Unable to receive signal due to VMware Player installation (HDHomeRun Prime, Win 8)

[mikkle]

Hi,

First of all, thanks for your hard work on this project.

I installed NextPVR yesterday for the first time and was unable to view any channels, but I think I've figured out the source of the problem. My setup is fairly straightforward: HDHomeRun Prime on local network, SchedulesDirect subscription, latest NextPVR + all patches on Windows 8 64 bit.

For the longest time, I was unable to watch any channels on Live TV (black screen, no sound). I noticed that NextPVR was able to create a .ts file in the appropriate folder but the file was always zero bytes. I did quite a bit of searching and found out that this usually happens when NextPVR is unable to communicate with the HDHomeRun tuner. I then proceeded to add explicit firewall exceptions, then disable all firewalls, disable antivirus protection, etc. to no avail: still no picture, no sound, and a zero-byte .ts file.

Eventually I looked through the logs to see if I could glean anything useful and the following message caught my eye:

Code:

Executing: C:\Program Files\Silicondust\HDHomeRun\hdhomerun_config.exe 13xxxxxx set /tuner0/target rtp://192.168.76.1:36322

You see, my local network is actually on 10.0.* -- not 192.168.* . It seemed NextPVR was asking HDHomeRun to send the data somewhere other than my desktop. A quick call to IPCONFIG cleared that up as it revealed the following entry:

Code:

Ethernet adapter VMware Network Adapter VMnet8:

   Connection-specific DNS Suffix  . :
   Link-local IPv6 Address . . . . . : fe80::1493:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx%21
   IPv4 Address. . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.76.1
   Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.255.0
   Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . :

For some reason, NextPVR was trying to route the stream to the VMware Player virtual network adapter. Once I disabled the virtual adapters (there are two of them) from the Windows Control Panel, NextPVR then called hdhomerun_config using the proper IP address and I was able to watch Live TV!

How does NextPVR determine which network adapter to route traffic to? I can't find an option to explicitly specify this in the Settings UI, so I assume this is some sort of bug? Let me know if you need any additional info to troubleshoot.

Cheers!

[johnsonx42]

I've seen this before with other software and those VMnet adapters (and with other virtual adapter types that have an IP assigned). Effectively with those virtual adapters installed you have a "multi-homed" system just as if you had multiple physical adapters installed. This often presents a problem as Windows doesn't seem to have a mechanism to determine which IP address is the default one. In theory it could work with the listen port at 192.168.76.1:36322 even if the HDHR is at 10.0.0.1; it's just that the HDHR doesn't know how to reach 192.168.76.1, and sends the packets to the default route which is probably your internet router. If you could tell the HDHR a static route for the VMnet network, it would work.

I guess the fix from the NPVR side would be to have a config.xml setting <DefaultListenIP> that would default to Auto, and would allow users with multi-homed systems to override the default IP address.

[mikkle]

Thanks for the reply!

"route print" on my system shows a metric of 10 for the route from the gateway (router) to my default adapter, while every other route (including the virtual adapters) has a metric of over 250. (Routes with lower metrics have precedence.) Perhaps there is a way to retrieve this information programmatically to make sure the correct interface is used?

Thanks again!

[sub]

I've made a change for the next release which should fix this.

That release should be this weekend.

[mikkle]

That's great to hear, thanks to you both for your help!