Ceton InfiniTV 6 PCIe under Linux?

[RobertRathbone]

I'm currently running a SageTV server on a Windows 7 machine I setup about a year ago. I'm using a Ceton InfiniTV 6 PCI express card for the tuners installed on the same machine using SageDCT to connect the tuners to Sage as network encoders.

Now that SageTV is open source, I'd love to rebuild this server as a Linux box, but I'm unsure how well supported this Ceton card is under SageTV in a Linux configuration. I'm not aware of a Linux equivalent for SageDCT. Also, Ceton doesn't officially support Linux. They do have drivers on their website, but they are a bit old (2013) and I'm not sure if they support the newer Linux kernels.

Is anyone currently using Ceton InfiniTV cards under Linux with SageTV? How did you set it up? Any gotchas I should look out for? Or is it not possible yet?

Thanks for any info you can give me!

Robert Rathbone

[EnterNoEscape]

There isn't a Linux implementation for SageTV at least for the InfiniTV cards. You can compile the kernel module (which you will need to do with every kernel upgrade or use something like dkms to automate it), load it and bridge the tuner to an external network interface, then use SageDCT from a Windows computer using SageDCT's built in directory remapping. I guess you would also need to set up Samba and create a share on the Linux box. This is the closest you'll get right now.

I learned at least for me SageDCT doesn't like recording to Linux hosted shares. It will buffer endlessly and fall hopelessly behind. If you turn off async, it will drop packets like crazy. Interestingly enough, when recording to a Windows hosted share, there are no problems.

I too have the same ambition as you and am working very hard on solutions to all of the things keeping me from making the switch including a new network encoder to replace SageDCT and maybe in a much further future I'd like to see what I can do about making an add-in for PlayOn that's cross-platform. Obviously you'd still need a Windows machine to run PlayOn, but that can easily be run in a VM which is what I'm doing right now.

Joe

[Monedeath]

It is a switch I'd like to make as well, best I could find is that MythTV users are evidently having success with them under Linux so the drivers should be fine. It is just the matter of working the interface between Sage and the Card under Linux which creates the headaches that someone will need to wade through as mentioned above.

[EnterNoEscape]

The MythTV implementation uses the web interface on the tuner to get it to stream. I'm working with UPnP which is what SageDCT uses and works on both InfiniTV and Prime.

[RobertRathbone]

Fortunately, I have time for SageTV 9 to simmer for a while now that it's open source. I'm hesitant to rebuild the machine now that the new fall season has started, unless I'm confident that I could devote a single day on the weekend and do it. But I'd have to research everything first so I'd be reasonably confident that I could do it in a single day. My wife wouldn't be happy not being able to watch her shows...

I was afraid that SageDCT would be the troublesome piece of the puzzle. It would be nice if SageTV had that functionality built in to be able to accept streams from Ceton and HDHomeRun devices. I'm really hoping to keep all of this inside a single machine, and not have to be dependent on an external machine.

Thanks, guys, for sharing your expertise!

[Monedeath]

Well, an interim option for someone who wants an exercise in pain would be to setup a linux(master) SageTV server, and then configure a second one under Windows to serve as the Ceton tuner + SageDCT receptacle... And then set it(the Windows SageTV server) as a network tuner for the Linux server. It would be an interesting exercise just to see what explodes in the process as that isn't an intended implementation of that capability.

Then again, I guess it might not be too bad, if the new SageTV server resides in different hardware to start with, just point the old(already configured) server at the new one.