[Tfug] MythTV hardware encoder advice

[John Gruenenfelder]

On Sun, Nov 08, 2015 at 09:18:51PM -0700, Zack Williams wrote:
>On Wed, Nov 4, 2015 at 9:09 PM, John Gruenenfelder
><jetpackjohn at gmail.com> wrote:
>> DirecTV
>
>Any chance you can drop DirecTV?
>
>The reason I ask is that Cable or over the air gets you a lot of
>different options. I'm partial to the HDHomeRun product line, which
>are basically RF tuner to ethernet boxes (some with MPEG2 to H.264
>transcoding) which work with nearly all the DVR software out there.
>
>With satellite services, using their DVR is usually the best route,
>unfortunately.

Hi Zack,

No, the DirecTV subscription is shared in the house so I can't get rid of it.
Plus, if I'm going to give money to a giant corporate behemoth, I have a very
slight preference for DirecTV over Cox.  :)


However, I am pleased to announce SUCCESS!  Huzzah!

The Hauppauge product I mentioned in my original email was *not* the product
to get.  It did have digital tuners and was capable of HD, but only OTA
signals.  It did do encoding, but only MPEG2 and only for the standard def
analog signals.  The confuse stemmed from the fact that in many places this
product (and others) claim to allow HD recording.  This is technically true,
but in most cases it is either a) only OTA HD streams, or b) software
encoding/transcoding of the signal.  I suspect the new hardware I'm using in
the Mythbox could have handled realtime encoding using H.264, but it would
have burned through a lot of CPU time.

Fortunately, I was able to find the device I needed.  It is the Hauppauge
HD-PVR-1212.  It's actually an external box that you connect to the PC via a
USB2 port.  It has HD component inputs along with a TOS-link input for digital
audio.  The back panel also includes component and audio outputs so you can,
if you wish, have the signal just pass through.  This would be useful if you
wanted to record a gaming session where typical recording lag would make a
game unplayable.  The device outputs an H.264 data stream and both the quality
and file size are excellent.  I believe it maxes out at 1080i at 30fps.

For those interested, this is the device in question:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0018LX0DY

For some strange reason, NewEgg was asking a fortune for the device ($360!).
Amazon wanted a much more reasonable $160, and I managed to get a used one in
fine condition for only $90.  That's less than I spent on my original MPEG2
encoder card years ago.

There are other models available, including a "gaming" edition as well as a
newer HD-PVR 2, but I opted for the original so as to reduce the chances of
problems occurring.

In the end, I had more problems getting my replacement DirecTV HD receiver
working and activated than I did getting the HD-PVR to work.  My new setup is
fairly similar to the old one, except that the encoder is now external to the
PC case.  I'm even using the same USB->serial->null_modem_adapter->serial->USB
cable thingamajig to control the channel changing on the receiver.  I
downloaded a newer version of the directv.pl script and was pleasantly
surprised that my name and changelog segment were still intact in the header
from when I updated the script some 11 or 12 years ago.  :)

Right now, I have *almost* everything working.  For some strange reason, the
hue of the new recordings is slightly off making everything appear a little
more green/yellow than it should.  I can correct this with the MythTV picture
adjustments, but I'd like to find the root cause if I can.

Also, I seem to be running into a bug with the MythTV internal player.  For
some video formats (and I haven't yet nailed down exactly which ones are
problematic), the internal player doesn't show anything.  It doesn't crash,
but I get no video at all, just audio.  At first I thought it was a problem
with my recording setup, but I found that playing the recordings back with an
alternate player, like mplayer, worked fine.  Maybe it doesn't like the Radeon
video card I put in there.  In the worst case, I'll just remove that and
replace it with a simple video card known to work well in Linux.


Anyway, the bottom line is that this setup is pretty nice.  I get to keep
using my own MythTV setup, I now get HD, and I get to give a personal screw
you to the media companies and their stupid HDCP copy control/encryption on
the HDMI signals.  Boo!

I was a little concerned at first that I might have needed to upgrade the
storage in this machine since I knew HD recordings would be larger.  They are,
of course, but at the settings I'm using right now, a 30 minute program takes
2.25 GB of space whereas on the old setup an MPEG2 recording of the same
length used 1.37 GB of space.  So, altogether there will be less total
recording time available, but since it had more than enough space before I can
put off that upgrade for a while longer.

If anybody else decides to attempt a similar setup, I'd be happy to answer any
questions you might have if I can.


-- 
--John Gruenenfelder    Systems Manager, MKS Imaging Technology, LLC.
Try Weasel Reader for PalmOS  --  http://weaselreader.org
"This is the most fun I've had without being drenched in the blood
of my enemies!"
        --Sam of Sam & Max
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