Ceton Tuner Request for help

[skatcat743]

I'm stuck in a rock and a hard place here so lets go. My issue is that the Ceton drivers under Windows don't work but the Linux drivers do. I was going to use nextpvr 4 on Windows but since the drivers don't work I have to use nextpvr 5 under linux or find a way to make the Ceton card communicate over the network to a windows box. Is this the wrong forum to ask this question?

[sub]

NextPVR v4 definitely requires Windows.

I'm not sure any Ceton devices work under NextPVR v5. I don't have any of these devices myself, and there is only a very small set of users using these devices, so I haven't put any time into these yet. Ceton support in v5 is on my "hopefully supported in the future" list. Sorry!

[mvallevand]

From the MythTV wiki https://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Ceton_InfiniTV_4 I see

cat /dev/ceton/ctn91xx_mpeg0_0 | mplayer -cache 8192 -

So it looks like this like candidate for an Extras device using curl as your tuner.

Martin

[sub]

That's true - NextPVR v5 could potentially use a Ceton device with an extras.xml file.

[skatcat743]

Ah alright so what should I do in the mean time?

[sub]

If you're going to have to use Linux because that is the only platform with drivers, then you're going to have to go with NextPVR v5.

I don't have a Ceton device here, and no way to test them, but going by above, you can create extras-ceton.xml in the NextPVR user data directory, with something like the following, then start NextPVR. With this your Ceton device will be listed on the Settings->Devices page, and it'll let you import your channel lineup (assuming you've got Schedules Direct for listings).

Code:

<extras>
  <channel name="{channel-name}">
    <command>/bin/cat</command>
    <args>/dev/ceton/ctn91xx_mpeg0_0</args>
  </channel>
</extras>

Note, this isn't quite right, since it doesn't deal with telling the Ceton to change to the requested channel, but it'll probably be enough for you to see it working. It's likely you'd need to switch it to running a .sh file instead, so you can use wget to tell the ceton to tune to the correct channel before using /bin/cat.

[mvallevand]

I would definitely go with a bash script if you want tuning. It looks like tuning is done with a POST

https://github.com/MythTV/mythtv/blob/b1...r.cpp#L353


Ignoring the tuning for now test that the extra is going to work from ssh I would

1. Check your devices are working you will need an extra for each of them

ls /dev/ceton

then use the ceton web server and test the device in

Code:

ffmpeg -i /dev/ceton/ctn91xx_mpeg0_0 -vcodec copy -acodec aac  -f mpegts -y /dev/null
ffmpeg -i /dev/ceton/ctn91xx_mpeg0_0 -vcodec h264 -acodec aac  -f mpegts -y /dev/null

I use aac audio in this example. If ffmpeg complains about the /dev try file:///dev

In this ffmpeg stats will tell you how it keeps up and you can check you PC performance with top or htop. If you have no issue with the h264 transocding of you h264 channels just use that in your script. One thing that is missing in the current implementation of extras is the source channel a/v properties so everything on your Ceton is going to have the same trancoding characteristic but CableCard is usually a mix of h264 and mpeg2video.

Martin

[skatcat743]

Thank you for the help

[Alan]

If you are trying to use an InfiniTV 4 with Windows 10, you need to load the Windows 8.1 drivers. I was able to get that working with NextPVR 4.2.4.

Working Config
Windows 10, version 1903
InfiniTV 4 driver package version 13.6.3.1088
NextPVR 4.2.4,