STV: Cayars17 Ultimate STV (Release 17 - Jan 18)

[Opus4]

Just in case you missed this when it was posted before, I removed & reposted:

Originally Posted by alon24

I find that I record many shows and they show up ok but after a few days, they are suddly shown as no title, no header.

I would be curious whether this is happening when using any STV, because I think this might be an XMLTV problem. I recall previous problems where the EPG is updated after the show is recorded and the EPG data for that airing is either cleared or changed. For example: someone had a show's First Run status change to Rerun just a day or so after it was recorded, so it always lost its Favorite status and was deleted in an older version of SageTV. You may be running into the same thing & the file gets put into the library or something -- if you play a library file, you'll notice that there is no info box at the top of the screen during playback. Anyway... does any of this sound familiar to what is happening?

- Andy

[Cayars]

Originally Posted by gotuitdan

I tried the burner. I can add videos from the built-in video library but not from the imported video list, which is where I need to burn from. I select "add to DVD list" and it says it added it, but it isn't on the list. If I do the same thing from the normal video library it adds it fine. I haven't tried burning yet, since I need to burn from the imported list. The imported video is a DVD quality video. I tried adding a re-imported video from the normal library too, with no success...

thanks...!

I added the buttons and code to the Import as more of an "after thought" but I've never tried adding shows from there. I'll check it and as I'm sure it just needs a little tweek to get it working.

BTW, try setting the DVD config in detailed setup to "ISO FILE" mode and try "burning" a couple of files just to make sure the whole process will run on your computer. In ISO FILE mode it won't actually burn to DVD so you won't kill a DVD disc just for testing.

If you have Daemon Tools you can "mount" the ISO file and play it back just to make sure everything built correctly. In the programming of this thing I never had any problems with the ISO file not being any good so you can probably skip the "test" but if you have Daemon Tools already it will only take a minute or two to verify.

[ToxMox]

Just installed TestD and I have noticed a couple of issues. When reaching the end of a tv file the deletion screen that comes up no longer has a border or background. Just the text choices come up. Another thing is that the timebar doesn't properly reflect the current location in the video. The yellow line is off a bit.

[pciccone]

Originally Posted by Cayars

Has anyone tried the DVD Burner yet?

I did a 5 selection DVD Burn taking advantage of compression feature, using MPGTX for de-muxing and burn with DVD decryptor (I dont have videoredo or nero on this box).

The "status of whats going on" scrolled off the screen as it was processing. Everything worked fine it seems till the very end. I assume the last step is to spawn dvdburn.cmd to start dvd decryptor. It seems for me this part did not work as the dvd.iso is sitting in my D:\TEMP directory.

To test I took the contents of dvdburn.cmd and manually replaced %1 and %2 and ran it, that worked. Any ideas on what might have broke down? I could not read what was on the screen at the very end for any insight....

On the external configuration screen I have:
DVD drive as "Y"
Work folder as "D:\TEMP"
Commercial cutting: disabled
Compression: enabled
Debug: disabled
Burn mode: burn
Reg key "TRIAL"

Command I ran manually (which worked):

"C:\Program Files\DVD Decrypter\DVDDecrypter.exe" /mode isowrite /start /src D:\TEMP\dvd.iso /dest Y: /overwrite yes /close

(I also noticed the ISO was only about 1GB in size, should have been more towards 4.7GB since I packed the DVD? Maybe ISO building failed, I am making the ISO into a DVD now to see if it works)

Thanks for your help!

Phil

[chrysek]

Originally Posted by Cayars

Test Version D has been uploaded.

This zip file includes a test version of the DVDBurner. Make sure to configure it's settings in Detailed Setup.

DVDBurner Features

• It supports burning up to 5 files (at present) to DVD.
• It will build a menu on the DVD disc for you.
• It can cut commercials out of the video if it detects a VPjr file created by ComSkip AND you have VideoReDo (tested with version 1.7.0.302) installed.
• It will work on local and mapped drives including UNCs.
• It has the ability (configurable) to compress the video if the DVD "Master" size is greater then the max size of the DVD. How much you can compress your video depends on your recording rate. The higher your recording rate the more you should be able to compress the data. You will need to figure out what is acceptable to you.
• It can write to DVD or build an ISO file that you can mount using Daemon Tools. This is a good option to test compression without wasting DVD discs!
• Most of the current features can be controlled via Detailed Setup->External->DVDBurner.

Remember this is release 1 of the DVD software and it has only been tested on my systems. I already know of a couple of Interface issues that should be corrected and I already have more features and enhancements planned for it.

I'll write up more about the DVD software later after Christmas as there is more to elaborate on, but for now I'd like to get some feedback on it, in it's present form.

Let me know if you notice any problems in the STV or DVD Burner.

Merry Christmast to Everyone!

Carlo

Cayars16TestD.zip

PS this was built so you could use the ISO mode in combination with "external" processing recently talked about here in the thread. In the future, you will be able to offload DVD creation to another machine AND have it build ISO DVD images in an automated fashion that you can burn to disk.

The DVD Burner can be used on the Server or SageClient in it's present form. Keep in mind the first part of the process will take longer over a network.

Carlo, you are doing an excelent JOB, seriously, your STV is the best of all, it has so many features...

You did mention at one point that v16 will support recompression standard, does it mean that you foing to use some external programs for recompressions? will it need to be placed someplace separatelly or will you include it in your package as you do for comskip for example?

I would love to have a setting where I could say lets say recompress show "The Screen Savers" to PacketPC format, and dont delete original mpeg. I dont want all the shows to be recomressed except for maybe one or two in my favorites, or maybe it would be great if even all were recompressed if such is easier, but if I am never going to watch them it would be waste of CPU time since commercial skip is allready doing some work.

Also weather tool used to be placed in one of the other STV's, if someone does not have it already installed and does install only your STV and package it is not included and weather does not work.

Anyway once again you are the best with your STV and all the features.

Chris

[Cayars]

Originally Posted by ToxMox

Just installed TestD and I have noticed a couple of issues. When reaching the end of a tv file the deletion screen that comes up no longer has a border or background. Just the text choices come up. Another thing is that the timebar doesn't properly reflect the current location in the video. The yellow line is off a bit.

I made a goof and got caught in the circularities thing (Tox will understand) and elected to import a slightly earier version back in for the OSD. I guess I missed a theme or two so I'll check them out.

I'll also check the timebar out as I resized it a little to make more room for the text 0:00:00 things. This shouldn't be to hard.

[Cayars]

Originally Posted by pciccone

I did a 5 selection DVD Burn taking advantage of compression feature, using MPGTX for de-muxing and burn with DVD decryptor (I dont have videoredo or nero on this box).

<snip>

(I also noticed the ISO was only about 1GB in size, should have been more towards 4.7GB since I packed the DVD? Maybe ISO building failed, I am making the ISO into a DVD now to see if it works)

Thanks for your help!

Phil

Your settings look fine. The size of the ISO should have been in the 4.3-4.7 GB range so something went wrong along the way. Could you try it with 1 or 2 files and see what happens? Also try and take note if one items seems to go to fast. Maybe it faided on a demux or something.

[Cayars]

Originally Posted by chrysek

Carlo, you are doing an excelent JOB, seriously, your STV is the best of all, it has so many features...

Thanks for the kind words.

You did mention at one point that v16 will support recompression standard, does it mean that you foing to use some external programs for recompressions? will it need to be placed someplace separatelly or will you include it in your package as you do for comskip for example?

It will presently work with ffmpeg transcoding if you follow the setup in another thread around here. I was going to include this in the 16 release but it doesn't work well with UNC drives and many of us use them.

I'm looking/playing with some alternatives and do plan on incorporating this type of functionality hopefully in the next release. I would just prefer it to be more robust then what's currently available.

I also don't like the results i'm getting from ffmepg compared to Dr. DivX so I don't think this solution is up to "standard".

I would love to have a setting where I could say lets say recompress show "The Screen Savers" to PacketPC format, and dont delete original mpeg. I dont want all the shows to be recomressed except for maybe one or two in my favorites, or maybe it would be great if even all were recompressed if such is easier, but if I am never going to watch them it would be waste of CPU time since commercial skip is allready doing some work.

The solution I have in mind will be easily adaptable to transcode to DivX/XVid or and of the Ms formats for portable devices. From an STV standpoint you'll be able to select bitrates, and encoding format and a backend process will take over and do the transcodes.

Also weather tool used to be placed in one of the other STV's, if someone does not have it already installed and does install only your STV and package it is not included and weather does not work.

Anyway once again you are the best with your STV and all the features.

Chris

Actually, not true. All the weather files are included in the 3 zip files and the default configurations will work out of the ZIP unless you change them.

[pciccone]

Originally Posted by Cayars

Your settings look fine.

Originally all the items took the time they should, (except what I could not see off screen).

I am trying just a single item coming in at 1.4GB now (no compression will be needed).

Will let you know.

Thanks!

Phil

[pciccone]

Originally Posted by Cayars

Your settings look fine.

Same results with 1 file, although now the ISO size of 1.4GB matches the source file size meaning the ISO is "correct". Also went back and tried 4 files, ISO size is 4.7GB so 1st run must have been a fluke.

In both cases it completed the "Creating ISO" step and then jumped back to SageTV leaving me to believe this time its having an issue calling the dvdburn.cmd for some reason (yet I can run the command manually)?

[davephan]

I tried to use the Picture Library with SageTV 2.1 and Cayars 15. None of the pictures display. The Picture Library used to work with the Orginal STV. Is there a place to set the picture library directory? Or, is there another way that I load pictures (JPG, BMP, etc)?

Dave

[pciccone]

Originally Posted by davephan

I tried to use the Picture Library with SageTV 2.1 and Cayars 15. None of the pictures display. The Picture Library used to work with the Orginal STV. Is there a place to set the picture library directory? Or, is there another way that I load pictures (JPG, BMP, etc)?

Dave

It works exactly the same (as far as I know from my research), is your path for pics via UNC or drive letter (if drive letter local or remote/network?)? Are you running SageTV as a service or as an application on the server?

[alon24]

First of all, Merry chrismes tyo all :-)

and now a little question:

Who is the guy to talk to about in the special guides, - create xml file for each show??

It doesn't write the hebrew properly in the file, and I know I can help fix this (output stream with encoding to ISO-8859-8), this might seem small to anyone, but I am trying to get my many recordings compressed and stored on DVD and I can't do it in current state if not being able to output the file properties correctly.

[Cayars]

Originally Posted by pciccone

Same results with 1 file, although now the ISO size of 1.4GB matches the source file size meaning the ISO is "correct". Also went back and tried 4 files, ISO size is 4.7GB so 1st run must have been a fluke.

In both cases it completed the "Creating ISO" step and then jumped back to SageTV leaving me to believe this time its having an issue calling the dvdburn.cmd for some reason (yet I can run the command manually)?

OK I'll confess. I never actually burned a DVD during the whole building of this thing. I only went to the ISO stage and ust "knew" it would work since I'm only passing two parameters to the cmd file.

I should have made the trip to the store to pick up a 10 pack of DISCs.

I'll take a look at it when I get some free time (family coming to my house tomorrow) but I'm sure it's something simple.

[Cayars]

Originally Posted by davephan

I tried to use the Picture Library with SageTV 2.1 and Cayars 15. None of the pictures display. The Picture Library used to work with the Orginal STV. Is there a place to set the picture library directory? Or, is there another way that I load pictures (JPG, BMP, etc)?

Dave

If you switch the STV back to the original do you now have PICs in the library? If memory serves me correctly, the Picture Library is the only thing I haven't touched in the STV at this point!

[Cayars]

Originally Posted by alon24

First of all, Merry chrismes tyo all :-)

and now a little question:

Who is the guy to talk to about in the special guides, - create xml file for each show??

It doesn't write the hebrew properly in the file, and I know I can help fix this (output stream with encoding to ISO-8859-8), this might seem small to anyone, but I am trying to get my many recordings compressed and stored on DVD and I can't do it in current state if not being able to output the file properties correctly.

I've noticed your a programmer. Why don't you just take the XML file generated and convert it to Hebrew before it gets used? Seems like this would be an easy way to solve your problem.

But to answer your question the person would be me since it's my STV.

[Demideus]

Originally Posted by Opus4

I think this might be an XMLTV problem. I recall previous problems where the EPG is updated after the show is recorded and the EPG data for that airing is either cleared or changed. For example: someone had a show's First Run status change to Rerun just a day or so after it was recorded, so it always lost its Favorite status and was deleted in an older version of SageTV. You may be running into the same thing & the file gets put into the library or something -- if you play a library file, you'll notice that there is no info box at the top of the screen during playback. Anyway... does any of this sound familiar to what is happening?

No, this sounds completely alien to me. I've been using XMLTV since Sage 2.0.14Beta and to my experience the Sage interface does not accept updates of shows that start in the past (even if it's only a few seconds).
Therefore recorded shows should not be affected by EPG updates.

As a side note: it is possible for two shows to have the same ID but different descriptions (and even titles). In practical terms, the show ID is only used to see if two separately scheduled shows are in fact reruns of each other. The information of these shows is stored separately.

That being said, I do think that it is XMLTV related. It is easily possible that some info that is pushed into Sage this way (or missing from the input) will at some moment be caught out by a change in the internal Sage workings.
Since the interface is not supported by Sage, and probably not rigourisly tested, these problems are unlikely to pop up at Sage HQ.

Also, the interface was created in Sage 1.2.8 (2001) and hasn't changed since 2003 (Sage 1.4?). It is no wonder that there are some compatibility problems with the Sage 2 internal EPG structure (as demonstrated by the null problem with episode numbers earlier in this thread).

But I'm starting to rant. So just leave it at that whomever uses XMLTV as a source for the EPG, may expect some inconveniences (a Sage update being a prime moment for such inconveniences to pop up (as are some STV's )).

[Opus4]

Originally Posted by Demideus

No, this sounds completely alien to me. I've been using XMLTV since Sage 2.0.14Beta and to my experience the Sage interface does not accept updates of shows that start in the past (even if it's only a few seconds).
Therefore recorded shows should not be affected by EPG updates.

I would hope not, but I'm not entirely certain... I was basing my comment on the conversation in this thread, where a favorite set to record First Runs only was getting deleted after every XMLTV EPG update. It turned out that after the EPG update, the show was no longer listed as a first run, so it no longer qualified as a fav... and in v2.0 non-favs were immediately deleted if IR wasn't on or a certain property wasn't set. Such shows are no longer deleted, but this situation sounded like perhaps show details were getting changed when the EPG updated, so I offered a possibility to check out.

- Andy

[Cayars]

Originally Posted by pciccone

<snip>

To test I took the contents of dvdburn.cmd and manually replaced %1 and %2 and ran it, that worked. Any ideas on what might have broke down? I could not read what was on the screen at the very end for any insight....

<snip>

Command I ran manually (which worked):

"C:\Program Files\DVD Decrypter\DVDDecrypter.exe" /mode isowrite /start /src D:\TEMP\dvd.iso /dest Y: /overwrite yes /close

<snip>
Phil

Phil the code looks OK but I've got a feeling that the %2 is causing a problem. The %2 is being passed as only a letter and the colon is in the cmd file. I probably need to pass the whole thing.

Actually, the name of the ISO file generated is always "dvd.iso" (at least in this version) and it doesn't change. Also your DVD drive isn't going to change (wouldn't think so anyway) so you can technically hard code this information in the CMD file. The DVDBurner.exe program will still pass the two parameters but they will be ignored (since they're hard coded). This should get it to work for you.

Anybody else having the same issue can do the same thing. Just make sure the "D:\TEMP\dvd.iso" points to your temp location and also change the "Y" to your DVD Write drive.

Phil, if you get a change try hard coding only the Drive and let the program pass the first parameter in. Let me know if this works on not. This will help me determine if it's the first or second parameter causing the problem. My guess is the drive letter.

Let me know how this turns out.

[dvd_maniac]

Hi Cayars,

I am eagerly anticipating the upcoming release of ver 16 of this awesome STV. I want to ask When, When, When. But I am going to restrain myself.
Do you know how the built in compression is going to work yet or is it in the idea stages. I was wondering if it is going to be a favorite setting or recording by recording settings.

Also, do you take donations for your work?