QAM mappings keep getting lost

[Fuzzy]

I would at least give opendct a try. I did some fixes in the atsc scanning in opendct recently to help with inconsistent scanning issues, and the hdhr may do the same thing in qam. OpenDCT has the advantage of taking directly to the HDHR instead of going through the silicondust software as well, and can give some extra logging to get an idea of what's going on.

[LaoChe]

I apologize in advance I think I am going to have a whole bunch of questions. I am thinking part of my problem might be with permissions and firewall isues. I don't think I did a very good job with my first installation so I took a clean hard drive and installed a new server on it (this time I am trying the docker file instead of the script) and as I Linux newbie I am stumbling through it all. I think I may have a firewall issue with the HDHRs so Sage is never seeing the scan file which would explain my results as well as well as why Sage is taking such a long time to scan.

Can anybody tell me the path/filename of where the output is supposed to go so Sage will pick it up?

Also, I asked this in another post but if anybody reading this has the answer at the tip of their fingers... after running the docker I see the 3 new folders in ~/docker/..... (commandir, comskip & server) and I assume I need to copy them to their correct locations. I believe "server" goes in /opt/sagetv. What is the preferred location for the other folders?

Thanks a lot.

[Fuzzy]

Might be worth looking into dropping some cash on using unRAID. It certainly makes things more painless as far as configuration and maintenance, has docker built in, and you can do most things without ever seeing a Linux command prompt.

[LaoChe]

That would probably make sense but if I am going to have an Ubuntu server running I want to know how it works - and I am getting there, just very very slowly

I think my next step is to get Sage to use the scan output from the HDHR tuner instead of doing its own scan but SageTV is no longer an option for BDA compatibility (and apparently downgrading the firmware is no longer possible). The default BDA setting generates an XML file when I run it in windows. Running hdhomerun_config XXXXXXX scan in ubuntu generates a file like this:
SCANNING: 951000000 (us-irc:150, us-cable:150)
SCANNING: 949750000 (us-hrc:150)

The last .scn file I can find on my old server looks more like this:
CH:1 major:1013 minor:76 prog:569 phy:80 frq:559250000 mod:0 #:Unknown
CH:2 major:1013 minor:77 prog:535 phy:81 frq:565250000 mod:0 #:Unknown

Does anybody know how to generate a file that will work with Sage?

[Fuzzy]

If SageTV is no longer an option in the HDHR software, than I don't think you are going to get it to work direct from sage. That setting is what instructed it to write out the proper .scn files in the sagetv folder. I'll be honest though, I have never attempted QAM tuning at all, so I can't be sure (might try connecting an old HDHR-US up to see what it does later today to see if I can give you any guidance). I'm thinking, however, that if HDHR has abandoned sagetv support, you are going to have to go with a 3rd party (openDCT).

[LaoChe]

I don't think OpenDCT is an option because I don't have a cable card.

Does anybody know if any of the other formats contain the same information as the scn file? I could always reformat one of the other files (jriver wm, etc).
There seems to be almost no information about other file formats from HDHR scans online. I tried a few but can't even locate the output files.

I sent a message to Silicon Dust asking them to help out or turn back on SageTV support - we'll see what they say about that.

[Fuzzy]

OpenDCT supports QAM and ATSC as well - I use it for ATSC currently (where i did have to make some fixes in ATSC scanning). I don't know off-hand how well or if the QAM scanning works in it, but QAM tuning IS a part of the code, so i figured it'd be worth a try for you. It does have some sort of offline channel scanning (where it can scan through the channels on unused tuners in the background like once a week or so and maintain a list of channels, so when you do a scan from in sage, it will return the list almost immediately - this should allow you to do an update scan in sage every once in a while to pick up changes by the cable company.

[KryptoNyte]

Just a reminder if it hasn't been said already, SageTV has to be installed prior to the HDHomerun software right now for the SageTV menu option to appear in the HDHR software. If your install order was incorrect, you'll need to leave SageTV and uninstall/reinstall the HDHomerun software.

[LaoChe]

Thank you! I had installed hdhomerun_config before Sage so I uninstalled it and reinstalled it. But I can't figure out how to change the output file in the terminal. So I guess my real question is probably is it possible to create the .scn file using hdhomerun_config? The only thing I have found that looks close to what is called BDA compatibility mode in the GUI is /sys/model (currently hdhomerun_atsc). The only output I can get out currently using hdhomerun_config scan shows SCANNING... etc. not actual channel mappings.

I guess my other alternative is to install Sage on my windows laptop then reinstall the HDHR Setup program. Hopefully SageTV would then be an option and I can just move the resulting scan file over to the Ubuntu server.

[LaoChe]

Thanks KyrptoNyte, you were right. I went ahead and uninstalled the HDHR software from my laptop, installed Sage, reinstalled HDHR and SageTV was an option. I did a scan, the file went to the SageTV folder and I copied it over to the Ubuntu server in /opt/sagetv/server. I also deleted a couple of old .frq files specific to my tuners. I tried to do another channel scan in Sage but it started going through channel by channel really slowly and the result was only about 1/3 of the total channels so it doesn't seem to be picking up the .scn files

The files I got out of HDHR were:
Silicondust HDHomeRun Tuner 1016C800-0-0-QAM.scn and Silicondust HDHomeRun Tuner 1016C800-1-0-QAM.scn so I am wondering if they need to be named something different for Linux. I tried replacing the spaces in the names with underscores but no luck.

Thanks.

[EnterNoEscape]

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

OpenDCT supports QAM and ATSC as well - I use it for ATSC currently (where i did have to make some fixes in ATSC scanning). I don't know off-hand how well or if the QAM scanning works in it, but QAM tuning IS a part of the code, so i figured it'd be worth a try for you. It does have some sort of offline channel scanning (where it can scan through the channels on unused tuners in the background like once a week or so and maintain a list of channels, so when you do a scan from in sage, it will return the list almost immediately - this should allow you to do an update scan in sage every once in a while to pick up changes by the cable company.

OpenDCT doesn't have any realtime QAM scanning. It's a little more complex than ATSC because QAM will tell you everything is completely tunable even when it is not (usually due to encryption), so the same scanning methods used for ATSC do not always work. I tried to incorporate realtime QAM scanning in the past and the problem is that SageTV gets impatient while OpenDCT is testing the channels and gives up on the channel scan completely. If there is enough demand, I can revisit this and see what can be done, maybe on the SageTV side of things to be able to tell it to give the network encoder more time.

OpenDCT will do QAM channel scanning as an offline channel scan which would need to be enabled in opendct.properties. It would then pass the results of the offline channel scan when SageTV does a channel scan.

[KryptoNyte]

Originally Posted by LaoChe

The files I got out of HDHR were:
Silicondust HDHomeRun Tuner 1016C800-0-0-QAM.scn and Silicondust HDHomeRun Tuner 1016C800-1-0-QAM.scn so I am wondering if they need to be named something different for Linux. I tried replacing the spaces in the names with underscores but no luck.

Thanks.

I'm sorry, I don't know Linux at all. I'll have to try it one of these days.

Somewhere in your Linux install, when you added the HDHR tuner, I would think that it named it somehow (like what would show up in the web interface), or created a dummy scn file even on an unsuccessful scan? Regardless, can you suss out the difference in filenames based on what Linux thinks the tuner is called and update the filename accordingly?

Or, if another Linux user comes around, maybe they could check their install for the correct filenames.

[EnterNoEscape]

Originally Posted by LaoChe

Thanks KyrptoNyte, you were right. I went ahead and uninstalled the HDHR software from my laptop, installed Sage, reinstalled HDHR and SageTV was an option. I did a scan, the file went to the SageTV folder and I copied it over to the Ubuntu server in /opt/sagetv/server. I also deleted a couple of old .frq files specific to my tuners. I tried to do another channel scan in Sage but it started going through channel by channel really slowly and the result was only about 1/3 of the total channels so it doesn't seem to be picking up the .scn files

The files I got out of HDHR were:
Silicondust HDHomeRun Tuner 1016C800-0-0-QAM.scn and Silicondust HDHomeRun Tuner 1016C800-1-0-QAM.scn so I am wondering if they need to be named something different for Linux. I tried replacing the spaces in the names with underscores but no luck.

Thanks.

This can be a little confusing. In Windows, the HDHomeRun is communicated with as a BDA device (which appears to use the native communications protocol behind the scenes).

In Linux, it is communicated with using it's native communications protocol. This also causes the capture device names to be a little different. As far as I can tell, Linux doesn't use the .scn files, it will do a real scan with the HDHomeRun. I just did a channel scan test with my Linux test machine on an old HDHomeRun setup with ClearQAM. The channel scan was successful, but returned some garbage channels (lots of - ...) along with some good channels after a fairly long scan. I am using the latest published build 9.0.4.287.

[Fuzzy]

Originally Posted by EnterNoEscape

This can be a little confusing. In Windows, the HDHomeRun is communicated with as a BDA device (which appears to use the native communications protocol behind the scenes).

In Linux, it is communicated with using it's native communications protocol. This also causes the capture device names to be a little different. As far as I can tell, Linux doesn't use the .scn files, it will do a real scan with the HDHomeRun. I just did a channel scan test with my Linux test machine on an old HDHomeRun setup with ClearQAM. The channel scan was successful, but returned some garbage channels (lots of - ...) along with some good channels after a fairly long scan. I am using the latest published build 9.0.4.287.

I'm guessing that is a similar situation to what I had to work around in Your atsc scanning as well, where if you ask the hdhr for program info too soon after successfully running the channel, it returns a lot of missing or incorrect info. The Linux hdhr native is probably doing the same thing in sage.

[EnterNoEscape]

I agree, I think there's an open issue for the channels being returned by the native HDHomeRun implementation. Also, just so we're all on the same page, I wasn't using OpenDCT for my tests. I was using what SageTV provides out of the box. It feels like we should be fixing the built in support, but it's a lot less likely to happen if people just use OpenDCT instead. It gives me mixed feelings.

[LaoChe]

I am trying OpenDCT. A couple of questions. First, I got conflicting information about whether it will work on Ubuntu 16 or not. Will it? I followed the instructions here:

https://forums.sagetv.com/forums/sho...21&postcount=1

and everything seemed to go OK. Assuming it worked, now do I just restart Sage and do a regular channel scan?

Thanks.

[LaoChe]

Is there any hope for me? I have OpenDCT installed and running (it doesn't start on boot but I have been manually starting it). I am pretty sure it is functioning because now when I do a channel scan channels are generally mapped correctly to the guide (i.e. I now see 112-0-80 - WMFP where before installing OpenDCT I would just see 112-0-80 and have to map it to station WMFP) I am still changing the logical channel number to 80 but the different behavior seems to indicate that Sage is communicating with OpenDCT.

But the overall behavior is the same as before. An initial channel scan finds 50-70 of my 182 channels. On any subsequent scan some of those channels (anywhere from 2-30) are no longer available and another bunch of my 182 channels show up as available.

I am really liking the Sage/Ubuntu setup so I am hoping to find a way to make this work but I am open to any other suggestions - like if there is other hardware that would work better with QAM channels - or if I should be asking SiliconDust support (if I was still able to edit the channel lineup in the HDHR scan the way I used to would that make any difference?) - other software that would help? Or maybe Sage just isn't going to ever play nice with my cable provider.

Help and pity are appreciated as always

Thanks!

[Fuzzy]

Originally Posted by LaoChe

Is there any hope for me? I have OpenDCT installed and running (it doesn't start on boot but I have been manually starting it). I am pretty sure it is functioning because now when I do a channel scan channels are generally mapped correctly to the guide (i.e. I now see 112-0-80 - WMFP where before installing OpenDCT I would just see 112-0-80 and have to map it to station WMFP) I am still changing the logical channel number to 80 but the different behavior seems to indicate that Sage is communicating with OpenDCT.

But the overall behavior is the same as before. An initial channel scan finds 50-70 of my 182 channels. On any subsequent scan some of those channels (anywhere from 2-30) are no longer available and another bunch of my 182 channels show up as available.

I am really liking the Sage/Ubuntu setup so I am hoping to find a way to make this work but I am open to any other suggestions - like if there is other hardware that would work better with QAM channels - or if I should be asking SiliconDust support (if I was still able to edit the channel lineup in the HDHR scan the way I used to would that make any difference?) - other software that would help? Or maybe Sage just isn't going to ever play nice with my cable provider.

Help and pity are appreciated as always

Thanks!

Your best options is still going to be a CableCard, most likely. That just simplifies things. Used primes go up on eBay fairly often, and usually sell for very reasonable prices. This would get you 3 tuners, and you'd get more than just the Clear channels (Encrypted Copy Freely Channels as well).

[KryptoNyte]

I'm with Fuzzy, just get the cablecard setup and you'll never look back.

[tmiranda]

Originally Posted by KryptoNyte

I'm with Fuzzy, just get the cablecard setup and you'll never look back.

+1