Windows 8 - Plex - Hdhr3 - nPVR Project Help

[wizwor]

I am looking for help with a project. We cut the cable three years ago replacing our terrestrial provider with an antenna, five DTVPal DVRs, and five Insignia BD players that streamed Netflix and played media off an attached USB disk. Later, we added Roku streamers. We use the Rokus for Netflix, Playon, and Plex plus some other stuff.

I have added a HDHR3 to my configuration. I would like to use it to record programming off the air into a folder that Plex scans so that family favorites are stored in one location rather than on each DVR.

Plex, Playon, and the DVR software will be running on a single PC running Windows 8 (Playon is Windows only). I don't need to interact with the DVR from a television set -- I just want the files to show up in Plex.

nPVR was recommended as the best DVR for this purpose. I'm having difficulty making it work.

I have installed the HDHR3 and am able to preview my OTA tuners using the included Windows application. I have installed nPVR and it sees the HDHR3 as six devices: ATSC-0, QAM-0, ATSC-1, QAM-1, HDHR0, and HDHR-1. Of these, I get channels when I scan on ATSC-0 and ATSC-1. The channels found match my channel lineup, so I assume those are the devices I should be using.

When I open nPVR and click TV Guide, I see a list of these channels with no descriptions. If I double click a channel brogramming block, I get a dialog that offers to record/quick record/watch/close. If I choose record, I get a dialog with record option. When I look in \windows\temp I see a new zero byte length file called (no show details)_20130713_08300900.ts, but that seems to be all that happens. If I choose watch from the same dialog, the header of my nPVR window is changed to the name of the selected station, but the screen is black. The program seems to be busy (it takes a moment to get its attention if I try to drag the window to a new location or right click to get to that menu), so I assume I have to change settings.

In the About section of settings, it lists the version as 2.62. It had warned me that it needed the DirectX runtime installed, but that went away when I installed that. I haven't changed anything under General. The UI mode is PVR. The Devices section lists the tuners I mentioned earlier and shows \\hushpc\npvr as the database share. Under Recording, I changed the directory to MyVideos. Under Media Folders, I changed the Video Folders to folders on my PC that contain folders. Decoders is default -- EVR video renderer, ffdshow decoder. Everything else is default. I have lots of logs. They are too long to post in whole. If you can tell me what to look for, I can post that.

Thank you for reading this.

[johnsonx42]

0. yes, the ATSC versions are the right tuner devices for antenna; the QAM versions are for unencrypted digital cable, and the "HDHR" versions are actually for a different device called an HDHR Prime for use with CableCard.

1. make sure you have allowed NDigitalHost.exe, NRecord.exe and NextPVR.exe through your firewall. Also, check in the setup for the HDHR you've set the application to "NextPVR", although a small number of users have reported success with it set to "Other ATSC". firewall blocking is the usual explanation for zero-length recordings/livetv, though the HDHR application setting is sometimes the culprit.

2. make sure you merge your channels across the two tuners. there are automatic ways of doing it, I think it prompts you at some point (it's been so long since I setup NPVR from scratch I've forgotten where the auto-merging happens)... you may already have done so. If you have all your channels enabled on both ATSC tuners, but see only one set of channels in Settings->Channels, then you're already merged.

3. you'll need a source of EPG data. I really strongly suggest you use Schedules Direct. Only $26 per year for reliable, legal EPG data. once you have your schedules direct lineup setup, then go to Settings->Channels, select your first channel and hit Details; map the physical channel to the correct channel in Schedules Direct (this is where you put in your schedules direct login info). once you've done the first channel, hit the Bulk Map button and map the rest of the channels.

4. yes, you can change the channel numbers to whatever you want them to be. No, you can't use channel.subchannel numbers like 4.2 or 5-003. Integers only.

5. In Settings->Recordings make sure you have the default recording path set appropriately. Likewise in Settings->Misc you have the LiveTV buffer set to a reasonable path.

6. To name the recording files appropriately for Plex, with show/season/episode info and .nfo files, you'll need to implement MVallevand's ImageGrabLite utility in PostProcessing.bat - see the wiki in the Utilities section.

7. If you want to actually watch recordings and LiveTV from the NPVR server (even just for testing) you'll need to set appropriate MPEG-2 video, MPEG-1 and AC3 audio decoders. Decoders are not included. No decoders are needed for recording though.

8. I just repeated a lot of what I wrote previously in the NPVR sticky post, see it linked in my signature and at the top of the Support forum for more info.

[Zeb]

Those three all-important firewall exceptions need to match your network location setting (Public or Private).

The ffdshow decoder requires setup. On NextPVR's Settings -> Decoders page, just to the right of the MPEG2 Video dropdown is a button [...] to access decoder properties. You need to add NextPVR to the whitelist and enable MPEG-2 libavcodec. For AC3 Audio, AC3Filter is a free download. But as johnsonx42 indicated, you don't need decoders for NextPVR in order to view recordings in a different application.

Of course EPG options are discussed in the Wiki. True, mc2xml is free, but setup is somewhat complicated: http://www.nextpvr.com/nwiki/pmwiki.php?...n.XMLTVEPG

Your MyVideos folder should preferably be in the Public folder.

[wizwor]

Thanks. I understood about 80% of what you said. Fortunately, that was enough to get me going. Fair warning: I'm stupid and I've bookmarked these forums.