DVBViewer Recorder: Network encoder

[StephaneM]

Hello Thomas,

Originally Posted by thborchert

1. What is the advantage of this network encoder plugin over Anders Nolbergers SBDARecorder?

It works with more devices as DVBViewer is the recording engine. So all supported DVBViewer Hardware will work, as well as some SoftCam plugin.

2. What is the advantage over Sage's built-in DVB(-C) support? How far along is that, anyway?

For me : recording quality (allthough DVB-T was ok for me with native SageTV support, it is far way better now with DVBViewer) and recording stability (with DVB-S + CAM).

Also: the plugin will extract teletext subtitles in real time and save them in SMI format so as they can be played by the subtitles STVi.

Regards,
Stéphane.

[rtengvad]

Originally Posted by thborchert

2. What is the advantage over Sage's built-in DVB(-C) support? How far along is that, anyway?

I use this plugin because I have a channel tuning issue with the native DVB-C support.

For me this plug in however is not 100% ideal either - not because of the plug in itself but because Dvbviewer records program in .ts format that has to be transcoded in sage to placeshifter and mediamvp. That does not go well on all channels. In particular if tele text subtitles is included in the stream.

And then power management does not work well either.

Other than that I can only recommend this plug in. Its stable and very easy to set up thanks to Stephanes online guide.

Rasmus

[StephaneM]

Originally Posted by rtengvad

Dvbviewer records program in .ts format that has to be transcoded in sage to placeshifter and mediamvp. That does not go well on all channels. In particular if tele text subtitles is included in the stream.

DVBViewer 3.9.3 may resolve some issues. It is currently in beta and I have not tested it myself. They also have changed the CAM handling for Technotrend devices. As soon as 3.9.3 will be out I'll test it to see if all work properly then you'll be able to upgrade safely to 3.9.3 and forward to SageTV the problematics recordings.

And then power management does not work well either.

What issues do you have with power management? I may be able to do something about it (the DVBViewer Recorder service is able to react to standby and resume, so I could startup / shutdown DVBViewer upon resume / standy if it can help).

Regards,
Stéphane.

[rtengvad]

Originally Posted by StephaneM

DVBViewer 3.9.3 may resolve some issues. It is currently in beta and I have not tested it myself. They also have changed the CAM handling for Technotrend devices. As soon as 3.9.3 will be out I'll test it to see if all work properly then you'll be able to upgrade safely to 3.9.3 and forward to SageTV the problematics recordings.

I am using the 3.9.3 beta actually and it solved the very slow channel tuning issue. But I still have problems with some of my streams. George at Sage says the the files have timestamp inconsistencies in them which cause a problem in the transcoder. If that the fault of dvbviewer or my cable provider I don’t know.

Originally Posted by StephaneM

What issues do you have with power management? I may be able to do something about it (the DVBViewer Recorder service is able to react to standby and resume, so I could startup / shutdown DVBViewer upon resume / standy if it can help).

You wrote once to me that you could make it work with PM. I was assuming back then that it was not working with PM. I have tried with the 1.5 version putting my server to sleep with no luck. After closing the recorders It went to standby easily. I haven’t got deeper into it, but would very much like to make it work. I'll check up on that.

Rasmus

[StephaneM]

Originally Posted by rtengvad

George at Sage says the the files have timestamp inconsistencies in them which cause a problem in the transcoder. If that the fault of dvbviewer or my cable provider I don’t know.

With my DVB-T / DVB-S I have not seen any timestamp inconsistencies (you can review the DVBViewer debug log it will tell you if there is discontinuities in the TS).

DVBViewer Recorder should also log something if there is a PTS reset in the stream (while extracting TTX subtitles). This is because I never encountered any PTS reset in any stream so far and I need some samples (for now, I just ensure that PTS are increasing normally and if this is not the case, I assume the clock was reset and correct it for good timestamps of the subs).

A little explanation : TS streams does embed prestentation timestamps in elementary streams that are to be presented : audio, video, subtitles, teletext data. One of this stream (usually the video) does carry the "main" clock besides its own presentation timestamps.

Those timestamps are not the actual time. It more like a "tick" count. So the main clock just "ticks" regularly and you have to ensure that your decoder "ticks" exactly the same. So to speak you synchronize your own clock with the main clock of the TS. For instance the TS says it is now 04h02, and your clock says it is 23h20 : you know now the time offset between your clock and the main clock. Though this time offest may not be the same in all the TS: the main clock can be reset and the TS does tell you when the clock is reset, so as you can always have the current time offset. For instance the stream start with a main clock whose time is : 14h00, then ten minutes laters, the main clock is reset to 00h00.

Each stream does have a presentation time stamp. These time stamps are the time the elementary stream must be presented to the user, they are expressed in the main clock time. For video stream PTS of each video frame are not sequential: this is because MPEG2 video does transmit frames in decoder order: Intermediate frames needs a starting frame and ending frame to be decoded. So imagine you have 4 frame A B C D, they are transmitted like this : A D B C, because B and C needs A and B to be reconstructed.

All that seems pretty simple, however it is not : TS specification contains many many rules and as such you can write many different encoders that will produce TS that are not structured in the same way. So for a decoder to be error less you have to take into considerations all possibilities and that's not possible unless you have a lot of samples streams. Moreover encoders are created by software developpers and when you study the TS specification you can make mistakes because it's not that clear (I wonder why the documentation is that cryptic : I guess those who write this were lazy).

You wrote once to me that you could make it work with PM. I was assuming back then that it was not working with PM. I have tried with the 1.5 version putting my server to sleep with no luck. After closing the recorders It went to standby easily. I haven’t got deeper into it, but would very much like to make it work. I'll check up on that.

Yes I told you that the current version of DVBViewer Recorder doesn't do anything when the computers goes into standby and resume (this is because DVBViewer Recorder doesn't have any issue with sleep and resume itself).

I'll add standy and resume handlers in the next release. What it will do : simply shut down the recorders on standby (this will force DVBViewer to shut down as well). And it will start the recorders on resume. This may helps you (it will not help you if you have hardware that doesn't wake up when resuming the PC).

Regards,
Stéphane.

[thborchert]

Thanks guys! Hmm, the problems mentioned touch on vital things for me:

- I am using the MVP exclusively for playback and it works well with SBDARec, except for channel surfing, which I don't do.

- I use wake-up-from-standby for recordings exclusively and it works well.

With Sage's native support, I cannot get encrypted channels to play, so that doesn't work for me. CAM handling seems to be lacking.

With my current set-up, I get occasional freezes during recording, which seesm to be caused by something taking over the CPU for a few seconds. I have no idea what it is.

[rtengvad]

Originally Posted by thborchert

With Sage's native support, I cannot get encrypted channels to play, so that doesn't work for me. CAM handling seems to be lacking.

CAM is supported, but it still has problems apparently. So it is important that you bug report all problems you have.

What is your present set-up?

Rasmus

[thborchert]

Originally Posted by rtengvad

CAM is supported, but it still has problems apparently. So it is important that you bug report all problems you have.

What is your present set-up?

Rasmus

You know, my experience with bug reporting and/or offering to help testing DVB-C at Sage are catastrophic, to put it mildly. I have never gotten any kind of feedback, ever, on multiple reports.

I'm using a FloppyDTV for Germany's "Kabel Deutschland" DVB-C line-up. Second tuner is an analog Hauppauge PCI card for the same provider's analog line-up. EPG data comes via Stephane's excellent tool, the FloppyDTV is controlled via SBDARec. Watching is via the Hauppauge MVP exclusively, and the PC is going into hibernate when not in use.

[rtengvad]

Originally Posted by thborchert

You know, my experience with bug reporting and/or offering to help testing DVB-C at Sage are catastrophic, to put it mildly. I have never gotten any kind of feedback, ever, on multiple reports.

I'm using a FloppyDTV for Germany's "Kabel Deutschland" DVB-C line-up. Second tuner is an analog Hauppauge PCI card for the same provider's analog line-up. EPG data comes via Stephane's excellent tool, the FloppyDTV is controlled via SBDARec. Watching is via the Hauppauge MVP exclusively, and the PC is going into hibernate when not in use.

I don't have the same experience as you with Sage. But I think we are only a few using the FloppyDTV DVB-C tuner card, so it is important that you keep file in the bug reports. Remember to state the type of tuner and the report goes to the right man Qian at Sage.

Enough of that. This is the dvbviewer plug-in thread Lets not “pollute” it.

Good luck

Rasmus

[jiggles]

I've got a rather strange problem, and I'd like to pick some brains if I may

First off my setup: hardware is a FloppyDTV DVB-S2 with Dragon CAM with valid Sky subscription card, software is DVBViewer 3.9.2.0, DVBViewerRecorder 1.6 and SageTV 6.3.10. CPU is Athlon X2 3600+, motherboard is the Gigabyte 780G-based one.

When SageTV uses the FloppyDTV directly it's very flaky when it comes to tuning, sometimes it comes up with "no signal", though if I stop the playback and try again often it will tune OK. DVBViewer doesn't seem to have such issues, so I thought I'd try DVBViewerRecorder instead.

The first problem I encountered was stuttering for 5-10 seconds after tuning to a channel, the sound would be out-of-sync (ahead of the picture). This seemed to be related to using the ffdshow codec -- if I switched to the SageTV or Cyberlink codecs this didn't happen. Anyway this isn't my major problem I just thought it might be a useful data point to some in this thread reporting stuttering. All the I'm reporting below is experienced both with the Sage and Cyberlink codecs.

My main concern is that SageTV seems to have trouble playing some channels when they've come through DVBViewer but not when tuned direct; other channels are fine through both routes.

For example BBC News 24 will play just fine through the network encoder, whereas ITV4 just freezes (the sound continues to play, just the video freezes). It's not just ITV4 though, there are many channels possibly the majority which exhibit this behaviour.

What I've found so far is that:

- DVBViewer will tune and play ITV4, etc., without any problems
- SageTV accessing the FloppyDTV direct will play ITV4 without any problems (once it gets tuned)
- the .ts file of an ITV4 programme recorded through DVBViewerRecorder will play fine through MPC-HC, but not through Sage media centre, the video freezes just as it does trying to play live TV. I tried the latest Sage beta 6.4.3 and that does the same.
- I transferred a few problem .ts files to a different PC, with the Sage Client and MPC-HC, I see the same symptoms, MPC-HC plays and Sage doesn't.

Neither BBC News 24 nor ITV4 are encrypted according to DVBViewer, and of course given that the .ts file created can be played back post facto through a third-party player but not through SageTV suggests to me at least that this isn't a problem with the encryption/CAM/etc.

So I'm sort of at a loss. Superficially it looks like something is happening to the streams for certain channels when they pass through DVBViewerRecorder which makes them incompatible with some bit of Sage (maybe the media splitter?).

Any thoughts? I'm happy to post up logs, etc., if they'd be useful.

[Whitey]

I have the same set-up as you but don't have problems with ITV4 I don't think (I don't watch very often) but I'll check. I do though have problems with BBC1, where I get a encoder error.

I also get the stutter after 5 seconds of tuning on some channels but they don't go out of sink. I notice it mostly on the FTA music channels.

What about H.264 channels? BBC HD & C4 HD start off fine on my set-up but after a few minutes start stuttering badly.

From what I've read these problems are due to sage not being able to handle the DVB streams.

All my recordings playback fine in DVBViewer

Whitey

[StephaneM]

Originally Posted by jiggles

My main concern is that SageTV seems to have trouble playing some channels when they've come through DVBViewer but not when tuned direct; other channels are fine through both routes.

Well this is a SageTV / DVBViewer issue. Transport streams are by nature various, meaning that all TS doesn't use the spec. in the same way.

DVBViewer normally just "dump" the broadcasted TS by only keeping the elementary streams you are interested in (so streams for a particular channels : audio / video / subtitles).

Then SageTV will have to demultiplex this stream. From my experience there are some TS features that SageTV doesn't like:

* TS with full PAT (the PAT is a table that contains a reference to all programs contained within the TS). SageTV performs better when the PAT contains only the reference to only available program in the TS (the other have been dropped by the recording).

* TS that contains DVB Subtitles / TTX Subtitles

You can update DVBViewer to the latest beta (I have not): this will resolve the full PAT issue (DVBViewer will be able to record a PAT that contains only the recorded program).

You can also submit a bug report to SageTV for the recordings you cannot play.

Note: the first 5/10 sec. of a recording will always be messed up. This is because DVBViewer doesn't start the recording on a "clean" frame (meaning that the video frame may needs some previously transmitted frames to be complete, but obviously you can't go back in time to record them). I'm fine with this because you don't have the same issue with audio (audio should start first and video should catch up, but I think SageTV render the first audio / video "packets" at the same time so obviously some time is needed to adjust the synch.)

Regards,
Stéphane.

[logsvp]

Finally this evening (UK time ) I have achieved success in that I have got the Network Encoder to flawlessly display BBC HD on SageTV (sourced from a Pinnacle 7010i) . I was having a lot of problems getting the video to work until I read this thread http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/show...38&postcount=3 and set the properties as shown to use ffdshow.

I am still having some problems with some other non-HD channels and hope to sort those out tomorrow.

Unfortunately, I haven't yet managed to view any output from the network encoder on my STX-HD100 HD Extender. I suspect it may be something to do with the .ts streams? I am using the latest DVBViewer (3.9.4.0) and latest SageTV beta (6.4.3) and HD100 beta firmware (20080519).

I thought I would double check with this thread's readers before posting in the beta forum as to whether there is anything special to be done to get it to work on an HD extender?

[StephaneM]

Originally Posted by logsvp

I am still having some problems with some other non-HD channels and hope to sort those out tomorrow.

I also still have problems with SageTV waiting a loooooooooooong time before playing back some live recordings. I was hoping DVBViewer 3.9.4.0 would resolve the issue but...

Anyway in DVBViewer 3.9.4 there is a new option in "Settings / Options / Recorder" : "Adjust PAT/PMT", try to select it and see if it resolves your issues (you may also want to uncheck DVB Subtitle / Teletext if you don't need them)

Unfortunately, I haven't yet managed to view any output from the network encoder on my STX-HD100 HD Extender. I suspect it may be something to do with the .ts streams? I am using the latest DVBViewer (3.9.4.0) and latest SageTV beta (6.4.3) and HD100 beta firmware (20080519).

Send some sample to SageTV (be sure to have checked "Adjust PAT/PMT" for those samples.

Regards,
Stéphane.

[logsvp]

Originally Posted by StephaneM

Anyway in DVBViewer 3.9.4 there is a new option in "Settings / Options / Recorder" : "Adjust PAT/PMT", try to select it and see if it resolves your issues

Thanks for this - I have just tried this option and BBC-HD is now displaying on the STX-HD100
I have had one instance where I have stop watching BBC HD, gone to a DVB-T channel and then back to BBC-HD and got a blank screen. I stopped the recorder (and DVBViewer) and SAGE TV and powered off the extender. Swiched on and started everything and it has worked since.

I am still getting the odd bit of stuttering on one of the satellite channels so need to investigate that futher.

I have tried running a GraphEdit on the .ts file generated from recording BBC HD but it crashes (error in cldemuxer.ax) - So I am unable (at the moment) to absolutely prove which filters are being used.

[StephaneM]

Originally Posted by logsvp

I have tried running a GraphEdit on the .ts file generated from recording BBC HD but it crashes (error in cldemuxer.ax) - So I am unable (at the moment) to absolutely prove which filters are being used.

Install Haali Media Splitter and you'll avoid the Cyberlink demuxer, should work great for playback in Windows Media Player and to view graph in graphedit.

Regards,
Stéphane.

[logsvp]

Originally Posted by StephaneM

Install Haali Media Splitter

You're a star

Installed it as you suggested and GraphEdit now works + Also the stuttering seems to have disappeared on the satellite channel and now seems to play back fine (on the limited testing I have done so far) - I assume installing the Haali Media Splitter has helped resolve this problem.

[iammike]

I just purchased DVBViewer and have it working with this plugin pretty well now. I'm using it with a motorized CBand dish, and have both DVB-S and DVB-S2 signals working fine. Reading through this thread it looks like a lot of folks are using transport streams. On my set up, program streams seem to work a lot better. I couldn't get transport streams to work hardly at all. The program streams don't seem to be affected by the delay issues some folks are reporting with live recordings though.

My question has to do with the recording path. Whenever I use the plugin, it will only record to C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Documents\My Videos. I have DVBViewer set to record to a drive other than my C: drive and it does so without problem. I added another path to the list of recording locations and then deleted the default path. How can I accomplish the same thing with the plugin? I really don't want to use the C drive for anything other than the operating system and applications.

Thanks,
Mike

[StephaneM]

Hi Mike,

Originally Posted by iammike

My question has to do with the recording path. Whenever I use the plugin, it will only record to C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Documents\My Videos.../...I really don't want to use the C drive for anything other than the operating system and applications.

The recording directory must be changed in SageTV (this is my plugin that add a recording dir in DVBViewer, so as DVBViewer can record where SageTV expect to find the recording).

Note: Program Streams are fine if you don't need TTX subtitles.

Regards,
Stéphane.

[gianpieroizzo]

Hi Stephane,

I've the same problem of iammike, it seems that your plugin allows only to register on C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Documents\My Videos, even if on SageTV I set a different recording dir (D:\SageTVRecs).
Is there a way to configure this behaviour ?

thanks in advance
Gian Piero