Cheap HDMI Video Capture devices - any use with SageTV?

[timg11]

There has been a recent influx of low cost Chinese HDMI video capture devices that have been mentioned by hardware aficionados on social media.

Has anyone tried these? They claim to support UVC, for what it's worth.
Any applicability to SageTV?

[pjpjpjpj]

I posted the same thing not too long ago.
https://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=66293

You can read that thread, but in general it appears the answer is likely no. The one I got works great standalone to capture HDMI into a file but Sage won't see it as a tuner (if that's your idea).

Also see my OP in that link about the thread here years ago when Chromecast was new, about how to get HDMI into Sage in a generic channel. A little searching of the word Chromecast might find it if you are interested.

[jpwegas]

Originally Posted by timg11

There has been a recent influx of low cost Chinese HDMI video capture devices that have been mentioned by hardware aficionados on social media.

Has anyone tried these? They claim to support UVC, for what it's worth.
Any applicability to SageTV?

You might be able to use this with OpenDCT with the Generic Pipe Capture Device to capture data from this device from an STB or similar. See https://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=63823

--John

[pjpjpjpj]

Originally Posted by jpwegas

You might be able to use this with OpenDCT with the Generic Pipe Capture Device to capture data from this device from an STB or similar. See https://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=63823

--John

I was told (in the thread I linked above) that OpenDCT is for network and not for a USB port.

However, an open-ended (not discussed) question in my thread was whether that USB stream could be sent through the network to another destination (NAS?) such that it would then be "in the network" rather than on the server itself, and then be grabbed from there by OpenDCT.

[Zogg]

Originally Posted by pjpjpjpj

I was told (in the thread I linked above) that OpenDCT is for network and not for a USB port.

However, an open-ended (not discussed) question in my thread was whether that USB stream could be sent through the network to another destination (NAS?) such that it would then be "in the network" rather than on the server itself, and then be grabbed from there by OpenDCT.

VLC and ffmpeg could possibly capture from the device and stream over the network to OpenDCT. You could also use localhost (127.0.0.1) to "stream" it on the same system, but it might be a resource hog. I bet it would work though.

You'd just have to script it all up or use something like EventGhost to watch for a trigger and then kick off the capture and streaming (and channel tuning if need be).

[jpwegas]

Originally Posted by pjpjpjpj

I was told (in the thread I linked above) that OpenDCT is for network and not for a USB port.

OpenDCT supports a few different modes. It can stream over the network from other devices like the HDHR Primes, but it also has an option to read from a local a pipe. So if the USB device was separately set up to stream to a pipe, OpenDCT could read from that.

Originally Posted by pjpjpjpj

However, an open-ended (not discussed) question in my thread was whether that USB stream could be sent through the network to another destination (NAS?) such that it would then be "in the network" rather than on the server itself, and then be grabbed from there by OpenDCT.

I don't think you need to do all those steps. You can set up the USB device on the Sage host (or another host - OpenDCT does not have to run on the same host as Sage), set up a OpenDCT using the Generic Pipe Capture Device to start the USB capture device to write to the pipe and OpenDCT to read from the stream.

--John

[jpwegas]

Here's an example OpenDCT config using the Raw consumer (not the Pipe consumer, but it would be similar) (taken from this post: https://forums.sagetv.com/forums/sho...3&postcount=60)

sagetv.device.<unique_id>.consumer=opendct.consumer.RawSageTVConsumerImpl
sagetv.device.<unique_id>.custom_channels=3000
sagetv.device.<unique_id>.fast_network_encoder_switch=false
sagetv.device.<unique_id>.streaming_executable=c\:\\\\ffmpeg\\ffmpeg.exe -f lavfi -i anullsrc -i http\://username\asswword@serverip\:serverport/h264/cameraOrGroupShortName/temp.ts -f mpegts -codec\:a aac -
sagetv.device.<unique_id>.tuning_delay_ms=0

For the USB device you mention you would change the streaming_executable command to run the executable that starts the capture from the USB device and outputs to the standard output.

OpenDCT is very flexible. If you have a command that generates an A/V stream (whether remote URL, remote/local network, local file, local device, whatever) you can get it into OpenDCT and use it with Sage.

--John