CableCARD tuner support for MediaPortal 1 (3 Viewers)

[Lyfesaver74]

Okay @breese, you do not have a cableCARD tuner, which what this thread is related to. The HVR-1600 is a damn good tuner, but not CableCARD. CableCARD tuners require you to purchase/rent a card (looks like the old PCMCIA cards) and install into the tuner.

 

[hello_joe]

I am going to move my topics over to the MP1 General from here on out.

Responded in your other thread.Apologies in advance for the length, but hopefully you can make some sense of that. Note that I'm new around here so each of my posts is still hidden until it is approved by a moderator.

Now if I can just find info on the XDM files. I cannot understand the Frequencies listed in them.

I guess you're talking about the XML files, and I've explained how to find and read them in the other thread.

 

[Lyfesaver74]

For those of you who recently downloaded the CableCARD patch my friend fixed for 1.3 Final, there was a bug that broke any non CableCARD tuners to be able to run along side. I have updated my post with a patch that holds the correct TVLibrary.dll

 

[bobert24]

I feel like I'm missing something very obvious, so forgive me if this is super simple - I've been using mediaportal for all of 15 minutes now.

When I go to the TV Server Configuration, my Ceton InfiniTV 4 doesn't show up under TV Servers. When I check the wiki, I see that Ceton tuners aren't supported at all. And yet this thread, which appears to be what brought about TV in MediaPortal, is based on testing on, among other things, Ceton tuners. Lyfesaver, you said just a couple pages back that you've got 8 Ceton tuners, and are about to make it 12, and that they're working great.

I'm trying to work my way through the 21 pages of this thread, but so far I haven't seen anything just super-promising. What am I missing here?

Thanks in advance. I love the software - I just want to really be able to use it.

EDIT: I'm working under the assumption that the patch in the first post was for 1.3 Alpha/Beta only, and that functionality was built into the final release. This is just my assumption based on the fact that the final release says it has the support built in, but I could be misunderstanding something here. If I need to downgrade, that would be an easy fix.

 

[Lyfesaver74]

No, @bobert24 go to this post and download the patch. The CableCard feature is still a WIP, so it was not added to beta. You want to follow the instructions on the first post but use the patch from my post.

After that, all will be well =)

 

[bobert24]

No, @bobert24 go to this post and download the patch. The CableCard feature is still a WIP, so it was not added to beta. You want to follow the instructions on the first post but use the patch from my post.

After that, all will be well =)

Thanks very much for your help. Something else I noticed since I first posted, and seems to be confirmed by your post - I'm running Win 7 64-bit. It looks like this may only work for 32-bit users? Thanks again.

EDIT: Answered my own question as I found time to finish the rest of the thread. Definitely 32-bit only for now. As someone else said - disappointing, but definitely understandable. Really looking forward to a 64-bit version. We all appreciate all the volunteer work being done around here.

With that in mind, I guess my real question is this: How in the world are you running 8-12 tuners on a box with 4GB or less of RAM?

 

[Tsaukpaetra]

How in the world are you running 8-12 tuners on a box with 4GB or less of RAM?

The tuners don't take up that much RAM, unless you happen to be watching all of them in separate mediaportal instances while recording and re-encoding all of the streams.
It is, after all, a mere mpeg2 stream as far as I know, which doesn't really require that much processing power or memory to deal with.

 

[bobert24]

How in the world are you running 8-12 tuners on a box with 4GB or less of RAM?

The tuners don't take up that much RAM, unless you happen to be watching all of them in separate mediaportal instances while recording and re-encoding all of the streams.
It is, after all, a mere mpeg2 stream as far as I know, which doesn't really require that much processing power or memory to deal with.

I guess you're right. I was basing my assumptions on the standard WMC/XBMC "1 GB per tuner/extender", but if you're not actually serving all those streams to different clients, you're not using nearly the same RAM.

 

[Tsaukpaetra]

I was basing my assumptions on the standard WMC/XBMC "1 GB per tuner/extender"

Right, each extender is actually a completely new login to the host machine, with an instance of WMC, so that's why the requirement is recommended, because the data stream is decoded into the extender session and re-encoded before finally getting sent over the network to the extender.

 

[Lyfesaver74]

Just wanted to give a quick update as to the goings on for this project. I want everyone to know that my friend is really putting some hours into this. He is getting a little bit of help from a couple of our awesome team members. Here is what is going on and why:

Our goal is to use the features of the newest HDHR Prime and Ceton drivers that use UPNP. Ceton just added theirs about a 2--3 months ago. Both seem to give us the exact info we need. The current mountain being climbed is that he is not a UPNP expert. Actually this might be his first venture into the inner working of it all, so it is a learning process. If anyone listening is handy with UPNP and can offer some advice, please feel free to let me know.

What this will achieve is allow MP to talk with the CC device through different pipes (channels) than is currently being used. Our current patch communicates in a way that restricts us to keep it a 32bit only patch. Well, using UPNP this eliminates all that and will allow any flavor of Windows (Vista and newer) to allow the tuners to work in MP.

As my friend's understanding grows, so does the speed of developing a working UPNP patch. Any tips or advice is welcome at this point =)