OpenDCT Java Network Encoder

[EnterNoEscape]

I haven't quite got there yet. I'm still focused on optimizing the experience on more predictable setups. I like the HDHomeRun View approach. I just have some concerns that Silicondust not only will not like that their app is being used in this manner, but that they might update things frequently enough that I might not be able to keep up. STB's are much more predictable in that the channel input mechanism is unlikely to ever change, making them a very stable bet. I guess you don't know until you try. I'll probably take a first look at this tonight.

[EnterNoEscape]

I tried to get things going and immediately wasted $1.98 so far. The app crashes on my FireTV and playback is terrible on the Nexus Player. I guess I'll refocus on recording playback from Windows Media Center until Silicondust actually endorses HD playback.

http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=63186

I had an idea that I can get one computer to record up to 4 different channels by using VM's and passing a physical video card through to each one. I hate the thought of having a computer just idling when 90% of the time it's not even in use.


Update: I figured it out. The wireless was problematic on the Nexus Player due to distance from the AP. I didn't think of this as a problem because playback in the Android miniclient wasn't a problem on the same device. I'm able to playback DRM'd HD perfectly now.

[Telecore]

What is your long term plan - are you going to eventually use multiple AndroidTV boxes with IPTV encoders or just use the QIP7100? How do you envision control of the AndroidTV boxes? (IR? or some IP solution?)

I can't seem to find a similar IPTV encoder with all of the same features as the Unisheen1000 plus 5.1 and 1080p. Also having some difficulty determining a low cost AndroidTV box that works with HDHRView app and ideally has wired ethernet can do MPEG-2 decoding in hardware. Is the FireTV or Nvidia Shield a good option? I may go ahead and get another HDHR Prime (got rid of my 2 on eBay a few years ago) for now as I was going to do that anyways and keep looking at this.

[EnterNoEscape]

So far recording the output of the Nexus Player has been a little problematic. The first thing I had to do was configure the encoder to down-scale the 1080p60 content to 720p60. Otherwise it won't even start encoding. The situation should be different on the encoders that actually support 1080p60 output (mine only accepts it as input).

The other piece of this, the HDHomeRun View software doesn't have a 100% stable feel to it. I've had a few situations whereby playback stopped and would not restart until I completely closed out of the app and went back in.

When I connect to the Nexus Player with adb while the HDHomeRun View app is running, it has a tendency to completely lock the device up. This results in the device rebooting on it's own or my needing to manually intervene. When I impersonated a USB keyboard (Arduino Leonardo ~$6 + Ethernet Shield ~$7), it was very responsive. I tried to find something ready-made because I'm sure many members wouldn't really want such a DIY solution. I didn't find anything even remotely as cheap as the solution I pieced together. Honestly, you'd be surprised how easy it is to program the Arduino devices; especially when the sketch is already done for you and you just need to upload it. The only problem with the USB approach is you can't be sure the app is actually loaded or working, but if I can't figure out why adb is causing so many issues, this might be all we have. I've debugged the Android miniclient on this particular Nexus Player, so I'm really just leaning on the View app is already very heavy on the CPU and adding debugging overwhelms it.

For some reason SageTV sets HDMI to output a program stream regardless of other settings. That surprised me given that the HD-PVR for example has always produced TS files. FFmpeg is unable to remux the H.264 + AAC TS stream into a program stream, so that's it's own problem. I guess I'd need to just present it as component, but since SageTV doesn't currently let me use the tuning plugins, this might be a moot point.

[EnterNoEscape]

Originally Posted by Telecore

What is your long term plan - are you going to eventually use multiple AndroidTV boxes with IPTV encoders or just use the QIP7100? How do you envision control of the AndroidTV boxes? (IR? or some IP solution?)

I can't seem to find a similar IPTV encoder with all of the same features as the Unisheen1000 plus 5.1 and 1080p. Also having some difficulty determining a low cost AndroidTV box that works with HDHRView app and ideally has wired ethernet can do MPEG-2 decoding in hardware. Is the FireTV or Nvidia Shield a good option? I may go ahead and get another HDHR Prime (got rid of my 2 on eBay a few years ago) for now as I was going to do that anyways and keep looking at this.

I think I'm going to do multiple Android boxes if I can get it to be stable. Unfortunately the way I get it working might not be something everyone will want to try, but as you have been hinting, it will save money. The QIP7100 is a temporary rental while I work out image quality issues and encoding abilities/limits.

There aren't any IPTV encoders currently available that will do greater than 2 channels. I contacted the vendor. He actually is a former SageTV user. He said they don't have any hardware that supports 5.1 yet. You only need OpenDCT to support the IPTV encoders. You can really do this with anything that can capture HDMI. I'm kind of surprised no one has tried this already. You could realistically use one of those IR to USB keyboard devices with the USB-UIRT.

Edit: I plan on going the USB keyboard route. I'm going to use the app https://github.com/sphinx02/FireStarter/ which apparently works ok on the Nexus Player to ensure the HDHomeRun View app is actually loaded.

I think the Shield is way to expensive for this dedicated task and I could not get the app to launch on my first generation FireTV. I wasn't even going to try the stick because it couldn't handle 60fps content in the Android miniclient and it doesn't have MPEG-2 hardware acceleration. I am making some progress in understanding the quirks on the Nexus Player, but I'm not sure you will ever have the exact same stability of an STB. Even given these issues, I'm still going to focus on the Nexus Player because the value is very good. Once I am confident that I can make this reasonably reliable, I'll be purchasing a few more of them.

I was thinking about how much is too much to spend and I guess if you're going to set up 3 Android devices and 3 IPTV encoders. Since I will spend $504 a year on 3 STB's for an equivalent setup, I believe that if I can spend less than $444 dollars ($60 a year CableCARD rental) on 3 android devices that work well, that's a good deal. There's no reason to work into this the cost of the Prime since many of us already have one, and you'll need the encoders with either configuration.

[EnterNoEscape]

I figured out what was happening with the adb situation; my USB cable was faulty. The next hurdle I'm working on here is the fact that I can't have the device connected in to adb via USB and use the USB power for a USB NIC. I can enable the ADB server over USB, then connect to it over the network, but if the device is rebooted, I have to perform this whole process over again. That's not really going to be acceptable since I'd need to keep swapping between USB modes any time the device reboots. I'm trying to work out if there's a way to keep the server active through reboots without rooting and so far it looks like the only option I have is to root the device.

I did work out a set of commands that work perfectly for tuning channels as reliably as possible. The reason the channel change is sent so many times is that it only takes effect once the actual video playback has started in the app. This could be made a little smarter by monitoring logcat, but this is good enough for now. OpenDCT allows you to specify something to be executed when a recording stops, so killing the app could be put there instead. The reason I have the app killed, then started is because I noticed that it can get jammed up when it has been running for over 3 hours. It happened 3 times to me around just over the 3 hour mark. This could just be the wireless connection being disrupted, but adding this step should help keep any quirks from ending up in all of your recordings for the night.

adb -s <device> shell am force-stop com.silicondust.mg.upnp; am start -n com.silicondust.mg.upnp/.newui.ActivityHDHomeRunPlayer
adb -s <device> shell input keyboard text <channel>; input keyevent KEYCODE_ENTER
adb -s <device> shell input keyboard text <channel>; input keyevent KEYCODE_ENTER
adb -s <device> shell input keyboard text <channel>; input keyevent KEYCODE_ENTER
adb -s <device> shell input keyboard text <channel>; input keyevent KEYCODE_ENTER
adb -s <device> shell input keyboard text <channel>; input keyevent KEYCODE_ENTER

Update: I'm also taking a hard look at the Tronsmart Pavo M9. It has HDMI capture built in and everything needed to write an app to use it is open sourced.

[EnterNoEscape]

I got the app working on the FireTV. I had to turn off hardware acceleration for both MPEG-2 and H.264. MPEG-2 looks fine with the software decoder. H.264 looks a little bad. It's watchable, but just barely.

[EnterNoEscape]

I realize I'm just posting a lot of progress here, but I figured at least a few people might be interested in where I am status-wise with this. I worked out the following batch file that's working very well for tuning the Nexus Player via ADB over USB. I'll get this integrated with my production setup soon and see how it fairs.

set ADBPATH=C:\Path\To\android-sdk-windows\platform-tools
set DEVICE=AAAABBBB

rem Make sure the device is actually available.
"%ADBPATH%\adb.exe" devices | find /C "%DEVICE% "
IF NOT ERRORLEVEL 0 "%ADBPATH%\adb.exe" kill-server & "%ADBPATH%\adb.exe" usb

rem Try to tune in the channel without killing the process first.
goto tune

:retryfailure
"%ADBPATH%\adb.exe" -s %DEVICE% shell am force-stop com.silicondust.mg.upnp

:tune
"%ADBPATH%\adb.exe" -s %DEVICE% shell am start -n com.silicondust.mg.upnp/.newui.ActivityHDHomeRunPlayer

:retrychannel
"%ADBPATH%\adb.exe" -s %DEVICE% shell logcat -c; input keyboard text %1; input keyevent KEYCODE_ENTER;
"%ADBPATH%\adb.exe" -s %DEVICE% shell logcat -d | find /C "Play channel: %1"
IF ERRORLEVEL 1 goto retrychannel

rem Press enter a few times to make sure the channel list goes away.
"%ADBPATH%\adb.exe" -s %DEVICE% shell input keyevent KEYCODE_ENTER;
"%ADBPATH%\adb.exe" -s %DEVICE% shell input keyevent KEYCODE_ENTER;

rem Try to catch an error in tuning and fix it by restarting the app and tuning again.
"%ADBPATH%\adb.exe" -s %DEVICE% shell input keyevent KEYCODE_ENTER; logcat -d | find /C "### PLAYER START !!!!FAILURE!!!!"
IF NOT ERRORLEVEL 1 goto retryfailure

[jmv]

I am building a new Windows 2012 R2 based Sage TV server (V7). I decided to give OpenDCT a try (0.5.3). I have a couple of issues. First OpenDCT does not activate all of my HDHR's. My 2 Model HDHR-US (OTA) are both seen and activated, my Model HDHR3-CC (Prime Cable card) is seen and activated. However a later model HDHR3-US 103B91FB is seen in the log, but tuners are not added to OpenDCT (below is the single log entry that shows OpenDCT saw the unit...). I don't know if it matters, but the HDHR with the non-activated tuners is the first one of the 4 listed in the OpenDCT log.

18:13:45.880 [HDHomeRunDiscoveryReceive-34] INFO HDHomeRunDiscoverer - Discovered a new HDHomeRun device 'HDHomeRun HDHR3-US 103B91FB'.
18:13:45.990 [HDHomeRunDiscoveryReceive-34] DEBUG HDHomeRunControl - key: '/tuner0/lockkey' value: 'null' lockKey: '0' sendLength: 26
18:13:46.005 [HDHomeRunDiscoveryReceive-34] DEBUG HDHomeRunControl - key: '/tuner1/lockkey' value: 'null' lockKey: '0' sendLength: 26
18:13:46.005 [HDHomeRunDiscoveryReceive-34] DEBUG HDHomeRunControl - key: '/sys/hwmodel' value: 'null' lockKey: '0' sendLength: 23
18:13:46.005 [HDHomeRunDiscoveryReceive-34] INFO HDHomeRunDiscoverer - Discovered a new HDHomeRun device 'HDHomeRun HDHR-US 10103591'.
18:13:46.130 [HDHomeRunDiscoveryReceive-34] DEBUG DynamicConsumerImpl - Using default consumer 'opendct.consumer.FFmpegTransSageTVConsumerImpl' for channel ''
18:13:46.146 [HDHomeRunDiscoveryReceive-34] DEBUG HDHomeRunControl - key: '/tuner0/lockkey' value: 'null' lockKey: '0' sendLength: 26
18:13:46.146 [HDHomeRunDiscoveryReceive-34] DEBUG HDHomeRunControl - key: '/sys/model' value: 'null' lockKey: '0' sendLength: 21
18:13:46.146 [HDHomeRunDiscoveryReceive-34] DEBUG HDHomeRunControl - key: '/sys/version' value: 'null' lockKey: '0' sendLength: 23
18:13:46.162 [HDHomeRunDiscoveryReceive-34] DEBUG HDHomeRunControl - key: '/sys/features' value: 'null' lockKey: '0' sendLength: 24

My second issue, is that if I try to watch liveTV on the server using the prime tuners, the playback is very choppy, dropped frames, black screen sometimes locks. If I use an HD300 playback is smooth, also, if i record and then start watching it is smooth. I am using all default settings. Should I change something in the OpenDCT properties file to improve server liveTV playback?

Thanks for a great contribution to the SageTV community...hope I never get to see the CC Flag feature in action!

[EnterNoEscape]

I just wanted to follow-up one more time here. It seems that if you run the HDHomeRun View app long enough (2+ hours) on a DRM'd channel, the audio starts to drift very noticeably. I'm fairly certain it's not the encoder because if I restart the app or change the channel, the audio is synced up again. If it was the encoder I would expect that I would need to restart the encoder or re-seat the HDMI cable. Also I didn't have this problem with the STB after days of non-stop recording.

Update: It turns out the best results I was able to get were actually with the FireTV using Ethernet, software decoding, 1080p60 output and the online beta UI. The funny thing is that wireless was more stable with the online UI, but every 5-15 minutes would slightly stutter. I guess considering how I'm using this, I really should just leave it on offline UI.

[Telecore]

I'm still interested in this long term - now have a working HDHomerun Prime and looking at Android boxes - it seems Nvidia Shield may be the best available now but not cheap at $200. Also looking at encoders, but don't see any definitive stuff out there with 1080p60, 5.1 audio support and that does not require me to use an HDMI splitter (you know what for). If anyone discovers any alternative IPTV encoders, please share.

[EnterNoEscape]

I would be ok with the 5.1 not even being the original bitstream at this point (re-encoded to 5.1 AAC or AC3). There are a lot of 1080p60 encoders out there, just no reasonably priced ones that also do 5.1.

If anyone can find anything for less than $200 that can capture 1080p60, I too am very interested.

[tmiranda]

Are you using the HDMI capture device to get the video from the Nexus Player?

[EnterNoEscape]

Yes and I am tuning it with adb.exe.

[tmiranda]

Originally Posted by EnterNoEscape

Yes and I am tuning it with adb.exe.

Making sure. Let me know if you want a tester. I have a nexus player and can purchase the HDMI capture device.

[EnterNoEscape]

Originally Posted by tmiranda

Making sure. Let me know if you want a tester. I have a nexus player and can purchase the HDMI capture device.

The only problem I've run into is the need for adb, but knowing that the Nexus Player performs better when it's on Ethernet, that means adb over wireless, but to enable adb over wireless, you need to plug it into a USB port on the computer any time it's rebooted. The whole process is very annoying and the wireless mostly works for streaming HD, but still even placing the device right next to a wireless AC AP, it still occasionally drops packets. At this point I think the only option is to root it or forever have this problem.

This is partly why I'm looking at other devices too. The shield is probably the only one that I know you wouldn't need to go through this many hoops to use, but they are a little expensive for this kind of task.

[tmiranda]

Originally Posted by EnterNoEscape

The shield is probably the only one that I know you wouldn't need to go through this many hoops to use, but they are a little expensive for this kind of task.

Agreed. This plus the HDMI capture device makes for an expensive encoder.

[EnterNoEscape]

Originally Posted by tmiranda

Agreed. This plus the HDMI capture device makes for an expensive encoder.

When you figure you're spending $144 - $168 a year per STB (and I'm sure it will only get worse), you can see how the investment pays for itself unless you're not sure you'll still be using cable in 2 years. Even after figuring in $36 - $60 a year for the CableCARD, you need to remember that one CableCARD is actually like having 3-6 STB's.

And if anyone is thinking about using WMC and recording from an extender, you'll be disappointed to know that H.264 DRM'd content will likely not playback.
http://www.thegreenbutton.tv/forums/...c2896a72d3f552

[nyplayer]

Originally Posted by EnterNoEscape

When you figure you're spending $144 - $168 a year per STB (and I'm sure it will only get worse), you can see how the investment pays for itself unless you're not sure you'll still be using cable in 2 years. Even after figuring in $36 - $60 a year for the CableCARD, you need to remember that one CableCARD is actually like having 3-6 STB's.

And if anyone is thinking about using WMC and recording from an extender, you'll be disappointed to know that H.264 DRM'd content will likely not playback.
http://www.thegreenbutton.tv/forums/...c2896a72d3f552

I have WMC Installed on my windows 10 machine and it plays all DRM content just fine. Including H264. I have it even working with Schedules Direct not Rovi TV Guide.

[EnterNoEscape]

Originally Posted by nyplayer

I have WMC Installed on my windows 10 machine and it plays all DRM content just fine. Including H264.

The thread mentions that it works ok on the computer with WMC installed. I'm talking about devices like the Ceton Echo.