, the input ID, is actually in bytes 0-3, not just byte zero with 1-3 reserved (remember, little-endian addressing so the rightmost byte has the lowest address). 2. This one: 0xD6 0x07 ??? is actually the reservation start year, and occupies bytes 0x14-0x17. Again, remember little endian, so to put this together as a DWORD the value would be 000007D6. Plug that into your hex calculator and you get -- voila! -- 2006. 3. At 0x28, your ??? is, again, a DWORD (0x28-0x2B), but I have here as a one-time vs. recurring. I'm not sure that's right; my later notes got this stuff straightened out, and I see you've pegged recurring vs. one-time elsewhere. 4. You ??? at 0x3c I had a question mark about, too--something about maybe the use default file name flag, but again, I'm not putting too much faith in that yet. I'll keep looking for my better data--I think it's on another computer (not the HTPC where I'm actually typing now). If I do (I'll be P.O.ed at myself if I lost that, spent a lot of time sussing that out!), I'll go over the rest. In the meantime, you may want to consider collapsing your matrix down to include the "reserved" chunks into their constituent fields...oh, and one other thing that cleared several things up is to use the "save reservations" feature in MyHD, then go look at the file it had written. All the stuff is in there, nicely labeled; all you have to do at that point is to make enough test cases to figure out the ambiguities and enumeration values. Best of luck with your project--keep us posted! Lonndoggie
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#113
03-09-2006, 09:14 AM
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I received some information that may help me with integration.
I'm almost done with the major wedding preparation madness that has been keeping me from this, so I hope to start digging in again soon. Sorry to have gone dark for a while. Last edited by salsbst; 03-09-2006 at 05:36 PM.
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#114
03-23-2006, 11:03 AM
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Quote:
 Glad to hear it's still an active project. Ken C
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#115
04-20-2006, 02:29 PM
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still preying for this solution
Any word?
__________________
If you're not cheating, your not trying... My sage rigs: Server - Windows 2003, Intel 865 PERLL w/ P4 3.2g 1gb ram, 3-PVR250, 3-PVRUSB's, 1 Skystar2, 1 twinhan 102g, 1 starbox DVB-S Cards. Evo network QAM encoder. 1.2TB storage 6.x server + MTSAGE for DVB Client 1/Master BR - MediaMVP running a 30" Olevia LCD TV. Client 2/Front Room - Shuttle ST61G4 XPC 1gig ram, 60gb HD, BTC9019 wireless keyboard/mouse & Harmony 880. 6.x client. GF6600GT driving a Sony WEGA 55" rear projection tv.
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#116
04-30-2006, 11:22 AM
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Add me to the list of people who are interested in having the MyHD card work with SageTV. I am thinking about building a new machine for recording OTA HD and HD satellite using the R500 mod, and would like to use the MyHD card I already have.
Kenny
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#120
05-23-2006, 11:33 AM
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The bad news
a) Our old bedroom TV broke, and in the process of integrating the a new TV into our lives, I either wrecked the laptop that was driving SageTV in the bedroom or discovered that its display adapter driver never worked properly over DVI in VMR to begin with. BSODs were involved. In any case, starting from scratch on this machine's config is my top priority right now. b) My attempts to develop this on the DirectX/driver level have been foiled due to lack of access to the APIs and lack of support from MIT. c) I've decided that I won't be the one to actually implement the version that doesn't require terminal services The good news a) Our old bedroom TV broke, so I now have an HDTV in the bedroom which makes me more anxious than before to have the MyHD encoder working b) I've partially completed a refactoring of my code that serves a couple purposes; i) gives me (or others) a code base on top of which to develop other encoders for SageTV without worrying about the threading and I/O issues on the SageTV side. [My next encoder will be a "line in/MP3" encoder implementation, one that is meant to support FM radio recording.] ii) makes it easier to swap out different implementations of the MyHD encoder to suit different people (e.g. whether or not to use the Terminal Services approach to running as a service). c) I'll be releasing my code under the MIT (Mass. Inst. of Tech., not MacroImage Technology) open source license. Combine this with (b)(ii) and you can conclude that a reasonably talented .Net developer should be able to implement and support a non-terminal services implementation relatively easily. If nobody takes this up, I may get around to it eventually, but it won't be my top priority for some time.
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