[adamsutton]

Hi Iwan,

Glad that its "mostly" working Series linking is something I'd not really tested much myself, but I know a few people using it, so good to get positive feedback. It should work almost exactly like a sky box. Though it will "try" not to re-record the same episode. Unfortunately it won't always work as opentv has no unique ID for episodes, so I use a hash of the description, so if that changes it might re-record etc... There are better alternatives for this, but they have other issues so at the moment I'd stick with opentv if its working.

With regard to the descriptions, that's definitely odd. It's not entirely correct to say the EPG download overwrites the previous values, it only does these if they change. An interesting point is that I don't check the string is non empty, so an empty string would replace a previous non-empty one. That's a bug/omission on my part.

Though that being said, they shouldn't be empty in the first place. Can you just confirm something for me:

- Are these shows you speak of in the "recordings" list?
OR
- EPG entries?

I only ask because the data is handled slightly differently in these cases. So if we're talking about "recordings", then that possibly is a bug in my transfer/update of data from the EPG into the recordings log.

Adam

P.S.
I do have a slight confession to make, I'm not actually using TVH in anger yet. With all the dev work to get the EPG code actually working properly I've not been able to switch the house from skybox to TVH for fear of annoying the wife with all dev related disruptions However now things are more stable and TVH generally is moving in the right direction I'm hoping to switch over in the next week or so. So hopefully I'll start picking up some of these sort of issues myself.

[behaviour]

It does look as though an 'empty' update is overwriting a previously populated one. These updates are in the EPG only. Where it has scheduled a recording based on it's description, checking the scheduled recordings shows that they are still active and have descriptions. If it's of any use, one of the programmes I am currently testing is 'I'm Alan Partridge' on Dave.

I haven't had the skybox plugged in for years now. I've been through so many trasitions over the years from WMC to mythTV to XBMC, which I've stuck with. I think the fact my wife watches recordings rather than live TV has helped. We both like the fact we were able to create groups to match how we saw channels (and order them how we like) as well as add a favourites group for the small handful of channels we actually watch regularly. Another great addition is the iPhone app which makes scheduling individual recordings so easy (for the wife). TVH seems very stable these days, with hardly any failures that I can recall. I run it on a central server with 4 tuners and have a number of XBMC boxes around the house conecting.

[adamsutton]

Unfortunately I was upgrading my NAS box last night, which runs TVH, had some issues with the f#*&@ing BIOS not doing what I wanted it to (it refuses to boot, automatically, from my USB pen drive which has the OS on it). That wasted lots of time so when I finally realised the TBS DVB drivers had failed to load I didn't have a chance to fix it. I fixed the drivers remotely this morning, but because I was a bit worried about the card (BIOS also warned about over current issues, among other things, and I already popped one PSU when I shorted the sat cable) I unplugged it all reseated it but forgot to re-attach the bloody sat cables.

So the short of it is I can't test anything at the moment and I'm unlikely to get any time tonight so I'll have to take a look tomorrow.

The overwriting with empty strings is in my opinion an omission from my code, it was something I simply overlooked. With hindsight it seems obvious that you wouldn't want it to do that. So I'll mod it. But it still begs the question why are the strings empty in the first place, could be a problem with the huffman decoder (but I don't think so).

My guess is there's something else going on that I can't quite get my head around at the moment. I'll have to have a think about what might be causing the problems.

Can you quickly remind me what your setup is?

You said 4 tuners, all DVB-S or mix of DVB-T/S?

Which EPGGrab modules have you currently got enabled?

opentv/eit? others?

Ta

[behaviour]

Just to confirm that after taking your advice and upgrading to the latest version due to there being recent EPG related updates I'm now seeing the description being populated for all the programmes I checked. Much better!

[behaviour]

Hi Adam, have something else for you to check out with regards your series link feature. This is more of a niggle than any sort of failure

I searched my EPG for Grimm and found that it was on at 7pm and 12pm. Due to me being less likely to need a tuner at midnight I selected a 12pm and hit 'Record Series' it went ahead ans scheduled them all at 7pm. I got around this by deleting the scheduled recordings and editing the auto record that was generated and specifying to find schedules at around 00:00.

Also, whilst I'm typing, with the UI debug switched off and the EIT: DVB Grabber enabled I am getting constant messages of the following:

Jul 17 19:30:02 eit: install table handlers
Jul 17 19:30:22 eit: processing cancelled

Is this a debug left switched on somewhere or is it pointing to an issue?

Iwan

[adamsutton]

Iwan,

Yeah that sounds about right. By default it will always try to record the earliest event, main reason is to give extra opportunity to re-record if it gets missed for some reason. Basically you're doing that bit manually, which is fair enough since in this case you can better understand the situation.

Though I'd hope that when I get around to do something DVR improvements this shouldn't be necessary. But still you should have the option. I think making these options available is the tricky bit, most people simply want to hit record series and let the box do the work. But when we get it into XBMC, we might be able to get the UI guys to add an "advanced options" tab. I could potentially do the same in TVH UI.

Do you think if a user updates the autorec rule, such as adds a specific time, it should re-evaluate all existing timers to see if they should now be removed?

The output is normal, I was messing about with the debug and simply left some stuff in as INFO that should really be DEBUG. I intend to go through all my debug statements to tidy things up before the code is merged and make sure there all on the relevant levels etc... For now you'll just have to live with it

Adam

[behaviour]

If a recording is missed, say due to no tuner being available as there were too many programmes scheduled and not enough tuners, would it automatically schedule another recording (if available)? If so, that's pretty cool!

I still think that if I search for a programme via the TVH UI and see there is an earlier and later option, if I choose to 'record series' on the later option it should use that time as the rule. I would have chosen to take the risk if there were no further recordings and I missed it for some reason. Maybe this is just my preference. You need to go with what you believe is the best option. I have a work around for now. It would be cool if altering the auto-record updated the scheduled recordings, but that sounds to be more hassle than my proposed solution

That's good about the debug output. I suspected that was what it was. As long as it's nothing to worry about

Iwan

[adamsutton]

Iwan,

Yes in theory I believe that was always the case, however to some limited extent I've tried to improve this. However its somewhat untested, however when using a series link it should be slightly more robust (more prone to recording duplicates than missing things, though again dup detect is attempted).

I can see where your coming from on this, the problem is that from a simplistic point of view it works like this:

1. You select an episode in EPG and hit record series.
2. It creates an autorec rule based on the series identifier of that episode (or fallback to title if no series info exists).
3. It searches the full schedule for any linked episodes and sets up record entries, typically taking the earliest entries first (for reasons mentioned).

I admit this is slightly different to a sky box, but they actually understand the data they have so there might be cues in there to say what time to record at etc... I was worried that if I tried to constrain the time in some way (which isn't difficult) I'd then miss series that are shown back to back for many hours (it happens quite a lot). So I thought I'd keep it simple (at least for now).

When I come to look at the DVR code (so far I've made very few mods to get series link included) I could certainly do some more clever things, such as set the time based on selected episode and use this as a "preferred" time. In other words record at the selected time in preference to other times, but still record stuff outside of that time frame if no better alternative exists. This would probably be closer to a sky box.

However personally I'd prefer to improve the basic DVR scheduling to make use of the info regarding repeat airings to try and resolve conflicts automatically and typically the best thing in this case is to always try and record the earliest show (to give more opportunity for repeat recordings). But its not a trivial problem to deal with all the scheduling etc..

I think having some "advanced" options to help the user guide/override things would be useful. I'll think about what might be useful and try to put a basic form together in the UI (but not just yet), which might serve as an example for XBMC later down the line.

I did put a doc together some time ago on some of my DVR thoughts, but this is definitely all future work. https://docs.google.com/a/adamsutton.me....KP_-Y/edit

With respect to automatically updating the recording schedule when you change the autorec rule, this is actually a trivial thing to do. So I will think about whether this is a good idea (maybe with user option to re-schedule etc..).

Adam

[giaur]

Hello,

There are some problems with tvheadend. Sometimes, if there are audio track description not supported by mkv, there is no sound. So: there is no sound in live stream started from web interface and also, there is no sound in recorded mkv - there is no any audio track in mkv.

I can only suspect this is caused by not supported audio track names. But - if anybody still maintain tvheadend fork, it will be good idea to check this out. I've also asked this on lonelycoder forums, but there is no any reponse from them.

[Prof Yaffle]

@giaur - I'm no expert, but have you tried querying the file to find out what these tracks look like so you can be more specific? There are many command-line tools, but VLC is pretty universal at both opening a file and telling you what's in it (Tools-> Codec Information).

I was under the impression that virtually anything can be included in an mkv file, and I've certainly never struggled with anything.

[giaur]

Hello,

Please look at this log (from tvheadend) - this is one of my recording attempts:

Jun 05 23:39:53 dvr: "Stadiony nienawiści - Postscriptum" on "TVP2 HD" starting at Tue Jun 5 23:39:53 2012, scheduled for recording by "XBMC"
Jun 05 23:39:53 dvr: "Stadiony nienawiści - Postscriptum" on "TVP2 HD" recorder starting
Jun 05 23:39:53 subscription: "DVR: Stadiony nienawiści - Postscriptum" subscribing on "TVP2 HD", weight: 100, adapter: "ITE 9135(9005) Generic_1", network: "NW 01 MAZ", mux: "NW 01 MAZ: 610,000 kHz", provider: "EmiTel", service: "TVP2 HD", quality: 100
Jun 05 23:39:54 dvr: Stadiony nienawiści - Postscriptum.2012-06-05.23-39 from adapter: "ITE 9135(9005) Generic_1", network: "NW 01 MAZ", mux: "NW 01 MAZ: 610,000 kHz", provider: "EmiTel", service: "TVP2 HD"
Jun 05 23:39:54 dvr: # type lang resolution samplerate channels
Jun 05 23:39:54 dvr: 1 H264 1920 x 1088
Jun 05 23:39:54 dvr: 2 MPEG2AUDIO pol 96000 0
Jun 05 23:39:54 dvr: 4 EAC3 org 96000 0
Jun 05 23:39:54 dvr: 5 EAC3 aux 96000 0
Jun 05 23:39:54 dvr: 3 TELETEXT
Jun 05 23:39:54 dvr: 6 TEXTSUB pol
Jun 05 23:40:03 subscription: "DVR: Stadiony nienawiści - Postscriptum" unsubscribing from "TVP2 HD"
Jun 05 23:40:03 dvr: Recording completed: "/media/WIN_E/PVR//TVP2 HD/Stadiony nienawiści - Postscriptum.2012-06-05.23-39.mkv"
Jun 05 23:40:04 dvr: "Stadiony nienawiści - Postscriptum" on "TVP2 HD": End of program: Aborted by user

So, as you can see, there are 3 audio tracks in ts stream provided by broadcaster: pol (mp2), org (eac3) and aux (eac3). All of them works with xbmc. If I try to record, thveadend don't display any errors. But, created mkv file does not contain any audio tracks there is only video track.

The same issue if I click to Play in tvheadend's web interface - this is mkv streaming too, and vlc (and alll other players) can't see any audio tracks there.

But, problem don't exists on other channels, with "pol" audio track only - in this case, everything works.


As I wrote above, I can only suspect problems with audio track names and I may be wrong. But I'm pretty sure, that "org" and "aux" are not allowed as audio track names in mkv container specification - it should be language descritpion or not set (unknown).

[adamsutton]

This isn't really the right place for this discussion.

However, things are going to change over at TVH in the next few days/weeks. Can I suggest that you log (if not already done) this in either my github fork issues or redmine.

I'll try and take a look at it when I can, but most likely I'll have to get another (more knowledge) member of the team to look into it.

Adam

[giaur]

Can I suggest that you log (if not already done) this in either my github fork issues or redmine.

I can post it there and I can also share some .ts samples from my dvb-t (if this helps). Can you post link to github you are talking about? I'm not sure where can i find it.

[adamsutton]

https://github.com/adamsutton/tvheadend

Just make a note of the issue in the Issues section, TS samples may be of use so if you've got some keep them to hand. When I get a chance I'll try and take a look (or find someone who can).

Adam

[giaur]

I've created new issue, so you can look into it. There is debug log posted there and it seems sometimes audio tracks are incorrectly recognized - tvheadend assumes 0 channels for each audio track and don't even put them into mkv. But this is only sometimes - some channels works fine, and other channels don't work, have no idea why.

https://github.com/adamsutton/tvheadend/issues/42