Moving from Win10 to Unraid

[weeber]

I've come to the point in my life where I really need to get a handle of all my files and media; my existing method of individual drives isn't cutting it. So I'm going to look at converting my Win10 machine that runs SageTV to UnRAID, and I want to run SageTV as a Docker.

I'm trying to learn everything I can about UnRaid, Dockers, etc. because my experience with Linux is very limited, but from what I've read and watched on YouTube, it's looks straight-forward. Are there any gottcha's that I need to look out for specifically for SageTV? I record using a HDHR Prime and OpenDCT from Comcast, so I think that will be an easy configuration.

I currently have one drive where all recordings are stored. My plan is to copy to drive to a backup drive, add the recordings drive to the array, then copy my recordings to the array. Can I expect SageTv to import these files OK? What about Wiz.bin? Can I copy that over to the Sage Docker (using Krusader, I'm guessing)? Any other Sage files I should plan on copying over, or is it best just to keep it as fresh as possible?

Any tips, advice, words of encouragement, etc. is appreciated.

[KarylFStein]

I pretty much did the same thing. Once I had a free drive I loaded unRAID and added that drive to the array. I then installed an unRAID plugin called Unassigned Devices. Since you only have one recording drive, you may put that into your unRAID server then mount it using that plug-in. (I had a Windows array, so had to mount shares on the Windows server and transfer files over that way). Then you can just copy the contents over to the array, (and later when you're happy add the old drive to the array as well).

I ended up buying some new drives. 2 SSDs for cache (just for redundancy--only 1 is fine too), and 2 largish drives for parity, (again 1 is fine, but with two you can lose 2 drives in the array and still rebuild it--I like redundancy). For the parity drive it has to be as large as the largest drive you plan to add to the system.

SageTV and OpenDCT dockers were easy to install and gave me no issues with my Prime.

I only copied over my wiz.bin.

I haven't used Krusader, but it probably does what you want.

[weeber]

Awesome, that's good to hear Karyl. My plan is to start to play with UnRaid this weekend with a couple of spare drives I laying around. If all goes well I'll work on a full conversion later.

Should be fun.

[wayner]

It sounds like you don't need to change channels - that can be one of the main gotchas with unRAID as I think that the Linux drivers for the USB-UIRT can handle the multi zones.

If you are using HD-PVRs you may need the DVB plugin.

I love unRAID and there can be lots of other useful stuff in unRAID - Plex, Ubiquiti Unifi, VMs for Linux, Windows, etc.

[weeber]

Originally Posted by wayner

It sounds like you don't need to change channels - that can be one of the main gotchas with unRAID as I think that the Linux drivers for the USB-UIRT can handle the multi zones.

If you are using HD-PVRs you may need the DVB plugin.

I love unRAID and there can be lots of other useful stuff in unRAID - Plex, Ubiquiti Unifi, VMs for Linux, Windows, etc.

The UnRaid will be server only, I won't be watching/changing channel using the server. All playback is handled by clients - Shield or Sony TV (Android TV). No HD-PVRs; HDHR Prime only.

I'm pretty excited to try UnRaid out, the more I read the more impressive it becomes. I was considering getting a Synology NAS, but UnRaid seems like a better fit for my needs (and wallet)

[wayner]

Then things will be easy. I don't use SageTV for LiveTV but I need a way to change the channel on my cable box for recordings. You don't need that with the HDHR Prime so it makes things MUCH simpler as you have fewer points of failure - like no channel changing errors and no issues with an external box.

[weeber]

OK, getting SageTV and OpenDCT setup on UnRaid was easier than I thought. My Shield found the new server and I connected to it easy enough. Tuners seem to be working fine though OpenDCT. Just one problem:

The playback of H.264 streams is really fast, like 5x speed. And playback of MPEG-2 streams doesn't seem to work at all. Is there a codec pack or something I need to install? I can't find any similar issues when I search the forum.

While I'm testing my UnRaid setup, I'm keeping my Win10 setup running, and my Shield still connects and playbacks from that just fine, so I'm assuming it's something with my UnRaid config.

---Edit---
SageTV was able to find the OpenDCT tuners from both the UnRaid and Win10 machine (same HDHR, just OpenDCT on different systems). When I try to use everything in UnRaid, I get the fast playback error/issues. However, when I tell the UnRAID Sage to use the Win10 OpenDCT tuners, playback works normally, I'm thinking it must be an OpenDCT config thing on the UnRAID device, will continue to dig and update.

---Edit 2---
Setting the miniplayer client on the Shield from ExoPlayer to IJK seems to have fixed the problem. Must be a setting that I've changed somewhere to make OpenDCT work with ExoPlayer, just need to do some digging. But otherwise everything seems to be working.

[egeller]

Originally Posted by weeber

OK, getting SageTV and OpenDCT setup on UnRaid was easier than I thought. My Shield found the new server and I connected to it easy enough. Tuners seem to be working fine though OpenDCT. Just one problem:

The playback of H.264 streams is really fast, like 5x speed. And playback of MPEG-2 streams doesn't seem to work at all. Is there a codec pack or something I need to install? I can't find any similar issues when I search the forum.

While I'm testing my UnRaid setup, I'm keeping my Win10 setup running, and my Shield still connects and playbacks from that just fine, so I'm assuming it's something with my UnRaid config.

---Edit---
SageTV was able to find the OpenDCT tuners from both the UnRaid and Win10 machine (same HDHR, just OpenDCT on different systems). When I try to use everything in UnRaid, I get the fast playback error/issues. However, when I tell the UnRAID Sage to use the Win10 OpenDCT tuners, playback works normally, I'm thinking it must be an OpenDCT config thing on the UnRAID device, will continue to dig and update.

---Edit 2---
Setting the miniplayer client on the Shield from ExoPlayer to IJK seems to have fixed the problem. Must be a setting that I've changed somewhere to make OpenDCT work with ExoPlayer, just need to do some digging. But otherwise everything seems to be working.

Oh yeah, we probably forgot to tell you (that's how I felt in March 2017, when I went through what you are going through now). You are, most likely, missing the impact of using FFmpeg processing raw cable TV streams.

The Windows version of OpenDCT defaults to:
consumer.dynamic.default=opendct.consumer.FFmpegTransSageTVConsumerImpl

The Unraid version of OpenDCT defaults to: consumer.dynamic.default=opendct.consumer.MediaServerConsumerImpl

Additionally, you have an entry for each tuner that can override the default. It looks like:
sagetv.device.[your_number_here].consumer=opendct.consumer.DynamicConsumerImpl

Check your windows config and I will bet they point to the FFmpeg consumer. Make the Unraid version match your Windows config, and all will be better, and hopefully fixed.

[KeithAbbott]

Originally Posted by egeller

Oh yeah, we probably forgot to tell you (that's how I felt in March 2017, when I went through what you are going through now). You are, most likely, missing the impact of using FFmpeg processing raw cable TV streams.

The Windows version of OpenDCT defaults to:
consumer.dynamic.default=opendct.consumer.FFmpegTransSageTVConsumerImpl

The Unraid version of OpenDCT defaults to: consumer.dynamic.default=opendct.consumer.MediaServerConsumerImpl

Additionally, you have an entry for each tuner that can override the default. It looks like:
sagetv.device.[your_number_here].consumer=opendct.consumer.DynamicConsumerImpl

Check your windows config and I will bet they point to the FFmpeg consumer. Make the Unraid version match your Windows config, and all will be better, and hopefully fixed.

So I'm confused. According to the following post, opendct.consumer.FFmpegSageTVConsumerImpl has been deprecated. Am I missing something?

Originally Posted by EnterNoEscape

• sagetv.device.parent.<unique_id>.consumer=opendct.consumer.FFmpegTransSageTVConsumerImpl

  This is the implementation to be used for streaming to SageTV. The currently valid values for this property are the default, opendct.consumer.RawSageTVConsumerImpl and opendct.consumer.MediaServerConsumerImpl (new in 0.5 and only uses media server). Parent entries cover an entire device. Right now this is for convenience, so you don't need to set this value for each tuner. It will probably change once we are using a web interface. opendct.consumer.FFmpegSageTVConsumerImpl has been deprecated as of 0.4.

[KarylFStein]

I use opendct.consumer.FFmpegTransSageTVConsumerImpl. I think it does some on-the-fly fixing of some stream issues.

[egeller]

Originally Posted by KeithAbbott

So I'm confused. According to the following post, opendct.consumer.FFmpegSageTVConsumerImpl has been deprecated. Am I missing something?

I have ignored that. With a number of Comcast channels, SageTV cannot interpret the raw stream. FFmpeg transcodes the stream into something clean.

On another forum, I read that processing IPTV streams through FFmpeg is a recommended best practice. This is kind of like that.

[weeber]

Originally Posted by egeller

I have ignored that. With a number of Comcast channels, SageTV cannot interpret the raw stream. FFmpeg transcodes the stream into something clean.

On another forum, I read that processing IPTV streams through FFmpeg is a recommended best practice. This is kind of like that.

Thanks, I worked through a lot of what you mentioned this weekend. I did try to set FFmpegSageTVConsumerImpl in OpenDCT properties (just like my Windows setup), but for some reason it wont stick. I made sure OpenDCT was stopped, but it keeps changing back to MediaServer - maybe because it's now deprecated.

Looks like I should be using: FFmpegTransSageTVConsumerImpl; similar looking but different, I guess.

What I got working though was to add the channel range 0-5000 (assuming that's all channels) to consumer.dynamic.channels.ffmpeg= This seems to tell OpenDCT to use FFmpeg transcoding for everything I tune. I guess this is probably as good as setting the default to the correct value, but I'll go back and take another run at it.

Besides that everything is working great. I got all my previous recordings imported and successfully playing back, new recordings are working as they should, and commskip seems to be working. Now I just need to add disks (the parity disk should be delivered today).

Another question - My search through the threads seems to indicate that SageTV on Unraid cannot wake the computer to record? Is that correct? If so, not a deal-breaker, but kind of a bummer. I enjoyed having my Win10 Server sleep when not in use, but wake up to record or when I issued a WOL packet.

In any event, I want to thank everyone for their help and feedback on this, and for those who have taken SageTV as an Opensource project and made all these nifty new branches from it.

[KarylFStein]

Note for the OpenDCT docker you want to change the consumer type for each tuner instead of just changing the default. This is because the docker as implemented overwrites the default on startup. So, change the entries like this:

sagetv.device.######.consumer=opendct.consumer.FFmpegTransSageTVConsumerImpl

[egeller]

Originally Posted by weeber

Looks like I should be using: FFmpegTransSageTVConsumerImpl; similar looking but different, I guess.

Another question - My search through the threads seems to indicate that SageTV on Unraid cannot wake the computer to record? Is that correct? If so, not a deal-breaker, but kind of a bummer. I enjoyed having my Win10 Server sleep when not in use, but wake up to record or when I issued a WOL packet.

Yes, what I have in my configs is: opendct.consumer.FFmpegTransSageTVConsumerImpl

Regarding the wake-up: I have played with sleeping and wake-up of my test Unraid server. It's a disaster. The server freezes and will not wake up. Brief research seems to document that sleep / wake-up of Unraid is highly hardware dependent, and the motherboard in my test machine does not support wake-up.

If I were researching your question, first I'd research if sleep and wake-up is possible with your server. You can try to sleep the server from the server's Main panel (Where you stop and start the array). It is at the bottom of the page. I would not recommend this, until you determine how you are going to wake it up. Next to the server's "sleep" button, on the Main page, there's a link to an Unraid Wiki with more information.

[weeber]

Yeah, I'm discovering the hard way that although this mobo/CPU combo went to sleep and woke up great in Win7 & 10, the same can not be said for UnRaid

I'm going to mess with it a little more, but it looks like it'll be a 24/7 Server now. I'm a little disappointed in that, but the ability to pool my multiple drives and have some redundancy with a parity drive I suppose is the sacrifice I'll have to make.

Originally Posted by egeller

If I were researching your question, first I'd research if sleep and wake-up is possible with your server. You can try to sleep the server from the server's Main panel (Where you stop and start the array). It is at the bottom of the page. I would not recommend this, until you determine how you are going to wake it up. Next to the server's "sleep" button, on the Main page, there's a link to an Unraid Wiki with more information.

[egeller]

Originally Posted by weeber

Thanks, I worked through a lot of what you mentioned this weekend. I did try to set FFmpegSageTVConsumerImpl in OpenDCT properties (just like my Windows setup), but for some reason it wont stick.

Since my last comment, and some testing of a new source, I found out more about this.

The OpenDCT docker works different than the Windows version. The docker overwrites the value, at the top of the config, back to opendct.consumer.MediaServerConsumerImpl.

Your only option is to change the value on each tuner that needs to be opendct.consumer.FFmpegTransSageTVConsumerImpl

[weeber]

I'm about a month in from my move from Win10, and all I can say is that I wish I'd move to UnRaid sooner. This has been an amazingly easy transition, besides a few minor issues mentioned above. SageTV still works great, UnRaid is amazingly simple to setup and use, and the number of other plugins & dockers available the extend the functionality is really impressive.

If anyone is looking to convert to UnRaid, I think it's a great move, nothing to be worried about.

[technazz]

Originally Posted by weeber

I'm about a month in from my move from Win10, and all I can say is that I wish I'd move to UnRaid sooner. This has been an amazingly easy transition, besides a few minor issues mentioned above. SageTV still works great, UnRaid is amazingly simple to setup and use, and the number of other plugins & dockers available the extend the functionality is really impressive.

If anyone is looking to convert to UnRaid, I think it's a great move, nothing to be worried about.

I agree. I wished I would have done years ago.

Anyways go look at SpaceInvader One youtube channel for Unraid tips and tutorials.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZD...N0WeAPvMqTOrtA


Chris