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Hi,

I've moved my setup to have ServerWMC centrally hosted using 2 PCIe TV Tuner Cards with 2 Tuners each giving 4 DVB-T Tuners in total.

Sometimes the channel plays ok to all clients, other times not and I get a No Video data found on this channel error in XBMC. This happens on all clients, as I say sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

One curious thing, ServerWMC is reporting 12 Tuners, where I would expect it to say 4. Could this be the cause? It is trying to use a tuner with no video to stream the channel?



(Streaming currently OK to LoungeTV on the screenshot, logs below are from before so this is not included)

My cards have some FM Tuners which I guess are taking it from 4 to 12.

In WMC it works flawlessly on the host. I have tried ServerWMC 1138 and the new 1150 both give the same result. All clients are running the latest XBMC PVR 0.2.95.

Logs attached from my test just now.

http://pastebin.com/7NgHgHzm

I think the 1st 3 times to Martins-V3772G were OK, the last 2 times not ok.

Any ideas?

Cheers

Going to need to see what krusty has to say about the tuner count thing, but we do now support FM tuners so what you're saying does make sense that it could explain the count going up to 12. Although really it doesnt seem to quite explain it given that 2 twin tuners should be 4 DVB-T and 4 FM tuners, meaning a total of 8! I think we may have a counting bug there as if you look at your log in the EnumerateRecorders section we are listing each tuner as DVB-T and radio, then we list the 4 radio ones again, and THAT total would be 12. so the radio ones are probably being counted twice. I dont think this has any bearing on your problem though

From your log my observations are that for the attempts that worked and the ones that failed, the same tuner (#1 DVB-T with a guid ending in 91755fd164a6) was being used in all cases, so I dont think there is a problem with grabbing a tuner that cant tune the channel, or the above radio count stuff having any impact on this. The times when things worked OK, the video and audio tracks were identified correctly, but I do note that things seemed to be quite slow with it taking 5 seconds for data to start flowing and then 2.4 seconds to analyze the streams and get the remux happening. Normally id only expect a few seconds... The 2 later times when it doesnt work, is because it took over 8 seconds just to start seeing data, and the the video stream had been found but not yet identified, when the WaitForTS time out (default 10 seconds) hits and the operation is cancelled. You can increase the timeout to a larger value (eg 20 seconds) which might help with getting the video stream identified and allow the operation to complete, however it's surprising to see such long times involved. How quickly does WMC change channels with this? How quickly does WMC start recording something when you tell it to? Can you run XBMC locally on the server and report on how things are there? I guess it'd also be interesting to know the vital stats of the server machine (cpu ram HDD) and also how your network is setup (speed/type of connection)

Anyway, if you want to up the time out, edit the config file (see Debug tab in ServerWMC) and find the line
<Timeout_WaitForTS_MS>10000</Timeout_WaitForTS_MS>

Change the value to say 20000 for seconds and then have a look at your logs again. One possibility is it just needs more time to identify the video stream. Another possibiliy of course is that something weird is happening and it doesnt matter how long you wait, it would never identify properly. If that was the case, then getting you to upload a sample WTV file would be a good thing, but let's see how you go first.

Also if you wanted to try and simplify your setup you could go into WMC and "untick" certain tuners (I dont have ones that support FM but if this showed up as a separate tuner in WMC you could untick it and then ServerWMC probably wouldnt see/count it) and also "untick" any channels you dont want to see in XBMC (I notice alot of your channels seem to have no EPG listing etc anyway). This may not help anything in terms of your slow speeds to get tuner data but perhaps it makes things clearer if the extra noise/cruft is not getting in the way?

Hey

Thanks for replying so quickly. I wasn't sure of the Tuner issue, just saw WMC said I had 4 and ServerWMC said I had 12 so presumed it was trying to use a tuner ServerWMC thought it existed but didn't hence working sometimes but not others. But as you say its trying to use the same tuner in the logs so must be totally unrelated.

Some channel changes do sometimes take longer than others, quickest around 5 secs, sometimes can delay to 15 secs. I guess this is where the time out would occur and the channel wouldn't play. I have modified the timeout to 20 secs and now all seems OK. I will test a bit more.

I will test WMC channel change times on the Server later tonight as didn't pay much attention. I do remember it taking a few seconds to tune from the guide when I was testing it last night.

Server is not a bad spec,

Win 8.1
Core i5-4440 @ 3.10GHz
8GB RAM
Dedicated 1TB HDD for TV Storage keeping it separate from the RAID5 with all my other Music/Movies. OS is on another partition on this RAID5 but is snappy enough.
RAID card is the LSI 9260-8i Hardware RAID.. but anyway as I say TV Storage drive is set to the dedicated 1TB HDD.

I am using 2 old Pinnacle 3010ix Cards with the AverMedia drivers from Win 7 64 bit, The Pinnacle drivers don't seem to like Win8. Seems to work OK but they are old cards so possibly the cause.

Server is Wired Gigabit but I haven't updated the NIC Drivers, ill try this. Clients are mix of Wired Gigabit and Wireless 2.4 and 5ghz.

Thanks

The radio tuners are getting double counted, apparently there are two different ways wmc can report their existence - I thought there was only one (at least on my system there is only one). I will have to fix this, but like scarecrow says its not causing your problem with tv. Thanks for posting the log.

Thanks Guys. I can't find the option in WMC to choose which tuners to use sorry. I tested channel switching in WMC on the Server, it took about 5 seconds from Guide to channel, then about 1-2 seconds moving up and down channels. 15 Second channel switch on XBMC doesn't bother me as we don't switch up/down, just use the EPG as long as it tunes reliably, which it is now doing since I set the timeout higher.

Nothing really running on the Server, CPU is at 1-2% with ServerWMC Streaming and all disk activity dead apart from the dedicated TV Drive @ around 2% activity. Not sure why my logs are showing slower than normal tuning but hey its working now and I can live with the odd 15 second tune.

Recorded shows start instantly.

From your logs I thought you were using the avermedia cards but now you mention you are using older cards with those drivers etc I would think that's probably related to the slowness. The way we use the tuners is to initiate recording of the channel, then remux the WTV to TS. So eventhough in WMC you may get a faster response on live viewing that's because it directly accesses the stream (and we cant get at that from ServerWMC). I would suspect that (if there was some way to measure it) recordings done in WMC would be seeing similar delays in terms of how long it takes for data to actually start being written to the WTV file. Anyway if increasing the timeout works for you and you aren't bothered by the lengthy time to start streams, Im glad you now have a reliable setup. Im sure that with new tuner hardware you would get some better responsiveness so keep that up your sleeve for if/when the time comes, or you want to try and get a better response time on stream starts. Oh and the specs of the machine sound more than adequate, I don't think there's any improvement to be had there (the times I am mentioning are to write data to the local WTV file, so NIC drivers or network stuff isn't going to affect that).

Yeh it was the old tv tuner cards. Just tried an Avermedia A850 USB Tuner and channel change is always around 5 seconds. If I were to keep this SD tuner and also connect 2 x DVB-T2 USB tuners do you know how xbmc/serverwmc would handle this? If I selected a program to record on a HD channel would it always try the DVB-T2 tuner first? If I selected a program to record on an SD channel would it try the DVB-T tuner first?

Cheers

In wmc you can set a preferred order for tuners so that it always tries your favorite tuners first, and only uses the others if there is a conflict. Serverwmc uses the same order for live-tv. Also I believe you can set wmc to always try to record a program in hd if possible.

Keep in mind there is a limit of I think, 4 tuners, in WMC unless you hack it with "TunerSalad". Im not too familiar with differing broadcast formats since in Australia we only have DVB-T. Wouldnt it be better to just use the fast USB tuners for everything? Or are there some channels that ONLY your slower pcie tuners can handle, but you want to make sure they are only used for those channels and not for channels where your "better" tuners can also do that channel?

Certainly ServerWMC/WMC will only select a tuner capable of servicing the desired channel you select, so there's no worry of picking a tuner that doesnt work for the channel you wanted to watch, but if multiple tuner devices support the channel, we most likely just pick "the first unused one" as seen in your logs, all the requests were using "tuner #1". Im not sure if you can adjust the order in which the tuners appear to us, you can certainly SEE the order in the ServerWMC log when it starts up and does it's "enumerating tuners" output.

I believe you can also get pretty fancy in WMC by messing with the tuning spaces and frequencies and tuner priority, underneath the advanced settings of each channel. ServerWMC should honour all stuff setup in WMC, we have had some users that had pretty complex customised setups earlier on, and we made more changes to ensure we imported the tuning spaces, frequencies, tuner priorities etc correctly from WMC

Hey

Thanks. Yes this is what I was thinking of doing. I was going to remove the old PCIe tuners altogether and use the AverMedia A850 DVB-T USB. I have 2 x August DVB-T210 DVB-T2 USB tuners on the way. This would give us 3 tuners in total for 2 main clients which would be fine and I can also add another usb tuner later if needed.

Thanks for your support guys.. it's amazing. Great appplication as well. I wouldn't have made the move from WMC to XBMC if it wasn't for your PVR Addon.

Thanks!

Hi, Had the same problem when I upgraded my XBMC to Goitham 13.1 and ServerMWC 1150. It was reporting I had 6 tuners when I should have 4 (2 DVB-T, 2 FM). I downgraded ServerWMC to 1138 - same issue but once I installed 1137 all was reporting correctly again - 4 tuners and I am able to watch LiveTV from XBMC again.

Seems a change introduced between 1137 and 1138 is causing this issue. Hope you can identify the issue as I am very happy with your software and hope tobe able t get updates again in the future.

Weird. Please post the serverwmc log for the case where it is over counts the tuners. I'd prefer it if its the newest version, if you can, To post a log, see the debug tab to find it, and upload the log to pastebin.com and paste a link to it here.

So you are saying when it over-counts the tuners live-tv doesn't work? If so, make sure in the log you post that you have one attempt at trying to start a live stream.

(2014-06-16, 23:59)krustyreturns Wrote: [ -> ]In wmc you can set a preferred order for tuners so that it always tries your favorite tuners first, and only uses the others if there is a conflict. Serverwmc uses the same order for live-tv. Also I believe you can set wmc to always try to record a program in hd if possible.

hello
Your software is really great. I installed the new tuners and the same problem occurred.
I think I found where does the problem may be in.
I'm with the 1175 release.
I always disables mcGlidHost.exe (mcGlidHost.exe scanned the frequency used to find new channel, take the "best" frequency according wmc and recover the missing epg on DVB-T wave) because wmc is bad usual frequency, but it works on wmc not disable "mcGlidHost.exe" so I left, I have the guide on some channel that there would not be if I had is disable.

You gave me the idea of putting as I did before that is to say to the frequencies that works best she eventually "xxx, 167MHz" and this way your software works. I sends you the logs with a frequency other bad with the good.

ps: If I put the frequency of "xxx, 167MHz" leaving lit mcGlidHost.exe wmc will not do than it head and change the frequency. If I disables mcGlidHost.exe, I no longer have the epg on some channel

work "xxx, 167MHz"
Not work "xxx, 000MHz"

thanks you for your software and work

hi,

If I understand correctly, you need to include some frequencies, even though they don't work, in order to get guide data to show up for some channels. Then the problem is serverwmc tries to tune to these bad frequencies for live-tv. This is because we changed newer versions of serverwmc to use lower priority frequencies in order to protect live tv streams from a recording starting on the same channel.

You can turn this off by going to the 'debug' tab in serverwmc and choose 'edit the settings file'. In this file, search for Decoy_FixedDecoysPerLiveStream and change it to this:

<Decoy_FixedDecoysPerLiveStream>0</Decoy_FixedDecoysPerLiveStream>

this will force serverwmc to use only high priority frequencies like wmc does. After making the change, save the file and restart serverwmc.

Does that solve the problem?

Thanks for the information about what 'mcGlidHost.exe' does. That was new to me.

Thank you for the quick response. Having disable "Decoy_FixedDecoysPerLiveStream" has not worked for me.
I think serverwmc does not like channels with errors and fails to provide a ts file.
Anyway I just had too much problem leaving mcGlidHost.exe manage the frequences.WMC unable to remain stable with frequencies other than "xxx 167MHz" .I am forced to disable mcGlidHost.exe otherwise it will I put unstable frequencies. The best thing for me would be to force the frequency "xxx, 167MHz" and let mcGlidHost.exe take epg without changing frequencies. But mxf files are too scared me.
Thank you again to insane software.