Problems with "Enhanced TV" messages ruining recordings

[timg11]

I'm losing 10-20% of recordings from the HD-PVR due to on-screen messages about "Enhanced TV". These messages stay on screen for the duration of the program.


I'm wondering how to design a system to detect this condition and send the remote control "OK" command to the cable box.

Since my SageTV server is running on Windows 7, I'm thinking of writing a scheduled task that will run at 1 minute after the hour and half hour. It would check to see if a new .TS files has appeared in my SageTV shows folder, and process it. I think I can write an image recognition program for a fixed image since the pattern is pretty simple. However, I first need a way to extract a frame from an H.254 TS file.

Does anyone know of a library or function that could pull a frame out of a TS file at a specific offset?

Or if you have another solution for this problem, please chime in.

Thanks!

[timg11]

What I have found so far:

FFMPEG will extract a frame from an H.264 TS file.

The command is:

ffmpeg -i VideoInputFile.ts -vframes 1 -ss 00:00:01 -vf "transpose=1" output.jpg

I'm now turning my attention to the image recognition. Template Matching is the approach, and I'm looking into the OpenCV Library to accomplish it.

[Skirge01]

Is there really no way to get the message to stop appearing in the first place? I'd have to imagine that your provider offers some form of DVR and that message could be appearing there as well, which would be impacting everyone's recordings. Or, is that a message from your TV and perhaps there's a way to stop it from occurring?

[stanger89]

DVRs usually just capture the bistream, while things like that are overlaid by the box, so you wouldn't see that in a DVR recording (same thing as the box OSD on channel changes).

timg11, is it possible some rogue command is getting sent? That looks like an error message in response to some remote input.

[will]

Instead of trying to figure out if the overlay is present why not just send an "ok" cmd every 30 minutes? On my cable box hitting okay while nothing but video is playing just brings up the mini info that automatically goes away.

To me it seems like this is a much simpler solution.

[timg11]

Originally Posted by stanger89

timg11, is it possible some rogue command is getting sent? That looks like an error message in response to some remote input.

Interesting thought ---
Two possibilities. "Random" IR commands from somebody controlling other devices (such as the HD-300) are being interpreted by the SA4250hdc cable box and causing unexpected errors. Pretty much ruled out since these errors occur when the SageTV/HDPVR are operating unattended (I.E. nobody is home).

Second possibility - Something in the computer or SageTV is sending "rogue" commands to the USB-UIRT that commands the cable box. Theoretically possible. Any ideas how I would track that? Most recordings are done while nobody is around.

[timg11]

Originally Posted by will

Instead of trying to figure out if the overlay is present why not just send an "ok" cmd every 30 minutes? On my cable box hitting okay while nothing but video is playing just brings up the mini info that automatically goes away.

Will, that is a good idea, except that if an "OK" or "sel" command is sent when there is not a message on the screen, it blacks out the program and displays a menu with options like "Start over, On Demand", etc. which again waits for a response. And the menus are different for different channels (some have "start over" feature and some don't), so I can't just send yet another OK command as a default selection, and there is no "Escape" command (that I am aware of).

[timg11]

Originally Posted by Skirge01

Is there really no way to get the message to stop appearing in the first place?

I have not found any settings to disable these unwanted features. There is a setting for "Interactive Prompt", which is set to Off.
I originally had a DVR (8300HDC), but got tired of paying extra for a recording capability that is so poorly implemented as to be unusable. So I bought SageTV, and once I got it working reliably, I returned the DVR and got the SA4250hdc which is a basic HD cable box.

However these prompts and messages seem to be unavoidable. If anyone knows of any secret "service menus" or ways to disable "Enhanced video" and other interactive features, please let me know. I'm sure other Time Warner customers would be very interested.

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by timg11

Interesting thought ---
Two possibilities. "Random" IR commands from somebody controlling other devices (such as the HD-300) are being interpreted by the SA4250hdc cable box and causing unexpected errors. Pretty much ruled out since these errors occur when the SageTV/HDPVR are operating unattended (I.E. nobody is home).

Second possibility - Something in the computer or SageTV is sending "rogue" commands to the USB-UIRT that commands the cable box. Theoretically possible. Any ideas how I would track that? Most recordings are done while nobody is around.

I can't remember the exact terminology anymore, but I think there are "pre" and "post" tune settings in the tuner setup, I'd check those.

It seems odd because that box to me looks like an error in response to attempting to use "enhanced tv", I wouldn't expect that to come up on it's own.

Does it come up at the beginning of the recording or part way through? If it's part way through, maybe you should call your provider and see if they have any idea why you're getting this random message for no reason.

[will]

Is "enhanced" TV just another way of saying HD? If you hit the button to go to the enhanced version does the channel change to the HD channel?

If that is the case, then I would suggest creating a separate guide data for your HD-PVRs and removing the SD channels that have HD channels. That way the cable box will always be on the "enhanced" version and you shouldn't see the message.

[SHS]

Originally Posted by will

Is "enhanced" TV just another way of saying HD? If you hit the button to go to the enhanced version does the channel change to the HD channel?

If that is the case, then I would suggest creating a separate guide data for your HD-PVRs and removing the SD channels that have HD channels. That way the cable box will always be on the "enhanced" version and you shouldn't see the message.

Yes that right when I had time warner 3 years go you would see thoses stupie message and I don't call what the setting you had to check to get around that problem, I think you had to do was disable in SageTV that SD channel and use only the HD channel I think that was the other work around.

[timg11]

Will, SHS,

Whatever Time Warner thinks "Enhanced TV" is, it is not simply HD. I have already disabled all non-HD channels, so they are not in the mix at all. These messages occur on HD channels. They appear as soon as the recording starts (the .TS file has them from the first frame), and they never go away for the duration of the program.

I also sometimes get messages about channels being "temporarily unavailable". I'm hoping my solution will also be able to recognize them and address that problem too. Once I get another example of it I'll save it and use the same process.

I'm making good progress on a solution, based on a framework of free software and perl to tie it together.
FFMPEG will extract a frame from an HDPVR TS file into a JPEG image.
Image Magick is an open-source image processing toolkit that is commandline driven. First I use its Convert utility to crop out the part of the image that has the error. Then I use its Compare utility, which returns a metric of similarity to a template (that I extracted from a show containing the error). A little Perl code parses out the metric and provides a return value that the batch script can use to determine whether to use the USB-UIRT commandline function UUTX.EXE to send a "SEL" key.

[SHS]

Try this
1.A prompt displays when tuning to a channel that offers an Enhanced TV menu.
2.Press the Select button while watching TV to access the tuned network’s Enhanced options.
3.Use the arrow up/down, then Select to choose an option.
4.Press the C button or Exit to dismiss the Network Enhanced options.

Other ways as far as turning off the Interactive Prompt. the only thing that might work is Pressing Settings on your Remote, and there should be, a setting called "Interactive Prompt." Switch that to "off" and see if that makes a difference.

[bill321]

Originally Posted by timg11

I also sometimes get messages about channels being "temporarily unavailable". I'm hoping my solution will also be able to recognize them and address that problem too. Once I get another example of it I'll save it and use the same process.

As far as I know, with Time Warner, enhanced tv not available messages means that the tuner lacks two way communication with TWC so you can't, for example, start a show from the beginning or watch VOD.

Similarly, the "temporary unavailable" channels sometimes is because of a two way communication problem related to the switched digital channels.

If I were you I would troubleshoot the signal strength - do you have amplifiers in the line that are blocking the two way signals that the tuner expects to see? Too many splitters perhaps?

good luck

Bill

[KryptoNyte]

Originally Posted by timg11

I also sometimes get messages about channels being "temporarily unavailable". I'm hoping my solution will also be able to recognize them and address that problem too. Once I get another example of it I'll save it and use the same process.

I had a few channels that were frequently receiving the "Temporarily Unavailable, try again later, press the A key on the remote to try again" message. It turned out to be a signal problem that Time Warner couldn't resolve, and I ended up dumping the package for the problem channels.

[timg11]

Originally Posted by SHS

Other ways as far as turning off the Interactive Prompt. the only thing that might work is Pressing Settings on your Remote, and there should be, a setting called "Interactive Prompt." Switch that to "off" and see if that makes a difference.

Yes, there is a setting called "Interactive Prompt", and it is off. I double checked just to make sure, and it is still off.

[DaveS]

I had a similar situation with the message something like "press sel to continue watching" or something like that. It related to Switched Digital Video with my cable company. I was using FireWire to change channels and ultimately that was the culprit. Apparently my set top box did not interpret FireWire channel changes as activity and consequently I received that message due to set top box inactivity. I tried setting Sage to tune the channel at every recording but that didn't help. Ultimately I had to get rid of FireWire channel changing and move back to USBIRT. Using USBIRT and tuning the channel at every recording eliminated those messages for me.

[Skirge01]

Originally Posted by timg11

Second possibility - Something in the computer or SageTV is sending "rogue" commands to the USB-UIRT that commands the cable box. Theoretically possible. Any ideas how I would track that? Most recordings are done while nobody is around.

Install EventGhost and the plugin for USB-UIRT and make sure the box in the lower left corner of the main screen of EG is unchecked. That will ensure that any command the USB-UIRT receives is shown in the log on the left.

I also found this thread, which states the message cannot be disabled on MDN (firmware version?), but that was back in 2009.

[timg11]

I have completed and tested the solution. It works!
I hope this can help others. (of the SageTV die-hards that remain)

This software runs on the SageTV server system (Windows 7 32 bit in my case).

If anybody wants to duplicate my solution, I have uploaded all the script source files and utilities here. There is a Readme.txt file in the ZIP that contains links to all the free/open-source utilities that I used in my scripts (FFMPEG, ImageMagick, and Perl), and one utility I wrote myself to scan for recent TS file.

[KryptoNyte]

This is really excellent work, Tim. In the spirit of keeping SageTV alive as long as possible, and the STB recording being one of the few "always works" solutions, it would be exceptional to see something like this right in SageTV.

To be able to look at the recording itself at any point and identify <something>, and then act on it, this could have quite a few uses I imagine.