service type of h.264 HD in nextpvr5

[andrew]

I have a HDhomerun with MPEG4 capability. I noticed nextpvr5 stores recordings as MPEG2. I looked into the web UI and didn't see an obvious way to have my HDhomerun stream as MPEG4.

NextPVR4 does of course do this (aka service type of H.264 HD), and after some poking around i believe under the covers it's stored in the nextpvr.db3 under the channel_mapping table using a service type of 25.

Before I go about doing something silly I have a few Qs;

1. Can I set the service type to "H.264 HD" in nextpvr5 web UI as I can in nextpvr4? I don't think so but i want to double check.
   
2. If no, - is the schema that effects channel_mapping relatively unchanged from v4 to 5? Looks like it's the same to me. I see new tables, but things sort of look relatively similar enough.
   
3. Thus, can I "update channel_mapping set service_type = 25" in nextpvr.db3 and achieve the effect I desire?
   

thanks!

[mvallevand]

That is mainly a live tv setting with the Windows NextPVR client. The web client doesn't probe it basically assumes everything needs to be transcoded except IPTV. Better to use a non-transcoding client if this is an issue.

Martin

[andrew]

Hmm, i'm not sure I described the situation well.

The hdhomerun will transcode to mepg4 in hardware. i want nextpvr to store locally as mpeg4, no transcoding necessary on record. Kodi happily plays mpeg4 files, so no transcode needed on play either. I don't use the web UI for video playing.

i have this as described on windows/nextpvr4 - the system pulls mpeg4 from the hdhomerun, stores it as mpeg4, and serves it as mpeg4 to Kodi. i'm trying to have similar functionality in nextpvr5 (it does everything as mpeg2)

[sub]

To be honest, you can pretty much ignore this unless you're using nextpvr.exe as your client. It's only used in this specific client application, and is only used to decide what type of decoder to add when watching live TV. It's not used when watching a recording.

If you using the web app, or iOS/tvOS/Android apps, or external client like Kodi/Emby, then this setting is also not used.

Thus, can I "update channel_mapping set service_type = 25" in nextpvr.db3 and achieve the effect I desire?

Yes, you can do that. As mentioned above, for the most part you can just leave it as-is and everything will work fine.

[BrettB]

Hmm, i'm not sure I described the situation well.

The hdhomerun will transcode to mepg4 in hardware. i want nextpvr to store locally as mpeg4, no transcoding necessary on record. Kodi happily plays mpeg4 files, so no transcode needed on play either. I don't use the web UI for video playing.

i have this as described on windows/nextpvr4 - the system pulls mpeg4 from the hdhomerun, stores it as mpeg4, and serves it as mpeg4 to Kodi. i'm trying to have similar functionality in nextpvr5 (it does everything as mpeg2)

Actually, by default, NextPVR will simply recording the .ts stream as it comes from the provider. In the US, ATSC is mpeg2, and traditionally, cable systems also used mpeg2 encoding. But some now use mpeg4 compression to get more channels on their limited frequencies. If the cable company sends a stream in mpeg4, then the recording from NextPVR will also be mpeg4.

The flag you are looking at is simply used by the NextPVR windows client to determine which codec to use when playing Live TV. It doesn't have any affect on the recordings or playback of recorded files.

Now, from your messages, I think that you actually have a HDHomeRun EXTEND which can take an mpeg2 .ts stream from the provider and do hardware transcoding to mpeg4 in the EXTEND before sending that transcoded mpeg4 stream to NextPVR. As I recall, there is no way to set or control that hardware transcoding from within NextPVR. You have to set it with the HDHR Config program.

This post: https://forums.nextpvr.com/showthread.php?tid=57876 also says that if you're using the BDA drive method to access the HDHR (i.e. the QAM or ATSC vs HDHR device type in NextPVR) then you need to have HDHomerun config set to "Default".