Media Portal with HD Homerun Extend (1 Viewer)

[bencro]

I've been trying to get MP1 (OTA Live TV & Recording) running on a computer we use as a HTPC, and have been unsuccessful. I am transitioning away from WMC, which worked for the most part (seems like the most recent update by SilconDust caused some display issues - pixelating, etc)...Oh, and MS blew away the EPG without a viable path.

I was thinking through the issues that I had as I worked through the MP1 guides, and believe that the very first problem I ran into was that the Preview function in the TVServer Configuration dialog was not acting as I expected. When I select a channel to preview, I get sound and video for about a half-second, and then it freezes. Also of interest is that the HDHomeRun VIEW application sometimes displays video and audio on some channels, but is not showing video on some channels. So, I'm thinking at least part of the issue is the wireless HDHomeRun Extend Dual Tuner (but the setup did work in WMC).
I believe I've tried all of the suggestions in the guide, and am at my wits end. I don't want to go back to a contract in order to see broadcast TV! Any thoughts on how to systematically work through this?

 

[RonD]

wireless HDHomeRun Extend antennae

I have a couple of earlier model hdhr tuners that work fine with 100mbps wired ethernet connections, but don't understand what you really mean by "Extend antenna". Are you using wifi to connect hdhr tuner to the main MP TV server?

looking at some hdhr documentation, is this HDTC-2US "Converts video to H.264 AVC for more efficient streaming and better playback support on portable devices.". Maybe WMC enabled this mode, local compression? inside the hdhr to cut down on BW needed to stream video. not sure if MP supports this, we'd need some comments from Mr-MP-TV-wziard @mm1352000.

http://www.silicondust.com/products/models/hdtc-2us/

if you use the HDHR config tool to monitor the HDHR tuner while using MP, do you see problems with the HDHR?

 

[bencro]

Thanks RonD. Yes, Extend is just a model name for - model HDTC-2US tuner. It's a dual wireless tuner hooked to my wifi router. The actual antenna is hooked to the HDHR tuner's input. The router broadcasts the signal to the PC over WiFi. BTW, I ran it wired as well, and it did not help much.

Yes, the HDHR playback in their "VIEW" tool was sporadic, with MP running, and even when MP wasn't running.

 

[RonD]

maybe we are talking about different HDHR software/tools. I was wondering your tuner is seeing ATSC/OTA/antenna signal problems. This shows 1 of my tuners on a good station (all green). I have some stations that are a little marginal, and hdhrconfig would show problems.

 

[mm1352000]

Yeah, log files full of continuity errors on the server side... which means that chunks of the stream are missing. That's either due to the wireless being insufficient (which is what I would lean towards) or an over-aggressive security application scanning TV Server's every move and causing overload for your HDD.

In general terms the TC model's transcoding features are not supported in MediaPortal, and for now we don't support PID filtering either. That means your network has to be able to carry 19.2 Mb/s per tuner. Wireless is just not a good choice for that.

 

[RonD]

hdhr has ways to do command line debug that can show network drops. if you want to try this you need to switch the HDHR IDs to match your tuners

there are 2 different pdfs online, older https://www.silicondust.com/hdhomerun/hdhomerun_development.pdf
newer https://www.silicondust.com/hdhomerun/hdhomerun_tech.pdf

# display list of tuners
"C:\Program Files\Silicondust\HDHomeRun\hdhomerun_config.exe" discover
hdhomerun device 1013A9F2 found at 192.168.0.199
hdhomerun device 10303662 found at 192.168.0.197
hdhomerun device 103533ED found at 192.168.0.198
hdhomerun device 10418944 found at 192.168.0.196

# set tuner 10418944 to physical channel, 29 in this case
"C:\Program Files\Silicondust\HDHomeRun\hdhomerun_config" 10418944 set /tuner0/channel auto:29

# get status
"C:\Program Files\Silicondust\HDHomeRun\hdhomerun_config" 10418944 get /tuner0/status

# receive channel video stream, output "." for good, press cntl C to exit
"C:\Program Files\Silicondust\HDHomeRun\hdhomerun_config" 10418944 save /tuner0 null
..........................
-- Video statistics --
48845 packets received, 0 overflow errors, 0 network errors, 0 transport errors, 0 sequence errors

from hdhr pdf, anything other than “.” is an error
While saving the stream, a single period “.” will be displayed every second. Errors will be indicated by a letter. Example output:
............n...............................n..........ts..........
-- Video statistics --
23323 packets recieved, 2 network errors, 1 transport errors, 1 sequence error

I used this when I added a new hdhr tuner to my setup and started seeing new/weird video glitches using MP1. This test showed lots of “n” showing network problems. I ended up moving around hdhr wired connections to my 1000 mbps switch/router ports to clean up the network problems and my MP1 videos problems went away

 

[bencro]

Thanks for your help. I removed the HDHR TC tuners and turned on my my Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-2255 with TVServer Configuration, and put the antenna to the 2255 tuner card, and it is working well on the channels that I checked. Having an antenna in the living room isn't ideal, but my network wasn't getting anywhere near 19.2 Mb/s.