SageTV Server Linux with Comskip for Docker (and unRAID) Support Thread

[stuckless]

Originally Posted by SomeWhatLost

I just don't see the need for parity checking of TV shows...seems like a lot of extra calcluations for a file that just gets deleted after being watched anyway...
as for limiting recordings to just 2 drives, that is due to the fact that I wear out recording drives relitivily quickly...I wouldn't want to wear out a share drive with movies and data on it... wont the Cache drives wear out if you write >100G per day?

I am confused, how is there no need for network mappings? currentlty all my movies are still on my original D525 based v5beta unraid box as I do not have enough HDD space on my new box yet... and the plan is to keep the original unraid box up an running, and use it to backup the shiny new v6 unraid box as soon as I get some more HDD's for the new box...
but for now just mapping to old unraid box seems like it would be the best option? if not network mapping then how?

I guess, obviously, if your files are elsewhere on the network, then you need to access them over the network. I guess my understanding was that you were setting up an unraid server where the files and the sagetv were on the same physical box... not 2 separate unraid servers. But all that being said, the unRAID docker container that I setup "might" work over the network, i have no idea, since I never tried it (not would I, since all my stuff is on a single machine -- which was precisely why I created it in the first place).

Given the complexities of your setup, you might be better off creating a new container and adding the things you need to get it working. (other people may have gotten networking to work, but as I said, it has never been a priority for me and my setup)

[SomeWhatLost]

well, the eventual plan is to have all the movies on the same box... just need the HDD's to show up... they just aren't here yet....

as for making my own Docker Container Thingy.... since my mastery of linux tops out at ls, and possibly ifconfig... I think I will just use yours... it is amazing how well yours just works... easiest SageTV install I have done... and most everything just worked...

[BobPhoenix]

Use Unassigned Devices plugin on unRAID. Then mount and share your recording drives in unRAID. Then browse to them in the SageTV Docker and select the recording folder on the drive you want to use. I would suggest you reformat and use the native linux formats however. Writing to NTFS is supported with the Unassigned Devices plugin because it installs a newer driver for NTFS than comes with unRAID. But I still don't trust it enough when writing so I use XFS format drives outside the array for my recording drives.

[EnterNoEscape]

Originally Posted by BobPhoenix

Use Unassigned Devices plugin on unRAID. Then mount and share your recording drives in unRAID. Then browse to them in the SageTV Docker and select the recording folder on the drive you want to use. I would suggest you reformat and use the native linux formats however. Writing to NTFS is supported with the Unassigned Devices plugin because it installs a newer driver for NTFS than comes with unRAID. But I still don't trust it enough when writing so I use XFS format drives outside the array for my recording drives.

I highly recommend never using NTFS drives in Linux for SageTV recordings. I went back and forth for weeks trying to figure out why someone using OpenDCT was getting EOF errors on live playback. It turns out that NTFS-3G was the culprit. NTFS in Linux for anything other than file recovery has never been a great experience for me.

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by SomeWhatLost

I just don't see the need for parity checking of TV shows...seems like a lot of extra calcluations for a file that just gets deleted after being watched anyway...
as for limiting recordings to just 2 drives, that is due to the fact that I wear out recording drives relitivily quickly...I wouldn't want to wear out a share drive with movies and data on it... wont the Cache drives wear out if you write >100G per day?

I looked into that a bit while researching running Sage on my unRAID. I was worried about recording to a user share. I wouldn't worry about it:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/28560...ity-fears.html

Even the drive that fared the worst would last almost 20 years writing 100GB/day, and that's for SSDs which have a finite write count, where as mechanical drives don't really.

I'd bet your problem with recording drives is heat related, not write related. Nothing kills drives faster than heat.

[SomeWhatLost]

hey, network mapping seems to magically have started to work... well sort of...
I can through sage navigate through the network, and select a network location for media...
but once setup it fails to to actually scan for movies...

@BobPhoenix, thanks, that was exactly what I was looking for... which is probably why I had Unassigned Devices already installed... apparently I forgot about it at some point while playing with sage...

so, what does it take to make comskip actually run? if I copy over a recording from my v7 Sage with an existing .edl file, Sage is happy as can be...
but it never seems to create it's own edl files, so I am guessing comskip never ran?

[BobPhoenix]

Originally Posted by SomeWhatLost

hey, network mapping seems to magically have started to work... well sort of...
I can through sage navigate through the network, and select a network location for media...
but once setup it fails to to actually scan for movies...

@BobPhoenix, thanks, that was exactly what I was looking for... which is probably why I had Unassigned Devices already installed... apparently I forgot about it at some point while playing with sage...

so, what does it take to make comskip actually run? if I copy over a recording from my v7 Sage with an existing .edl file, Sage is happy as can be...
but it never seems to create it's own edl files, so I am guessing comskip never ran?

I just installed Commercial Detector on my SageTV docker and it just works. I didn't do anything special with that.

What I had to do special was to turn off as much security on my Windows Box as I could to get the Docker to browse the Windows box. I also made a couple of registry edits on ALL of my Windows boxes so that they cannot become the "Browse Master" on the SMB network. I let my unRAID box be the "Browse Master". But just setting that and using the plugin in unRAID wouldn't stop the Windows boxes from becoming the backup browser and then never release it. When that happened I couldn't browse the network in the Docker at all. The registry entries I made were to the following:

key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\Browser\Parameters
entries:
"MaintainServerList"="No"
"IsDomainMaster"="False"

PS. You have to reboot the Windows box to make these effective. Just adding the entries doesn't appear to be enough.

[SomeWhatLost]

Originally Posted by SomeWhatLost

so, what does it take to make comskip actually run? if I copy over a recording from my v7 Sage with an existing .edl file, Sage is happy as can be...
but it never seems to create it's own edl files, so I am guessing comskip never ran?

just a minor question, everything I have read leads me to beleive that getting commercial detection to work on a PC host with docker is diffecult due to paths or something (ie reading the .edl files)
but in my playing around/testing v9, I got tired of running over to my HD300 and pointing it at the v9 server, so I just loaded up the PC client on my desktop and comercial detection/skipping worked just fine (with media that had an existing v7 genereated .edl file... still working on making comskip run on v9)
what did I do to make it "just work"? or was I reading out of date accounts of it being difficult?


also while playing around, I loaded up the android mini client on my phone (just to play, not sure that is a valid use case) that thing is awsome...
someone most definitely deserves a for that...
although, the "select a language" button was really small... ended up with german a coulple times.... well I think it was german...

[SomeWhatLost]

Originally Posted by stuckless

There are Java 7 and Java 8 versions available, so I'd recommend using the Java 8 versions. The Java 7 versions are there mainly to appease Jetty (although, I appear to be using Java 8 and Jetty is working fine, for the most part).

just curious about this, but what advantage does 7 have over 8?
other than being newer and all, and not exactly liking jetty?

is there any real disadvantage to using 7?

can I load both?

[stuckless]

Originally Posted by SomeWhatLost

just a minor question, everything I have read leads me to beleive that getting commercial detection to work on a PC host with docker is diffecult due to paths or something (ie reading the .edl files)
but in my playing around/testing v9, I got tired of running over to my HD300 and pointing it at the v9 server, so I just loaded up the PC client on my desktop and comercial detection/skipping worked just fine (with media that had an existing v7 genereated .edl file... still working on making comskip run on v9)
what did I do to make it "just work"? or was I reading out of date accounts of it being difficult?

Comskip on the docker container should just work. There are problems with Comskip and full clients, but, miniclient and hd300 should just work.

You will need to install the comskip plugin, obviously, since I don't do that.. but once the comskip plugin is installed... then comskip should kick in on new files, just fine. It does for me at least.

Originally Posted by SomeWhatLost

just curious about this, but what advantage does 7 have over 8?
other than being newer and all, and not exactly liking jetty?

is there any real disadvantage to using 7?

can I load both?

Java 7 is end of life (EOL), so, my recommendation is to run Java 8. But, if you find that there is something that is absolutely not working and you need it, then run Java 7. You an run both, but I wouldn't run both at the same time, pointing to the same database... that would be bad.

[Fuzzy]

Originally Posted by SomeWhatLost

just a minor question, everything I have read leads me to beleive that getting commercial detection to work on a PC host with docker is diffecult due to paths or something (ie reading the .edl files)

Originally Posted by stuckless

There are problems with Comskip and full clients, but, miniclient and hd300 should just work.

With the new version of the Comskip Playback plugin (2.1 or greater, released a couple weeks ago, I think), paths are no longer an issue. One of those nagging issues that never got addressed, because most people were able to easily use UNC paths - but with more and more switching to Linux (both because of the docker build AND for the 64-bit capability), and the difference in how network paths are handled, I asked JREkiwi to look into fixing it, and he did a great and very quick job of it.

[SomeWhatLost]

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

With the new version of the Comskip Playback plugin (2.1 or greater, released a couple weeks ago, I think), paths are no longer an issue. One of those nagging issues that never got addressed, because most people were able to easily use UNC paths - but with more and more switching to Linux (both because of the docker build AND for the 64-bit capability), and the difference in how network paths are handled, I asked JREkiwi to look into fixing it, and he did a great and very quick job of it.

thats what I meant, I was using the full PC client, and it all just worked...
I really have to give a shout out, give thanks, etc to everyone involved in any way with the V9 beta, plug ins, Docker, everything really...
while I have incountered a couple minor bumps in the path, for the most part everything just worked easy right out of the box... much easier then my initial install of v5 or v6 or whatever it was oh so long ago...
"it just all works" is a nice thing to say about any software package, but when there are as many moving bits as Sage it actually says a lot...


one last question... when I am really ready to transition from my existing v7 -> v9 can I just drop my wiz.bin in v9 and not mess everything up?

[SomeWhatLost]

so, nuked my existing sage java8 docker... technically I nuked all my dockers, but I only had sage so no biggie...
I love dockers... so easy to start fresh...

anyway, I loaded up v7 java, that worked fine on PC client, but got stuck at set timezone on hd300 and android mini client... there were no timezones listed to select? where did they go?

so then I loaded up v8 Java sage and now comskip works as expected...
but I got all sorts of phoenix errors...
like:
Error in VFS File: .\userdata\Phoenix\cache\vfs-cached.xml; null
Unable to download/update the phoenix views... Phoenix may not work correctly.

and another one about x-vfs missing... that was easy, it was missing, so I grabbed it and replaced it...

loaded up BMT and seems now seem fine... there are 48 loaded views...
I can see my library of currently 3 movies...

and I can see my 3 loaded movies using the "folder" view within sage...
but title view is blank, and all the gemstone flows are blank... where does "Title" or gs "Flows" look for movies? why doesn't it look in the folders that it can obviously see?

[SomeWhatLost]

Quick update, after installing the Phoenix plug in, it seems to have fixed the flows and Phoenix errors
But the video "titles" view still is empty?

[stuckless]

Originally Posted by SomeWhatLost

Quick update, after installing the Phoenix plug in, it seems to have fixed the flows and Phoenix errors
But the video "titles" view still is empty?

Have you scanned the files for metadata/fanart? if you open the item in BMT does it have a MediaTitle set and does it look like it has all the propper metadata (description, year, etc).

Views are generally driven off of metadata, so without metadata they might show up empty.

[SomeWhatLost]

Yes, in BMT everything is fine, and once I installed the full Phoenix plug-in all the gemstone flows started working.

The only remaining issue is the "Titles" view which I think is one of the stock video views?
Not really sure as I never really used the stock views, always either been SMM or Gemstone.
Just curious why folders work but titles does not?

[stuckless]

Originally Posted by SomeWhatLost

Yes, in BMT everything is fine, and once I installed the full Phoenix plug-in all the gemstone flows started working.

The only remaining issue is the "Titles" view which I think is one of the stock video views?
Not really sure as I never really used the stock views, always either been SMM or Gemstone.
Just curious why folders work but titles does not?

In BMT, you can go to the VFS view... and then in the Batch actions, there is a "Fix Titles"... you can try that and see if makes a difference.

[SomeWhatLost]

well, that really did not help...


I am wondering i this has something to do with it?
according to the Sage Web interface

Media Library:

Music: 0 albums / 0 tracks
Video: 0 files
DVDs: 6 files
Pictures: 0 files
Total Media Library Duration: 0 minutes

I have no videos... I have 6 DVD's but apparently it does not consider them videos...
Videos By Title only works on what sage considers a video?
fwiw, if I click show all videos in BMT the "DVDs" all show up there too, so I am guessing BMT thinks they are videos...

[SomeWhatLost]

Originally Posted by SomeWhatLost

I have no videos... I have 6 DVD's but apparently it does not consider them videos...
Videos By Title only works on what sage considers a video?

well that was it I guess... added some more files, specifically a couple MKV's and those show up as "videos" and hence they show up in the video titles search...

[stuckless]

Originally Posted by SomeWhatLost

well that was it I guess... added some more files, specifically a couple MKV's and those show up as "videos" and hence they show up in the video titles search...

This is why I like Phoenix/Gemstone The VFS for "Movies" will pull in any movie whether it's DVD, BluRay, regular video file (that is a movie), or recorded movie... I never did like the separation of media content by "type" other than for information purposes.