Connecting Digital Cable Box through FireWire

[McHero]

After much testing I was able to get channel.exe working on my end. I had VLC displaying the stream. I was able to open a dosbox and type channel 2 10 to change to channel 10. My VLS did not crash, it went blank for a second and then switched to channel 10.
I believe the 2 after channel is device 2 (2nd tuner) I will switch to the other tuner & see if I can change it with channel 1 10 & see if it works. I also added the channel.exe to GBPVR & successfully changed the channel!

[carpeVideo]

Thanks for the update on the external recorder WTG. Good idea to recompile the external recorder - I don't have a compiler on my machine.


The channel change problem occurs in two ways:
1) when you are watching live tv (timeshifted) and hit the channel up or down to another channel rendered by firewire, a few seconds of nothing and it pops back to the guide
2) when the program name changes (ie over and hour or half our time split) then typically the screen freezes and you have to escape out our get back in.

I am planning on testing with the graphedit player posted to see if it has faster response time and clears the problem up.

[ubu]

For the record, I recompiled the External Recorder so that it didn't do a kill, meaning I didn't need to use a batch file. I tried the script CarpeVideo posted, didn't get it to work right off and instead of figuring out what I was doing wrong I just changed the code. I don't really don't get why the External Recording is doing a kill before the stop logic. If someone is interested I can post the new .dll but to be clear it's just a hack. At somepoint I'll probably reorganize the code to issue the stop first and if it fails, then do a kill().

The Stop Recording Executable is primarily intended for running an app to post-process the file you've just recorded (comskip, etc.) so it makes sense for External Recorder to stop the recorder before it starts the app that wants to read the recorded file.

Instead of using the Stop Recording Executable, you could explicitly run the vlc stop process right before the "kill" logic. Maybe check config.startRecordingParameters for the dshow string (or something else unique to your vlc invocation) and, if it's found, run the vlc stop process, sleep for a few microseconds and then fall into the if (process != null) kill code (in case it failed).

I'm also working on a "customized" version of External Recorder so it will support a VLC recording service I've developed. I'm making my changes so they'll be transparent to existing External Rceorder users so they can be integrated into the "official" External Recorder plugin (subject to the approval of its author, normanr). If you come up with code changes to support digital cable boxes and they can be applied without breaking any of the existing functionality, let me know, and we can combine our efforts into a single release.

[wtg]

The channel change problem occurs in two ways:
1) when you are watching live tv (timeshifted) and hit the channel up or down to another channel rendered by firewire, a few seconds of nothing and it pops back to the guide.

Ah, I haven't tried Live TV viewing yet, so that's why I've not run into it.

2) when the program name changes (ie over and hour or half our time split) then typically the screen freezes and you have to escape out our get back in.

Humm... I've seen the program name change like that but never thought of what that meant GB-PVR must be doing with it's file management. Makes me wonder how sub does the switching so seemlessly, and of course what part of it makes it so unseemless when recording via firewire.

I am planning on testing with the graphedit player posted to see if it has faster response time and clears the problem up.

Yeah, please post back.

[wtg]

The Stop Recording Executable is primarily intended for running an app to post-process the file you've just recorded (comskip, etc.) so it makes sense for External Recorder to stop the recorder before it starts the app that wants to read the recorded file.

That's what I gathered. I think it's just the name that threw me and others off, since it sounds like it the name of a command to stop the process, not post-process the file.

Instead of using the Stop Recording Executable, you could explicitly run the vlc stop process right before the "kill" logic. Maybe check config.startRecordingParameters for the dshow string (or something else unique to your vlc invocation) and, if it's found, run the vlc stop process, sleep for a few microseconds and then fall into the if (process != null) kill code (in case it failed).

That's basically what I was planning. I was considering making the stop option a radio button with two choices - stop via kill or stop via command - and then adding an explicit post-processing option. The stop via command code would look to see if the process died and if not, fall back to killing it explicitely.

I'm also working on a "customized" version of External Recorder so it will support a VLC recording service I've developed. I'm making my changes so they'll be transparent to existing External Rceorder users so they can be integrated into the "official" External Recorder plugin (subject to the approval of its author, normanr). If you come up with code changes to support digital cable boxes and they can be applied without breaking any of the existing functionality, let me know, and we can combine our efforts into a single release.

Great, explicite VLC support would be nice since it can be used for so many things. As far as the changes I was considering, if I thought it was good enough to release I figured I could migrate the users existing stop option to the post-processing option I mentioned and default them to kill() so that it would work the same way it does today.

However, the odds of me getting around to it are quite low. I'm a long-time programmer but a complete newb to C# and .Net, and a full-time single father of 3 with my elderly mother living with me too. I'm pretty short on free time.

[carpeVideo]

Well I get the same freeze issue with the recorder. It may actually be not be external recording the causes the problem, if I use the VMR9 it actually freezes on any tunes channel change (using the software recorder as well), but VMR9 custom freezes only with firewire recording. I'll try the others and a different video decoder and see what happens. Using the graphedit player does seem sightly faster than VLC but you see a few menus popup as an artifact of autoit so you may prefer VLC,

carpeV


As to WTG's post I'd be willing to play a bit with the external recorder code as well - but it would be helpful to have a C# on .net for dummies guide - any links to something helpful would be appreciated.

[ubu]

If you guys are interested, I could create a custom version of the ExternalRecording plugin that runs the stop command before the kill command (so you don't have to mess with the Stop Recording Executable code at all). Something like this:

Code:

if (process != null)
            {
[B]                if (config.startRecordingParameters.Contains("Motorola"))
                {
                    Logger.Verbose("ExternalRecorder[" + this.GetHashCode() + "]: stopProgram-vlc:quit");
                    Process.Start(config.startRecordingExecutable, "--one-instance vlc:quit");
                    Thread.Sleep(config.waitAfterFile);
                }[/B]
                if (!process.HasExited)
                {
                    Logger.Verbose("ExternalRecorder[" + this.GetHashCode() + "]: stopProgram-Process.Kill()");
                    process.Kill();
                }
                else
                {
                    Logger.Verbose("ExternalRecorder[" + this.GetHashCode() + "]: stopProgram-Process.HasExited=true");
                }
            }

You could use this for testing and, if it solves the problem, I could integrate it into the "official" version. If this looks like it would work for you, let me know and I'll post the custom dll here. (btw - I'm using "waitAfterFile" for the sleep interval but it could be hard coded to some value, if you prefer).

Longer term, it might be better if I put this functionality into the VLC recording service I'm working on. The advantage of the recording service is that it manages the VLC process and keeps it running as long as the parent process continues to issue "stay alive" commands to it. So, if you encounter some unexpected error or if GB-PVR terminates abruptly, the VLC process will automatically be killed (so you don't wind up with zombie VLC processes that keep recording until the disk fills up :eek: ).

[carpeVideo]

Well I'll give the DLL a shot Ubu, although I do like the way suggested ( have 3 areas in the external recorder - one for a stop recording command and one for post recording. ) And your VLC service sounds like a great idea.


Carpe

[largelumox]

Hi all,

Great work on this thread so far. I have just received a Mot 6200 and have successfully recorded from it using CAPDVHS and VLC.

My problem is when trying to view / record files from gbpvr, I have set up external recorder based on details in this thread, but no video is shown or recorded. It seems I am have a problem passing the variable {fullname} (or {filename} have tried both) to my batch file...which is the same as carpeVideo's file from post 42 , page 5.

Could somebody who has this working please post either a screen dump of external recorder config page, or more detailed instrcution.

Its been a long time since I did any batch file work....and it shows!!

Right now on external recorder I have the following as a start recording / Start preview parameter

/C vlcstart.bat {fullname}

for the stop recording / stop preview I have
/C vlcstop.bat

where both are a direct copy from the post mentioned above.

Do I need anything in the Now recording section?

On a seperate note, channel changer works perfectly.

Any ideas on how else to fault find this?

Thanks

[carpeVideo]

The {fullname} needs to be in quotes "{fullname}" otherwise the script interprets it as 5 or 6 individual args, since it is likely there are spaces in the full name.

For the close you don't need a command file you can refer to VLC directly with the args posted.


carpeV