OpenDCT: An open source digital cable tuner.

[Fuzzy]

Originally Posted by realcap

Thanks, I changed consumer.ffmpeg.thread_priority=9 and update with results. If this is a network issue, my router may be causing the problem and may need to be upgraded (Netgear WNDR3400)? Which router do you recommend?

Appreciate your efforts and support.

I would simply avoid passing the data through a consumer router at all. Get a dedicated network switch to deal with in-network traffic, and then connect that through the router just for your internet traffic.

[EnterNoEscape]

Originally Posted by realcap

Thanks, I changed consumer.ffmpeg.thread_priority=9 and update with results. If this is a network issue, my router may be causing the problem and may need to be upgraded (Netgear WNDR3400)? Which router do you recommend?

Appreciate your efforts and support.

I don't necessarily blame your router unless it's blasting your network with useless data. Something as simple as a large file transfer from your server or a backup running on the server can cause the kind of problem I saw in your logs. If something else on the network is broadcasting a lot, that could also be a problem.

[realcap]

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

I would simply avoid passing the data through a consumer router at all. Get a dedicated network switch to deal with in-network traffic, and then connect that through the router just for your internet traffic.

I do use a switch but the router assigns the IP addresses. Will need to do some research to learn how to separate the internet traffic from the SageTV server which is also my desktop. Would I need a dedicated SageTV server? I have several older computers that I could convert if that would help. Thanks for suggestions.

[realcap]

Originally Posted by EnterNoEscape

I don't necessarily blame your router unless it's blasting your network with useless data. Something as simple as a large file transfer from your server or a backup running on the server can cause the kind of problem I saw in your logs. If something else on the network is broadcasting a lot, that could also be a problem.

All my backups are done between 4 - 7 am every night and I have programmed Sage to not record during those hours. Sage would be the only program that I'm aware of that would use data at 2 am. Will need to see if I can find out if there are other conflicts. Thanks for you assistance and comments.

[Monedeath]

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

I would simply avoid passing the data through a consumer router at all. Get a dedicated network switch to deal with in-network traffic, and then connect that through the router just for your internet traffic.

Yeah. the WNDR3400 is a new enough router it shouldn't exactly be a "routing" problem that is going on here.

Switching may be another matter. And I've seen the other threads on here talking about many of the Gigabit routers not actually being Gigabit capable for those people who have gigabit internet already. Which just makes it more confusing.

Start throwing WAP(Wireless access point), Firewall, and NAT(Gateway//Network Address Translation) duties on top of things and you've got a very busy box even before it tries to do any packet switching for local traffic.

I certainly remember blog posts and arguments from the min/max performance crowd that advocates for dedicated hardware for specific tasks(the Firewall in particular tends to get a lot of that attention, WAP coming in a close second), although most home users shouldn't need to go to that extreme.

But at this point, using the Router as a WAP/Firewall/Gateway only at this point isn't too much of an undertaking. Even the Gigabit Switches aren't too bad price wise. Let the Dedicated Switches do the local network switching, leave the Router for the Wireless and internet traffic. Particularly when dealing with "production" network devices, such as a Media Server(like Sage) and any (locally) networked equipment it may use(preferably on the same switch). Life is likely to be little less painful that way.

[Fuzzy]

Originally Posted by realcap

I do use a switch but the router assigns the IP addresses. Will need to do some research to learn how to separate the internet traffic from the SageTV server which is also my desktop. Would I need a dedicated SageTV server? I have several older computers that I could convert if that would help. Thanks for suggestions.

The router can assign up addresses just fine, and that doesn't mean traffic has to go through it. If you've got a gigabit switch between the tuner and the server, that is all the traffic will go through, and you should be fine. Dedicated servers do work great, but many of us are running unraid where the server is performing many duties at the same time, so it isn't necessary a problem.

[EnterNoEscape]

• Fixed null pointer exception when a broadcast address is not defined for a network adapter.

[Deacon Crusher]

Community, I feel like I've seen some posts on this, but my search mojo is failing me.

I went from Sagedct to the newer sagedct a couple years ago (thx again bobvgant) then went to primenetencoder a while after that (thx for that app also) and it's been working great, but it clearly is the past and I'm trying to get current.

Now running V9 and loving it, so next step (before scheduler change and then trying linux) is getting on to OpenDCT. The opendct setup instructions look super clear, but I feel like 2 things missing.

#1, Is there a way to "migrate" my primenetencoder setup regarding tuners/channels frequencies etc. to opendct? I have qty 2, 3 tuner network HR Primes with CC in them and qty 2, 2 tuner hdhr4 ATSC network tuners and one HD PVR (that I don't need opendct to touch).

#2, What's the right way to save and re-use my channel settings inside Sage after I switch from PNE to ODCT? or is there one?

Thanks

[NetworkGuy]

Hi EnterNoEscape,

I had a failure last night similar to one a few weeks ago, same time across all tuners. You said that was a corrupted stream from Comcast.

Can you please check and see if this is the same issue?

Thanks,
John

[EnterNoEscape]

Originally Posted by NetworkGuy

Hi EnterNoEscape,

I had a failure last night similar to one a few weeks ago, same time across all tuners. You said that was a corrupted stream from Comcast.

Can you please check and see if this is the same issue?

Thanks,
John

The line below is very unlikely a Comcast problem. This implies that the stream was likely still coming in from the HDHomeRun, but the consumer (FFmpeg) wasn't pushing any data out. It doesn't look like FFmpeg stalled so we might have a subtle issue involving thread priorities. Change consumer.ffmpeg.thread_priority=8 to consumer.ffmpeg.thread_priority=9 so that FFmpeg is running at the same priority as the RTP/HTTP producers.

21:54:36.813 [SageTVTuningMonitor-59] DEBUG SageTVTuningMonitor - The consumer appears to be stuck at 13313202892, file system length 13313202892, file name '\\SageTV\Recorded TV 3\NCISLosAngeles-S08E19-767-23764761-0.ts', copy protection COPY_FREELY.

[NetworkGuy]

Originally Posted by EnterNoEscape

The line below is very unlikely a Comcast problem. This implies that the stream was likely still coming in from the HDHomeRun, but the consumer (FFmpeg) wasn't pushing any data out. It doesn't look like FFmpeg stalled so we might have a subtle issue involving thread priorities. Change consumer.ffmpeg.thread_priority=8 to consumer.ffmpeg.thread_priority=9 so that FFmpeg is running at the same priority as the RTP/HTTP producers.

21:54:36.813 [SageTVTuningMonitor-59] DEBUG SageTVTuningMonitor - The consumer appears to be stuck at 13313202892, file system length 13313202892, file name '\\SageTV\Recorded TV 3\NCISLosAngeles-S08E19-767-23764761-0.ts', copy protection COPY_FREELY.

Done.

Thanks again for all of your support!

[panteragstk]

So I tried live transcoding of mpeg2 to mpeg4. It works, but it stutters. I'm not sure how to really describe it other than to say the video isn't smooth any more.

I'm glad to see that it really doesn't take much more than 15% of my CPU to do this so that is a welcome site.

What do I need to do to test this or what am I looking for in the logs that will help tell me what's going on?

[MattHelm]

Originally Posted by Deacon Crusher

...
#2, What's the right way to save and re-use my channel settings inside Sage after I switch from PNE to ODCT? or is there one?
...

I used a plugin called "Import/Export Channel Lineup". It adds a few commands to the edit channel settings.

Export saves the channels using the tuner name.

Import will create a blank import file, and then you just paste the data in the export file, and hit import again. Worked great on both mine, and my dad's systems.

[EnterNoEscape]

Originally Posted by panteragstk

So I tried live transcoding of mpeg2 to mpeg4. It works, but it stutters. I'm not sure how to really describe it other than to say the video isn't smooth any more.

I'm glad to see that it really doesn't take much more than 15% of my CPU to do this so that is a welcome site.

What do I need to do to test this or what am I looking for in the logs that will help tell me what's going on?

If it stutters that's a good sign that the stream isn't being processed fast enough. Unfortunately the process doesn't multi-thread very well in OpenDCT. How many CPU cores do you have?

[panteragstk]

Originally Posted by EnterNoEscape

If it stutters that's a good sign that the stream isn't being processed fast enough. Unfortunately the process doesn't multi-thread very well in OpenDCT. How many CPU cores do you have?

16 physical, 32 with hyper-threading.

[Deacon Crusher]

Originally Posted by MattHelm

I used a plugin called "Import/Export Channel Lineup". It adds a few commands to the edit channel settings.

Export saves the channels using the tuner name.

Import will create a blank import file, and then you just paste the data in the export file, and hit import again. Worked great on both mine, and my dad's systems.

Thanks Matt

[EnterNoEscape]

Originally Posted by panteragstk

16 physical, 32 with hyper-threading.

Then 15% is likely a few cores. If you can post the log, it should have the FPS we're really getting, but my experience has been that stuttering means it doesn't have the resources it needs.

[panteragstk]

Originally Posted by EnterNoEscape

Then 15% is likely a few cores. If you can post the log, it should have the FPS we're really getting, but my experience has been that stuttering means it doesn't have the resources it needs.

Video is more or less smooth, but the audio is choppy. Here are the logs.

[EnterNoEscape]

Originally Posted by panteragstk

Video is more or less smooth, but the audio is choppy. Here are the logs.

It's definitely not keeping up. Sometimes when transcoding at first there is a brief backlog of data that gets sorted out in less than a minute. In your case it falls behind and keeps falling further and behind. Below are a few telling log entries.

12:05:10.700 [NIOHTTPProducerImpl-124:HDHomeRun HDHR4-2US Tuner 1043DBF9-0] WARN  SeekableCircularBufferNIO - The buffer has 7863256 bytes left to be read, has only 1065 bytes left for writing and 1316 bytes cannot be added. Deferring bytes to queue buffer.
12:05:58.297 [FFmpegTransSageTVConsumerImpl-126:HDHomeRun HDHR4-2US Tuner 1043DBF9-0] DEBUG FFmpegTranscoder - FPS: 27.77777777777778
12:06:40.378 [FFmpegTransSageTVConsumerImpl-126:HDHomeRun HDHR4-2US Tuner 1043DBF9-0] DEBUG FFmpegTranscoder - FPS: 23.80952380952381

I have an i5-3570K that can keep up with things for up to 3 streams, so I know it's not impossible to use this feature on modern hardware. Somewhere down the road I think I'm going to take Fuzzy's suggestion to just use the normal FFmpeg binary for transcoding because it will multi-thread this a lot better (which might help your situation) and make supporting platform specific hardware acceleration a lot easier too.

[makutaku]

I am having trouble understanding how OpenDCT property file(s) work.

Could you please let us know the purpose of these files:

opendct.properties.default
opendct.properties.upgrade-0


And more importantly, why does opendct.properties keep getting regenerated ?

For those familiar with SageTV property file, this is somewhat not intuitive: I am still figuring out how to make some of the suggested changes "stick" and be applied without reverting back