SageMCTuner - anyone have this working with cablecard?

[Kimper]

I read through most of that very long thread on this topic... Alot of speculation with no real trials of this...

Does anyone have this up and running with a Ceton tuner? I would love to hear about your experiences.

Thinking about building a new HTPC and I really want Ceton tuner and Sage both!

[Mythikal]

Just got this set up today. I can confirm that it will handle all 4 tuners on the Ceton card. I'm still in the testing phase so I can't say how well it works yet, but it looks pretty promising so far.

[EDIT]
Well... It's in production now, so obviously testing went well. A couple of things to note:

1) The Ceton card takes FOREVER to tune it's first request after a reboot (upwards of 2 minutes sometimes). This is NOT SageMCTuner's fault, but it's worth mentioning. Just remember to watch something immediately after you reboot and it should be fine. I don't reboot very often (once a month?), so it shouldn't be much of an issue for me.

2) I started with 2 WD 2 TB green drives in a RAID0 for 7MC's recording. It just wasn't fast enough for 4 simultaneous streams. Switched to 2 WD 1 TB blacks in a RAID0 and it seems to handle the load just fine. I also have a dedicated drive for each tuner which might be overkill, but they were just sitting there doing nothing anyway.

3) The tuning requests seem to be spaced out, so if you have, say, 4 recordings schedule at one time, you might miss up to 40 seconds of the beginning of the show that was tuned last. I did just move everything to a new server, so it *could* be that Sage itself is busy rebuilding everything and making late tuning requests. We'll see how it fares after a week. Worst case scenario: Set all series to start 1 minute early.

I must say, for a fairly convoluted solution, it actually works quite well. I'm still shocked that I'm using a cablecard in Sage.

[jerryt]

Mythikal

Are you getting Closed Captions on the HD cable channels in either WMC or Sage from the Ceton card?

[Mythikal]

I know I'm getting them in 7MC for sure. I assume it's working in Sage too, but I haven't tested it. I'll check it out later tonight.

[babgvant]

Originally Posted by Mythikal

I must say, for a fairly convoluted solution, it actually works quite well. I'm still shocked that I'm using a cablecard in Sage.

There's a reason most people call it a "hack"

Originally Posted by jerryt

Are you getting Closed Captions on the HD cable channels in either WMC or Sage from the Ceton card?

I'd be really surprised it CC work directly in Sage, MC stores the CC in a separate stream. I wrote a filter to dump them to an SRT file after working on SageMCTuner, so it should be possible to incorporate that into the process.

[evilpenguin]

Wow, thanks for testing that out

[Tiki]

Just out of curiosity, would you mind posting who your cable provider is and what channels you are / aren't able to play through Sage? Are you finding that most channels are "all or nothing" or do you find that the copy freely flag gets set on a show by show basis?

[Mythikal]

Originally Posted by Tiki

Just out of curiosity, would you mind posting who your cable provider is and what channels you are / aren't able to play through Sage? Are you finding that most channels are "all or nothing" or do you find that the copy freely flag gets set on a show by show basis?

Comcast. I don't subscribe to any of the pay channels, but I haven't found any channels that are playable in 7MC that aren't in Sage. I've only had it working for a few days, but I haven't missed any recordings so far.

[GollyJer]

Hell yeah. This is awesome news! And most definitely my next Sage upgrade if all stays smooth for you. Be sure to keep us posted.

This may be a dumb question, but what codec & container is the HD video recorded in?

[Mythikal]

Originally Posted by jerryt

Are you getting Closed Captions on the HD cable channels in either WMC or Sage from the Ceton card?

Closed captions are working in Sage.

Originally Posted by GollyJer

What codec & container is the HD video recorded in?

Of course it all starts as .wtv (from 7MC), then it is muxed into standard MPEG-2 with your choice of either the PS (.mpg) or TS (.ts) container by setting encode_digital_tv_as_program_stream=true(.mpg) / false(.ts) in the sage.properties file on a per tuner basis.

Originally Posted by Mythikal

3) The tuning requests seem to be spaced out, so if you have, say, 4 recordings schedule at one time, you might miss up to 40 seconds of the beginning of the show that was tuned last. I did just move everything to a new server, so it *could* be that Sage itself is busy rebuilding everything and making late tuning requests. We'll see how it fares after a week. Worst case scenario: Set all series to start 1 minute early.

I did have to set all of my series to start 1 minute early, but it doesn't seem to have caused any recording conflicts yet.

I'm also happy to report that I still haven't missed any scheduled recordings.

[babgvant]

Originally Posted by Mythikal

Closed captions are working in Sage.

Wow! That is fantastic. MC must be wrapping the raw video stream and parsing out CC.

[btrcp2000]

How did the card install go, assuming you had to have the cable guy come out? Were they at all hesitant about installing it in a computer?

[tmiranda]

Originally Posted by btrcp2000

How did the card install go, assuming you had to have the cable guy come out? Were they at all hesitant about installing it in a computer?

FWIW - I called my cable company about getting the Ceton card hooked up and they didn't hesitate a second. They said just call and they would come to my house to install and enable the card for a one time fee of $25. They didn't care what computer I was installing it on or why. (But the tech's jaw dropped when he saw the price of the card. "Pretty expensive to watch TV." was his comment.)

[jerryt]

Originally Posted by Mythikal

Closed captions are working in Sage.

Thanks, that is good news...

[Mythikal]

Originally Posted by btrcp2000

How did the card install go, assuming you had to have the cable guy come out? Were they at all hesitant about installing it in a computer?

They had to come out (which I still don't understand because I ended up installing it), but all-in-all it was pretty painless.

[ryanroat]

Originally Posted by tmiranda

"Pretty expensive to watch TV." was his comment.)

Four tuners worth of DVR from Comcast here is somewhere between $32.00 & $34.50 per month (not sure of tax on equipment rental). So it's a one year break even point, and then you're saving money over the DVR rental. (Not sure what they charge for one M cable card here, but even if it was $8--half the cost of one DVR rental--it's still just an 17 month break-even point.)

It's really not that expensive over the long term.

[Spectrum]

Originally Posted by ryanroat

Four tuners worth of DVR from Comcast here is somewhere between $32.00 & $34.50 per month (not sure of tax on equipment rental). So it's a one year break even point, and then you're saving money over the DVR rental. (Not sure what they charge for one M cable card here, but even if it was $8--half the cost of one DVR rental--it's still just an 17 month break-even point.)

It's really not that expensive over the long term.

That's assuming everything you watch remains copy freely Remember firewire and QAM started out very open like this and were eventually locked down.

[PLUCKYHD]

Originally Posted by Spectrum

That's assuming everything you watch remains copy freely Remember firewire and QAM started out very open like this and were eventually locked down.

Heck in some markets it already is locked down (in fact in most it equals what you get from firewire)

also note the install fee has to be waived soon as the fcc ruled today they have to let customers do their own installs on cable card.

[Spectrum]

Wow I didn't realize that so many markets had already locked it down That doesn't bode well for the future of CC even for WMC. Granted CC was a doomed device from inception.

[Mythikal]

Originally Posted by Spectrum

Wow I didn't realize that so many markets had already locked it down That doesn't bode well for the future of CC even for WMC.

7MC and its extenders are DRM compliant and can therefore play the protected content whether it's flagged as copy freely or copy never.

Originally Posted by Spectrum

Granted CC was a doomed device from inception.

Ceton obviously doesn't think so, and it looks like they might make a few $$$ because of it.