[krustyreturns]

I have been trying out the server/client with OpenELEC and I'm very impressed. There are a couple of minor things I wouldn't mind seeing such as the ability to view series recordings grouped instead of each episode listed individually. However the only issue stopping me from replacing a classic WMC extender is semi-live TV.

A very large portion of what I watch is commercial delayed. Such as I'll start viewing a 2 hour show 40 minutes in and skip commercials along the way catching up to live TV by the end of the show. I understand some of the technical issues involved with viewing active recordings which seriously restrict the available options. A few streamers I have tried in the past have captured the recorded file as it was the moment playback started and only played until you reached the end of the file (what was recorded when you started). Certainly not ideal however you could skip forward and back along with all of the playback features of a recording. I believe WMC itself if connected to another WMC will let you do this as well.

Let's say you start 40 minutes into a show. You can view the 40 minutes the same as any recording. Once you hit 40 minutes it's over and you have to restart the show to view what was recorded while you were watching the first 40 minutes. Certainly not ideal but better than being without the ability to skip commercials without virtually any of the trick play features. I'm sure others would prefer the current method so having an option would be nice.

Which leads me to Stream format WTV or TS? I can't select WTV and I'm wondering if this is some what related? A feature to be implemented down the road and if so how? Again, I understand it's a technical nightmare. Unfortunately it's an area I spend most of my time in and any help would be great. Overall the server and client are very well implemented and for recordings it's a grand slam... very impressive.

your other two points first:

I can't group the episodes in a series, this is a restriction of xbmc not my addon. I would like to see this changed too, I recommend you and I both submit this feature request to the xbmc team. I know I keep meaning to!

Wtv is a weird file format that xbmc does not handle correctly when the wtv stream is live. So I remux to ts and stream ts to xbmc. I really need to get rid of that wtv stream switch - it confuses everybody - maybe in the next rev.

So to your main point. You start a recording of a two hour show, and start watching the active recording 40 minutes later so that you can ff through commercials - that's how I watch football now. Why can't you do this with my software? When you start viewing an 'active' recording 40 minutes after it has been recording, it is true that the ts remux has started from the beginning of the wtv file, but it is very fast, by the time you have watched a couple of minutes of the tv show, it will be way ahead of where you are in the wtv file, you should be able to skip commercials without any problem.

If for some reason you can't (which would be weird, because I can), I just realized I could build into the server an option to generate temp ts files for all recordings while that are in progress (provided you can take the disk space and cycle hit). Interesting idea I have never thought about before, but I don't see a problem with it. Then the ts would be all available to you at show start.

[Charles R]

I figured the grouping was a restriction within XBMC... Regarding my main point perhaps my hardware installation comes into play. I'm using a Celeron NUC running OpenELEC on a 8GB flash drive. No hard drive at all with very little power. When I try to fast forward/skip into a currently being recorded show it doesn't proceed much faster than real time. I'm guessing the remux process is taxing the poor PC rather heavily. Last night I was watching a show and couldn't skip... and then all of a sudden it worked great and sure enough the recording had completed and I guess you seamlessly switch methods... stopped the remuxing.

My goal was to build a low-end PC instead of using a streamer. The NUC is less than $200 as configured and plays video files great including HD audio/video. If I invest much more I might was well (perhaps) use Windows or dedicate an Xbox as an extender. Now if I knew an i3 would give me the required horsepower or I need more/faster storage (access to my NAS?) I might be willing to bite.

I have been pimping the server/client software here... at the current end of the thread.

Further note my server is an i3 with tons of RAM so it should be powerful enough to handle the remux I'm guessing. Storage wise I'm using iSCSI to my NAS mapped as a local drive.

your other two points first:

I can't group the episodes in a series, this is a restriction of xbmc not my addon. I would like to see this changed too, I recommend you and I both submit this feature request to the xbmc team. I know I keep meaning to!

Wtv is a weird file format that xbmc does not handle correctly when the wtv stream is live. So I remux to ts and stream ts to xbmc. I really need to get rid of that wtv stream switch - it confuses everybody - maybe in the next rev.

So to your main point. You start a recording of a two hour show, and start watching the active recording 40 minutes later so that you can ff through commercials - that's how I watch football now. Why can't you do this with my software? When you start viewing an 'active' recording 40 minutes after it has been recording, it is true that the ts remux has started from the beginning of the wtv file, but it is very fast, by the time you have watched a couple of minutes of the tv show, it will be way ahead of where you are in the wtv file, you should be able to skip commercials without any problem.

If for some reason you can't (which would be weird, because I can), I just realized I could build into the server an option to generate temp ts files for all recordings while that are in progress (provided you can take the disk space and cycle hit). Interesting idea I have never thought about before, but I don't see a problem with it. Then the ts would be all available to you at show start.

[TechLife]

When you say the htpc wakes with an error, you man that the htpc boots, auto starts the server, and the server fails - right?

Yes. Except is is waking from S3 sleep not a cold boot. The error is only displayed for a second before the XBMC splash screen hides it. I believe it is complaining about not being able to load the EPG.

The log says your tuner is not available, and that's why it is not starting. So I also want to know: how do you get it to start after this error? Do you just restart the server? Does that usually work?

Yes. That usually works. Sometimes I have to completely reboot the HTPC though.

I wonder if I never see this because my server is always on (on my family server - not devel). Maybe its possible that your server is crashing because the recservice has not had time to init the tuner after boot. If so, I could build in a delay and have it try again. Let me know.

That very well could be. I'd be happy to test. Unfortunately it doesn't happen every time. Seems to be every few days. I will pay closer attention to see if there is an exact amount of time involved. I am also considering throwing together a small Windows box to act as a TV server so I can use it in other areas without having to wake the main HTPC. That happens so infrequently that it hasn't been high on my priority list though.

Lastly, I don't know why xbmc disables the addon when it detects the server is not up. It never does that for me, it just complains the server is not up until I start the server. Did you change a setting in xbmc?

I don't either and it doesn't always happen. It was complaining just like you are used to. I disabled the notification because if it happens to the wife when I'm not home I'll get a very angry phone call. Other than that, there is nothing in XBMC that I have changed (at least not that I am aware of).

[krustyreturns]

I figured the grouping was a restriction within XBMC... Regarding my main point perhaps my hardware installation comes into play. I'm using a Celeron NUC running OpenELEC on a 8GB flash drive. No hard drive at all with very little power. When I try to fast forward/skip into a currently being recorded show it doesn't proceed much faster than real time. I'm guessing the remux process is taxing the poor PC rather heavily. Last night I was watching a show and couldn't skip... and then all of a sudden it worked great and sure enough the recording had completed and I guess you seamlessly switch methods... stopped the remuxing.

My goal was to build a low-end PC instead of using a streamer. The NUC is less than $200 as configured and plays video files great including HD audio/video. If I invest much more I might was well (perhaps) use Windows or dedicate an Xbox as an extender. Now if I knew an i3 would give me the required horsepower or I need more/faster storage (access to my NAS?) I might be willing to bite.

I have been pimping the server/client software here... at the current end of the thread.

Further note my server is an i3 with tons of RAM so it should be powerful enough to handle the remux I'm guessing. Storage wise I'm using iSCSI to my NAS mapped as a local drive.

No it doesn't switch - it was still streaming the ts file. Seems like there are two possibilities, one is that the reason it started working was your server pc had lots of data available to remux so it was doing it as fast as it could until it caught up or the wtv file ended. The reason you had trouble was your pc couldn't do both this fast remux and the streaming of the ts at the same time. When the remux stopped all was well. The other possibility is that your pc remuxed so slowly it couldn't get ahead of the your view, but that would not explain why it worked when the recording stopped, so I think it is the former. If that the case that's interesting, makes me think I should slow the remux down in instances where it is not waiting for tuner data, just so it makes less demands on underpowered systems.

You can experiment by starting a recording of a long program - like one hour. After recording starts, just wait a minute or two before you start viewing. See how long it takes before you can skip forward easily.

I thought wmc doesn't allow you to use a nas as the recorded tv folder, and I didn't think you could trick it by mapping it as a network drive. The remux is not that ram intensive but hoursepower, disk and network matter.

digression:
Interesting article (I didn't read it all but plan to). I made the switch from multiple tivos to multiple pcs running wmc in a server/client mode maybe about 6 or 7 years ago. All of my client pcs (3 of them) are about five hundred dollar machines (mostly because I want small ssd's for fast boot and blu-ray drives). My family still mostly runs this way, my son and I have switched to xbmc (the good part about my software approach is that wmc and xbmc setups can coexist).

[krustyreturns]

When you say the htpc wakes with an error, you man that the htpc boots, auto starts the server, and the server fails - right?

Yes. Except is is waking from S3 sleep not a cold boot. The error is only displayed for a second before the XBMC splash screen hides it. I believe it is complaining about not being able to load the EPG.

Why not just leave the server running?

I will look into doing multiple tries with delays for getting access to the tuner before it fails.

[TechLife]

I will look into doing multiple tries with delays for getting access to the tuner before it fails.

Fantastic. I will be very happy to give it a try. Thanks kr!

[krustyreturns]

I will look into doing multiple tries with delays for getting access to the tuner before it fails.

Fantastic. I will be very happy to give it a try. Thanks kr!

Cool. My question was not stated well: If you are just putting the server computer to sleep, why not just let the server program run? Why restart it after a wake?

[spaceboy]

hi kr, so i tried the new server build, renabled the credentials with my @outlook.com username and everything is fine in windows. on the raspberry pi i can't get either live tv or recorded tv to start. just the working wheel within raspbmc.

i attach the log for one run of live tv on the pi https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/3954...e%20TV.log

if it turns out its authentication still then please let me know whether there is anything from raspbmc that i can show you which shows how it handles the @outlook.com username as i've just set up a fresh one today and confirmed the username works with raspbmc accessing the smb shares itself

thanks!

[Dilligaf]

@spaceboy
Curious what /home/pi/.xbmc/userdata/passwords.xml contains when using xbmc authentication. Can you copy/paste the contents (of course after editing sensitive data) It should be only 3 or 4 lines long

[krustyreturns]

Started watching channel 3.1 (CBS), everything good. I can see two audio channels, both ENG. Switch to channel 6.1 (ABC), plays with no sound, I can see two audio channels, SAP and ENG, SAP listed first. I suspect no sound because it wasn't actually available, I think with the show does actually support SAP, it plays in SAP.

I hit "L" to get the sound/subtitle menu and see that the Castilian audio is selected. Manually switch the audio to ENG and it plays in ENG.

Change to 10.1 (NBC), see both audio streams, ENG listed first, it plays in ENG. Switch back to 6.1 (ABC) and it plays in ENG.

Following on to my last post to you. I looked at the log and I can't distinguish between the time channel 6.1 played SPA and the time it played ENG. As far the the stream descriptors found, it did it exactly the same way both times. That leads me to believe xbmc is choosing the wrong stream and the only way I can know for sure it won't choose spa is to not mux it to the output. Sigh. This isn't difficult to add, but it just doesn't feel right. Anyway, it looks like it will be an option in the next server.

---

hi kr, so i tried the new server build, renabled the credentials with my @outlook.com username and everything is fine in windows. on the raspberry pi i can't get either live tv or recorded tv to start. just the working wheel within raspbmc.

i attach the log for one run of live tv on the pi https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/3954...e%20TV.log

if it turns out its authentication still then please let me know whether there is anything from raspbmc that i can show you which shows how it handles the @outlook.com username as i've just set up a fresh one today and confirmed the username works with raspbmc accessing the smb shares itself

thanks!

damn. Well I at least I got the windows part working

Looking at the server log, it seems to think the unc path to our recorded tv folder is:
\\HTPC\d\Recorded TV

I am guessing that it is supposed to be:
\\HTPC\Recorded TV

without the 'd'. Try that and see if it works.

[CTD5]

I apologize if this has been discussed already (I tried to read through the thread as best I could), but I think I found a bug. Or I'm doing something wrong.

The issue is that if I tune to one channel from an XBMC client and then tune to *the same channel* on another client, it says all tuners are busy. (my backend only has one tuner)

I poked around a little and as far as I can see, (please correct me if I'm wrong) the server works by taking the .wtv stream from WMC and remuxing it into a .ts stream. Each stream contains the name of the client device.

Would it be possible to point the client to an existing stream that doesn't contain it's name if it is trying to tune a channel that is already being tuned? Would it be easier to clone the stream and rename it? Would that break something else?

Thank you, for all your hard work!

[User 137418]

Trying to post a log from pastebin for the first time, so I hope this works... I am pasting the whole thing because the first line has info about the server running, but the issue arose 10/12/2013 at 9:34am, so you can skip down to that part to look for the issue.

More issues with my audio streams starting in SAP vs ENG. HTPC running server 1077. Watching live TV on my thinkpad running client 1012.

Started watching channel 3.1 (CBS), everything good. I can see two audio channels, both ENG. Switch to channel 6.1 (ABC), plays with no sound, I can see two audio channels, SAP and ENG, SAP listed first. I suspect no sound because it wasn't actually available, I think with the show does actually support SAP, it plays in SAP.

I hit "L" to get the sound/subtitle menu and see that the Castilian audio is selected. Manually switch the audio to ENG and it plays in ENG.

Change to 10.1 (NBC), see both audio streams, ENG listed first, it plays in ENG. Switch back to 6.1 (ABC) and it plays in ENG.

Then the HTPC fell asleep (I haven't configured Advanced WOL to keep it awake while watching on remote clients yet), which is why the log abruptly stops.

Please let me know if you need any additional details.

Thanks for all the great work.

<script src="http://pastebin.com/embed_js.php?i=nnTaxN71"></script> (well that didn't work)
http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=nnTaxN71 (this "raw" link seems to work)

When you are watching one of these stations where the wrong audio is selected, while it is playing, copy the wtv file for me (or temporarily switch off 'delete temp files'). Place it here:
C:\Users\Victor\Google Drive\wtv clips
and let me know its there.

I would like to get these audio problems nailed down (especially since I thought I already had). I could just make it so that there is an option in the server to only grab English or the like, but I would really not like to have to do that. I will look at your log, but I will probably need a file too.

Another interesting thing is that the server went to sleep while playing a stream. I thouight this couldn't happen, because windows detects if a file is open by a remote client and won't go to sleep - this is the way it works for me anyway. I know how to stop windows from sleeping from code and I thought about making it so that if a stream is open the server is locked out of sleep. I wonder if this is because its a non-windows client? Didn't think that would make a difference. Anyone else experiencing this sleep problem?

Not sure about the sleeping now. I may have stopped playback to go look for the log file and it fell asleep at some point with playback stopped. I will test this again to verify. Nothing to chase down, yet. I'll keep you posted.

Thanks.

[spaceboy]

@spaceboy
Curious what /home/pi/.xbmc/userdata/passwords.xml contains when using xbmc authentication. Can you copy/paste the contents (of course after editing sensitive data) It should be only 3 or 4 lines long

ok. one of my pi's has a password.xml, the other does not. they can both access the smb shares on my htpc. i did disable the requirement to require a password for sharing on the htpc but the pi with the password.xml is the one set up today and i was asked for a username and password when browsing to the smb shares.

this is an extract from the passwords.xml file which is dated today

<passwords>
<path>
<from pathversion="1">smb://HTPC/</from>
<to pathversion="1">smb://username%40outlook.com:password@HTPC/</to>
</path>
</passwords>

there are some other lines as well but just folders within HTPC

if i play a movie from that pi i can see the credentials used like so:

23:08:27 T:2717905984 DEBUG: ScanForExternalSubtitles: Searching for subtitles...
23:08:27 T:2717905984 DEBUG: OpenDir - Using authentication url smb://username%40outlook.com:password@HTPC/E/Videos/Movies/The%20Break%20Up%20(2011)
23:08:28 T:2717905984 INFO: ScanForExternalSubtitles: found subtitle file smb://HTPC/E/Videos/Movies/The Break Up (2011)/The Break Up (2011).srt
23:08:28 T:2717905984 DEBUG: ScanForExternalSubtitles: END (total time: 949 ms)
2

no idea why the other pi doesn't seem to require credentials

and @kr, no the file path was correct. the D drive is my WMC recorded tv disk.

hopefully this is helpful!

[Charles R]

If you use iSCSI it looks like a local drive to Windows/WMC. In my case it's drive R and I only use it for recordings. On my NAS I configured part of a the hard drive as a iSCSI target. The space is treated as raw and dedicated to the Windows PC. No one else can access it outside of sharing it from the PC itself. It easily handles four concurrent recordings and several playbacks. This way my WMC server only has a SSD and is virtually quiet... a requirement as it sits right next to me.

I wonder if how data is writtien to the NAS (iSCSI) comes into play? I'll play around but I don't think I can ever skip forward easily while the recording is active. The server is an i3 and I'll see how hard it is working while the remux is active...

UPDATE: I just started a long recording (4 hour NASCAR). Looking at my server I see 3% CPU, 29% Memory, 18% Disk (15-22) and 8% Network while viewing the recording on my client. I paused it for a few minutes and then did fast forwarding for a couple of minutes and it seems to work (fine).

OK I see where the issue resides. If I select the recording I can't fast forward as my time displays as an example 02:30 - 02:15 and the image is frozen. However if I select the show via TV Channels I can then pause and fast forward. So far I can't rewind either way... selecting the show from TV channel or recordings. Perhaps user misunderstanding or error?

No it doesn't switch - it was still streaming the ts file. Seems like there are two possibilities, one is that the reason it started working was your server pc had lots of data available to remux so it was doing it as fast as it could until it caught up or the wtv file ended. The reason you had trouble was your pc couldn't do both this fast remux and the streaming of the ts at the same time. When the remux stopped all was well. The other possibility is that your pc remuxed so slowly it couldn't get ahead of the your view, but that would not explain why it worked when the recording stopped, so I think it is the former. If that the case that's interesting, makes me think I should slow the remux down in instances where it is not waiting for tuner data, just so it makes less demands on underpowered systems.

You can experiment by starting a recording of a long program - like one hour. After recording starts, just wait a minute or two before you start viewing. See how long it takes before you can skip forward easily.

I thought wmc doesn't allow you to use a nas as the recorded tv folder, and I didn't think you could trick it by mapping it as a network drive. The remux is not that ram intensive but hoursepower, disk and network matter.

digression:
Interesting article (I didn't read it all but plan to). I made the switch from multiple tivos to multiple pcs running wmc in a server/client mode maybe about 6 or 7 years ago. All of my client pcs (3 of them) are about five hundred dollar machines (mostly because I want small ssd's for fast boot and blu-ray drives). My family still mostly runs this way, my son and I have switched to xbmc (the good part about my software approach is that wmc and xbmc setups can coexist).

[TechLife]

I will look into doing multiple tries with delays for getting access to the tuner before it fails.

Fantastic. I will be very happy to give it a try. Thanks kr!

Cool. My question was not stated well: If you are just putting the server computer to sleep, why not just let the server program run? Why restart it after a wake?

I do let it run. XBMC is forced to shutdown through a script but nothing else is. I do not close ServerWMC in any way (that I know of). Windows is set to sleep when the power button is pushed on the chassis, which (through a relay) is what happens when the power button is pushed on the remote.