Plugin to allow switching between Sagetv servers from extenders?

[bigbill]

Is there something for that? If not, would that be possible to do from a plug in?

Thanks, Bill

[stuckless]

Originally Posted by bigbill

Is there something for that? If not, would that be possible to do from a plug in?

Thanks, Bill

Pretty if you set your extender to NOT automatically connect, it will show a list of sagetv server and you can select which one you want to connect to.

[wayner]

No, but this is something that I would like to be able to control from the web UI. I would like to have a list of all Extenders that have ever connected to the server and have a way of "forcing" them to rejoin. It would be very useful after your server goes down. SageTCP server can kind of do this but it has caused other problems on my system.

Theoretically it is possible but it would likely have to be done with something like telnet scripting run on the extender - the extenders are running Busybox Linux. You would have to change a text file on the extender with the server info and then restart the SageTV miniclient. I have both HD200s and 300s and they seem to work slightly differently in this regard so you would likely need to develop a specific process for each of these two devices.

It would also be able to do this on an AndroidTV device but I don't know if they have something like a telnet or ssh daemon running so that you could even access the device from the outside world. I think they must have some kind of control as I know that there are Shield drivers for Home Automation systems that can start specific apps on the Shield.

So the only way to do this is to power off the extender (which really puts it in standby state), power it back on, and press stop while it boots up and before it connects to your previous server. Or deselect the auto-connect option.

[bigbill]

Bummer. I have been doing the shutoff and pressing the select button to stop the auto-connect. But what I found was it will then default to the last connected device the next time its turned on. So if (when) I forget to reconnect to the main Sage server the WAF goes to hell immediately.

I guess the Sage guys never figured folks might want multiple servers to spread out the load of I/O,transcoding, and comskip processing.

Thanks, Bill

[wayner]

I may play around with this as a project in the near future. You only have HD-200s, correct?

And what would you want - a menu item in the SageTV menu that lets you reboot and connect to server xyz?

How about always having a default server so that SageTV always tries to connect to the default server, rather than the last connected server. Would that work?

And it looks like you have servers on both Win7 and unRAID, which is the same as my configuration.

[wayner]

By the way, here is an old thread that contains some discussion and code on this and related issues:
https://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=38921

And here is a thread from 2009 where someone asks the exact same question that you did:

https://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=42650

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by bigbill

I guess the Sage guys never figured folks might want multiple servers to spread out the load of I/O,transcoding, and comskip processing.

Multiple SageTV servers just makes everything more complicated. Unless you have tons of clients/tuners, I/O is simply not an issue, not when a single server can have multiple hard drives and you can configure Sage to prioritize drive usage by bandwidth (ie write to different drives).

If those are your concerns, there are other, probably simpler (WAF) ways to to address the issue. SJQ can distribute work to other machines. I used it for years to have my powerful desktop run ShowAnalyzer rather than my comparatively weak SageTV machine.

It seems to me like a better, simpler long term solution might be to re-evaluate why you're running multiple servers and try to move away from that.

[wayner]

I have always had multiple servers and I duplicate most of the content between the two servers. This is the best way to keep FAF - if there is any problem with one server then you just reboot the extender and choose another server. I don't necessarily have tuners on the other server but that is OK as we primarily watch content that was recorded or ripped in the past.

Another reason to have had two servers, at least prior to Sage V9 on Linux, was to allow many simultaneous connections. I found that once I hit about four miniclients that my SageTV server would start puking out.

[bigbill]

Yeah, During Primetime I can easily record 4 shows at the same time, I have sagetv spool them to 4 different drives and its during primetime is when shows will normally get watched by two or three different clients. The show watching gets very sluggish then. I had already set comskip to run after midnight as it didn't appear to be running at belownormal which I though it should be. That same server will also be recording web shows via Playon/Playlater and it also runs Ispy pulling in feeds from 8 cameras around the homestead. (I had to start running them raw AVI as having them compressed to mp4 files made watching shows almost painful.)

That server also selectively uses FFMPEG to transcode the OTA shows to MP4 and then will drop certain shows into my dropbox show folder so my Sagetv server in the RV can play them if i want when we are on the road.

Bill

[wayner]

That's a busy server!

This is getting off-topic but have you ever looked at Blue Iris rather than iSpy? I played around with iSpy but never used it in depth. I am quite impressed with Blue Iris and it integrates well with my Control4 Home Automation. I haven't done this but it would also probably be possible to feed the cameras into SageTV using something like ENE's OpenDCT or something similar.

[bigbill]

No, I hadn't heard of that, been using Ispy for many years now. I will add that to my list, maybe even install it on my second Sage Server. It is a little more powerful than my main server. Just not much disk on that one.

Being able to record them into Sage is something I would really like to do. I have been trying to figure out how to add one (or all) of the cameras to any of my TV's, or even cooler into the PIP on my larger tv for a long time, but have found nothing at all to get me there. Is there a good write up on OpenDCT, I'm not ever sure what its capable of after poking around and looking at threads here. -Bill

[wayner]

This Generic HTTP Capture Device should work for getting camera streams to show up as tuners in SageTV if you can get it configured properly and if your camera, or software like iSpy or BI, puts out the proper type of stream.https://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=63855

There is also a slight variation - the Generic Pipe capture device: https://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=63823

Blue Iris is pretty much fully fledged NVR software. It can be CPU intensive if you have lots of cameras running at high res and doing analysis, but it may not be as CPU intensive as iSpy. It can be set to record 24x7 or only when motion is sensed. But it is very flexible and can kick of processes, etc when motion has been sensed. And like iSpy it can use pretty much any camera that is connected to a computer or LAN. It does cost a one time fee of $70 but that is a pretty good deal considering all that it does. There are a few others in the SageTV community using it as well.

[bigbill]

Wayner, thanks for the Blue Iris info. I will probably switch to that. I have had it runing a few days now and might have about 20% of it figured out. But what I have seen so far is much easier to setup than iSpy.

Now I just have to figure out how the purchase works so I can get rid the the Eval strip across all the video..

I thought it said there was a freeware version, but maybe not. -Bill

PS. Now I have to look into having Sage bring up a camera or two. It would be awesome to have the front door come up in a PIP when someone rings the doorbell in the evening. I live in a city and 99% of the time its a door to door salesman selling something I would never want.

-Bill

[wayner]

I paid for the license pretty quickly. Apparently it is a project that is done by one guy and he does a great job. So $60 or whatever is pretty reasonable.

There is a user forum here that is very useful. That site has also great info on IP cams in general.

[bigbill]

Wayner, I too purchased a license. I found an ebay site that was $10 less than usual. And it worked. I also contacted support as the recorded video was unreadable on any other PC without exporting it. They told me to load the trial version on any machine I wanted to view the .bvr files and to delete a registry key each time the software expires on that PC. They really need to create a viewer as that is pretty much a kludge.

Who wants to go thru the hassle of exporting a file just so you can view it only your laptop. or some other pc.

-Bill

[wayner]

Can't just view the video via the Web UI that you have with Blue Iris - or the App on mobile devices. Blue Iris sets up its own web UI, just like SageTV, and you can view everything through that. That's what I do. I haven't had much need to move the video files anywhere else. Or you can just view the video on the Blue Iris PC - generally using RDP to access my Blue Iris PC.

[JustFred]

Originally Posted by bigbill

They told me to load the trial version on any machine I wanted to view the .bvr files and to delete a registry key each time the software expires on that PC. They really need to create a viewer as that is pretty much a kludge.

Who wants to go thru the hassle of exporting a file just so you can view it only your laptop. or some other pc.

-Bill

There's no need to jump thru hoops. Blue Iris will happily record to formats other than it's default .bvr format. For BI v4: Camera Properties -> Record tab -> Video file format and compression button. Then select AVI, WMV or MP4. This is also the place to select transcoding, if desired.

I find Blue Iris to be excellent: super reliable, reasonable CPU utilization and very reasonably priced. Been running it for several years on 3 of my Sage systems.

[Olias]

+1 for the Blue Iris software. I loaded it at work for a DIY security camera setup and found it to be easy to configure and operate.