VDR not working on a MD

[fibres]

Well I thought I would start a new thread for this one as it seems to be getting lost in my previous thread.

Well I have VDR up and running great on my hybrid machine.
However when I try and launch live tv on a md I get no signal and chanel unavailable.
Do I need to set anything manually on the md to tell it to look to the vdr server running on the core?

Any suggestions?

Regards

[totallymaxed]

Well I thought I would start a new thread for this one as it seems to be getting lost in my previous thread.

Well I have VDR up and running great on my hybrid machine.
However when I try and launch live tv on a md I get no signal and chanel unavailable.
Do I need to set anything manually on the md to tell it to look to the vdr server running on the core?

Any suggestions?

Regards

ok... the vdr integration for MD's is still incomplete which is why you see that error.

[fibres]

Ah ok. Damn.

From what I have seen of vdr so far it kicks mythtv across the world.
The work you have done so far on it is fantastic. It loads in less than a quarter of the time on mythtv and the channel change is much quicker.

Is there any way to hack to to allow it to work on mds?

Regards

[totallymaxed]

Ah ok. Damn.

From what I have seen of vdr so far it kicks mythtv across the world.
The work you have done so far on it is fantastic. It loads in less than a quarter of the time on mythtv and the channel change is much quicker.

Is there any way to hack to to allow it to work on mds?

Regards

Glad you like it... we're working hard to make it as integrated as possible. VDR is a great piece of software we agree ;-)

As to having it work on MD's... yes its possible... but you'll need a different vdr configuration at the MD.

[fibres]

Thanks for the as ever quick resposes andrew.

Do you have any info/sample config fle and basic instructions on how to do this?

Also couple of queries about vdr.

1 Can you watch the same channel from the same tuner on 2 different media directors at the same time? This is an annoying thing missing in myth IMHO.
2 Do you know if it supports DVB-C Cards with a ci/CAM to decode pay channels?
3 Do all the tuner cards have to go into the core or can you have a secondary machine with extra tuners in like a myth slave backend.

Regards

[totallymaxed]

Thanks for the as ever quick resposes andrew.

Do you have any info/sample config fle and basic instructions on how to do this?

Also couple of queries about vdr.

1 Can you watch the same channel from the same tuner on 2 different media directors at the same time? This is an annoying thing missing in myth IMHO.
2 Do you know if it supports DVB-C Cards with a ci/CAM to decode pay channels?
3 Do all the tuner cards have to go into the core or can you have a secondary machine with extra tuners in like a myth slave backend.

Regards

Well it requires more than a change in a conf file. It will need additional plugins and other changes which are not ready yet.

Re: 1. Its technically possible with vdr but probably not something we'll support in this release.

Re: 2. vdr certainly supports ci/CAM's but may need additional config changes and plugins. We probably will not support those in this release.

Re: 3. vdr can be configured with distributed tuner cards. We will not be supporting that in this release though. However with vdr this is less of an issue because of the inherent ability to get multiple 'channels' out of the MUX that the tuner is currently tuned to.

[fibres]

Thanks for the quick response.

Well as for 1 that is not a big issue. So if it can pull more than one channel off of the one mux does that mean that 2 mds can be watching different channels on the same freq on the same tuner card. If so how come they can both watch the same channel?

Also if a ci/cam was working on the system how would this effect the fact that vdr can pull multiple channels from the same mux?
I was aware of this feature of vdr which is yet another thing I love about the package, Hwever I was wondering how this would work with the ci/cam.
I suppose this comes down to if it decodes the whole frequency or just the single mux which I am not sure of, Any ideas on that?

Lastly when you say this release are you reffering to 0710 as a whole or just the current betas?

Regards

[cirion]

VDR supports using one cam on several cards in the standalone version.

But by using a plugin that supports Cam/SoftCam/CardSharing, I do not think the version of VDR in LinuxMCE makes any difference.
Tthat plugin lets you use multiple encrypted channels.

[hari]

VDR supports using one cam on several cards in the standalone version.

But by using a plugin that supports Cam/SoftCam/CardSharing, I do not think the version of VDR in LinuxMCE makes any difference.
Tthat plugin lets you use multiple encrypted channels.

DVB uses the CSA (common scramble algorithm) to scramble transport streams. The key for CSA is the CW (control word). That is scrambled with irdeto/nagra/betacrypt/whatever and sent over EMM pids. The keys to unscramble the CW are sent to the users over ECM.
Technically you need only one valid smartcard of a given provider to descramble the CW and could share that over multiple tuners to feed CSA. I write _could_ because this is probably not legal depending on your legislation area and the contract you are in with your pay tv provider. Those "soft cams" also violate patents for CSA (e.g. UK PA GB2 322 994/995) and others (nagra, ...).

but be aware: I am not a lawyer nor a DVB expert. YMMV.

best regards,
Hari

[totallymaxed]

Thanks for the quick response.

Well as for 1 that is not a big issue. So if it can pull more than one channel off of the one mux does that mean that 2 mds can be watching different channels on the same freq on the same tuner card. If so how come they can both watch the same channel?

Also if a ci/cam was working on the system how would this effect the fact that vdr can pull multiple channels from the same mux?
I was aware of this feature of vdr which is yet another thing I love about the package, Hwever I was wondering how this would work with the ci/cam.
I suppose this comes down to if it decodes the whole frequency or just the single mux which I am not sure of, Any ideas on that?

Lastly when you say this release are you reffering to 0710 as a whole or just the current betas?

Regards

Well with v4l & vdr the tuner in a card is tuned to the frequency that the requested 'TV channel' is on... in reality that is the frequency for the whole MUX. So for example the user requests TV Channel 1, which here in the UK would be BBC1, this request means that vdr requests that a tuner card is tuned to the frequency of the MUX that contains the streamed BBC1 transmission... and that stream is de-mux'd and we see that live picture on the screen. However because in fact the tuner is now receiving all of the MUX'd data we can also access any other 'TV channels' that are part of that MUX too - and either watch them or record them. To allow more than one device on the network to watch say BBC1 we need to encode that stream as a multi-cast stream and deliver over the LAN... then any number of other devices can display it simultaneously.

Depending on the ci/cam used and what it is accessing it may be possible to access multiple channels concurrently. How this will be made available in a future release and what features it will have is still being decided - it is unlikely we will make available features that could cause any legal issues though. It will be down to individuals to extend the system into those areas if they choose to.

When I say 'the release' I mean the eventual release of LinuxMCE-0710.

[rafik24]

 Hi fibres,

 In order to get vdr to work from an md i found a quick and static dirty fix which consist of replacing the plutovdr binary by a script that call it with dcerouter as argument. i'll explain:

 cd /usr/bin

 mv plutovdr plutovdr.orig

 vi plutovdr ( and add the following to the file)
 
 #########################
 #!/bin/sh
 plutovdr.orig dcerouter 2>/dev/null 1>/dev/null
 #########################

 My core has two dvb cards so this way i'm able to get the streams from vdr on my MDs.

 Regards,

Rafik
 

[Zaerc]

Hi fibres,

 In order to get vdr to work from an md i found a quick and static dirty fix which consist of replacing the plutovdr binary by a script that call it with dcerouter as argument. i'll explain:

 cd /usr/bin

 mv plutovdr plutovdr.orig

 vi plutovdr ( and add the following to the file)
 
 #########################
 #!/bin/sh
 plutovdr.orig dcerouter 2>/dev/null 1>/dev/null
 #########################

 My core has two dvb cards so this way i'm able to get the streams from vdr on my MDs.

 Regards,

Rafik

You probably also need to make the new file exacutable with "chmod 755 plutovdr".

[rafik24]

 of course silly me, did it but forgot to write it down as you would guess.

[burgiman]

@Rafik:
your are right with your hot-hack to get that working on a md.
but you will get always the same pic and osd on md and hybrid with that method, because it uses piping or broadcast-stream of the hybrid.

thats not the concept behind a server-client version having the same screens at the same time.
it's not that easy to get all vdr-standard features, extended with plugins and of course lmce-specific dce-functions under one hood....

believe me - i did the whole vdr integration till now and we are still working on a real server-client lmce version
burgiman

[rafik24]

  Hi burgiman,

 Well done for the job done so far, the client server side of vdr is the next thing i thought about since i have 3 dvb cards in my core.

  I looked around and it seem like the streamdev plugin offers the features we need.

 Regards,

Rafik