PID Filtering - network tuner (1 Viewer)

[MrManuzz]

Hi,

I have a HDHomerun network tuner equipped with 2 tuners. The HDHomerun has a 100Mbit/s network interface. Since a couple of months I think my television provider pushed more channels into the transport streams resulting into 50+Mbit/s network traffic when recording only 1 channel. When I want to record 2 channels simultaneously I notice a lot of stuttering. I can see the HDHomerun pushing its max (100Mbit/s) through the network.
I found that the only solution is to this problem is PID filtering. I checked with NextPVR and the HDHomerun tuner does support PID filtering. When using NextPVR I can easily record 2 channels simultaneously. Network traffic then only peaks up to 30Mbit/s.
I read that MP does support PID filtering, but it is only enabled with some firewire tuners. Is there a switch, registry entry or anything else to have MP enable PID filtering when using my HDHomerun tuner?

Any help appreciated!

 

[mm1352000]

I read that MP does support PID filtering, but it is only enabled with some firewire tuners. Is there a switch, registry entry or anything else to have MP enable PID filtering when using my HDHomerun tuner?

TVE 3.5 supports PID filtering with the HDHR. There is no switch etc. to enable PID filtering with TVE 3 (current TV Server). It simply doesn't support it.

 

[MrManuzz]

Hi

Thanks for your comment.
The sources which told me there is some sort of PID filtering are these;

http://wiki.team-mediaportal.com/@api/deki/pages/6195/pdf
At present the only specific case where MediaPortal uses PID filtering is with Digital Everywhere tuners (Firewire); we only enable it when they are tuned to DVB-S2 transponders with high data rates

And

https://www.team-mediaportal.de/teamnews/digital-everywhere-and-mediaportal-update
H/W pid filtering.

<snip>

Current status is :

H/W pid filtering is in cvs and working for me

Nevertheless it is good to know that MP2 / TVE3.5 does support PID filtering. I’ve played with MP2 in the past but at the time the feature to watch live TV was not available yet. That's why I could not upgrade. I’ll have a check again

 

[mm1352000]

Hello again

The sources which told me there is some sort of PID filtering are these;

When I said "there is no switch... etc." I was referring to the HDHR. I confirm that TVE 3 does indeed have very limited/buggy PID filtering support for the FloppyDTV tuners. However PID filtering is 100% not supported with the HDHR.

I’ll have a check again

Great.
Please let us know how you get on. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.

Regards,
mm

 

[MrManuzz]

Hi mm,

I've tried to get TVE3.5 up and running;
Working on a Windows7 standalone (no domain member) 32 bits environment, logged in as a member of the administrators group
- I completely uninstalled MP1 and it's components. I installed MP2 according to http://wiki.team-mediaportal.com/2_MEDIAPORTAL_2/1_Getting_Started/2_Installing_MediaPortal_2 and I met the dependencies mentioned.
- I installed the plugin 'SlimTV-NativeTV-10th_AE_Update1_refresh' and followed https://www.team-mediaportal.com/extensions/slimtv-nativetv
- I opened 'setuptv' (run as administrator) and went for the channel scan, as mentioned on the web page. Both my HDHomerun tuners are detected and it all looked very familiar, except;

- I see a new 'button' telling me that I'm running restricted mode. Read the explantion which pops-up when you press the button. Tried to work more on the local machine than I already did, tried to be more administrator than I already was, tried to run the TVservice as the exact same local administrative account I am using, checked NTFS write permissons, but whatever I try, the ristricted mode won't go away.
Is there a way to enforce 'normal mode'?

- The channel scan tells at least 30 times 'no signal' and when it ends it hasn't detected any channels. I can see from my HDHomerun utilities that MP2 / TVE 3.5 properly addresses the HDHomerun tuner and sends channel switching commands. From the MP2 server log files I can see that PIDS are found, but then the ServerError.log file shows

[2015-01-01 23:00:18,510] [86298 ] [44 ] [DEBUG] - tuner base: perform tuner action, action = Start
[2015-01-01 23:00:18,510] [86298 ] [44 ] [DEBUG] - tuner base: set tuner state, current state = Stopped, requested state = Started
[2015-01-01 23:00:18,511] [86299 ] [44 ] [DEBUG] - DirectShow base: perform set tuner state
[2015-01-01 23:00:18,607] [86395 ] [44 ] [DEBUG] - tuner base: action succeeded
[2015-01-01 23:00:18,608] [86396 ] [44 ] [DEBUG] - tuner base: lock in on signal
[2015-01-01 23:00:19,536] [87324 ] [44 ] [DEBUG] - tuner base: locked
[2015-01-01 23:00:19,540] [87328 ] [44 ] [DEBUG] - Mpeg2TunerController: configure PID filter, mode = Auto
[2015-01-01 23:00:19,540] [87328 ] [44 ] [DEBUG] - Mpeg2TunerController: found PID filter controller interface "Microsoft PID filter"
[2015-01-01 23:00:19,542] [87330 ] [44 ] [DEBUG] - Mpeg2TunerController: current, count = 0, PIDs =
[2015-01-01 23:00:19,545] [87333 ] [44 ] [DEBUG] - Mpeg2TunerController: required, count = 4, PIDs = 0, 1, 16, 17
[2015-01-01 23:00:19,545] [87333 ] [44 ] [DEBUG] - Mpeg2TunerController: add, count = 4, PIDs = 0, 1, 16, 17
[2015-01-01 23:00:19,547] [87335 ] [44 ] [DEBUG] - Microsoft PID filter: apply PID filter
[2015-01-01 23:00:19,547] [87335 ] [44 ] [DEBUG] - map 4 new PID(s)
[2015-01-01 23:00:19,548] [87336 ] [44 ] [ERROR] -
System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.
at Mediaportal.TV.Server.Plugins.TunerExtension.MicrosoftPidFilter.MicrosoftPidFilter.ApplyFilter()
at Mediaportal.TV.Server.TVLibrary.Implementations.TunerBase.ConfigurePidFilter(Boolean isTune)
at Mediaportal.TV.Server.TVLibrary.Implementations.TunerBase.Tune(Int32 subChannelId, IChannel channel)
[2015-01-01 23:00:19,551] [87339 ] [44 ] [DEBUG] - tuner base: free sub-channel, ID = 0, count = 1
[2015-01-01 23:00:19,555] [87343 ] [44 ] [WARN ] - Mpeg2TunerController: CA disabled
[2015-01-01 23:00:19,556] [87344 ] [44 ] [DEBUG] - sub-channel base: sub-channel 0 decompose
[2015-01-01 23:00:19,557] [87345 ] [44 ] [DEBUG] - Mpeg2TunerController: configure PID filter, mode = Auto
[2015-01-01 23:00:19,557] [87345 ] [44 ] [DEBUG] - Mpeg2TunerController: no sub-channels
[2015-01-01 23:00:19,557] [87345 ] [44 ] [DEBUG] - tuner base: no sub-channels present, stopping tuner
[2015-01-01 23:00:19,559] [87347 ] [44 ] [DEBUG] - tuner base: stop, idle mode = Stop
[2015-01-01 23:00:19,559] [87347 ] [44 ] [INFO ] - tuner base: free all sub-channels, count = 0
[2015-01-01 23:00:19,560] [87348 ] [44 ] [DEBUG] - tuner base: perform tuner action, action = Stop
[2015-01-01 23:00:19,560] [87348 ] [44 ] [DEBUG] - tuner base: set tuner state, current state = Started, requested state = Stopped
[2015-01-01 23:00:19,560] [87348 ] [44 ] [DEBUG] - DirectShow base: perform set tuner state
[2015-01-01 23:00:20,051] [87839 ] [44 ] [DEBUG] - tuner base: action succeeded

And then it starts over and repeats like 30 times.

- To try and work around this, I wanted to export my channels from MP1 installation, but I think an Import/Export feature is missing in MP2 (at least I couldn't find it at the location it is available in MP1).

So here I end (so far). Log files included in case you are willing to try and help me out.

 

[mm1352000]

Hello again (and happy new year!)

- I completely uninstalled MP1 and it's components.

Just to note in case you weren't aware: this wasn't necessary. You can have MP1 and MP2 installed on the same PC. MP2 can even use MP1's TV Server (TVE 3) if you install MPExtended.

About the rest of your post...
I'd probably write almost exactly the same as I wrote here:
https://forum.team-mediaportal.com/...date-1-2014-09-13.114068/page-60#post-1100302

That post explains to ignore restricted mode. It only means that you can't start and stop the TV service (which is actually MP2 Server service) from TV Server configuration. No big deal.

It also gives a patched version of the tuner extension which implements the HDHR PID filtering, and that should fix your scanning and the exceptions... I hope.

Feel free to ask if anything is not clear.

Best regards,
mm

 

[MrManuzz]

Just a quick reply, scanning now seems to run fine with the patched version of Mediaportal.TV.Server.Plugins.TunerExtension.MicrosoftPidFilter.dll. It's scanning now and I'll leave it for a couple of hours. Later today I'll post my further results.
Thanks so far!!

 

[MrManuzz]

Hi mm,

I'm happy to report that it all seems to work! The channel scan went fine (I haven't checked for any missing channels, but it found 313 channels. I assume it found everything there is). I tested / timeshifted with an unencrypted channel without PID filtering enabled on the HDHR. Timeshifting worked without problems. Then I enabled PID filtering on the HDHR (channel scan was done without PID filtering enabled, just for the record).
If anyone wants to know how you can enable PID filtering on HDHR, the setup utility which comes with the HDHR let's you choose with which application you are to use the HDHR. When you choose 'Mediaportal', the tuners are told not to use PID filtering, when you choose 'NextPVR' the tuners are told to use PID filtering. So I changed this to 'NextPVR', stopped and started the MP2 server service and tried timeshifting again. I can see network throughput from the tuner dropped from 45Mbit/s (without PID filtering) to 10Mbit/s (with PID filtering). I checked if I could play the timeshift buffer (.TS file) and it plays like a charm.

Coming days I will dig into configuring softcams and I guess it will be similar to MP1. So I'm very happy

Thanks again!

 

[mm1352000]

Coming days I will dig into configuring softcams and I guess it will be similar to MP1. So I'm very happy

Hmmm it is similar, but there are some differences. Also, sorry to say but you probably can't do PID filtering with the encrypted channels. The PID filtering needs more work - specifically to allow the ECM and EMM PIDs to be received by the decrypter.

 

[MrManuzz]

MM, can you put me in the right direction here.... I want to register MDAPI so TVE3.5 talks to MDAPI. I put the MDAPI files in the following 3 directories (one at a time and then tried)

C:\Program Files\Team MediaPortal\MP2-Server\Plugins\SlimTv.Service
C:\Program Files\Team MediaPortal\MP2-Server\Plugins\SlimTv.Service\SetupTv
C:\Program Files\Team MediaPortal\MP2-Server

and registered MDAPI successfully. Then I timeshifted an unencrypted channel. With MP1 at that moment subdirectories are created per tuner in \Program Files\Team MediaPortal\MediaPortal TV Server\MDPlugins but this doesn't happen now. Also the file MDAPICards.xml is not being generated. It seems I cannot let TVE3.5 talk / see MDAPI.

I've searched the forum for tips and tricks, see more people struggling with this but cannot find an answer. In what directory should I place the MDAPI files?