HDR-FOX T2 to HDHomeRun, my journey

@sceptic Glad you are up and running okay. I will take a look at the error as it shouldn't have stopped tuning because one channel/frequency had no video data found. The problem with scanning all frequencies is then dealing with duplicates where someone can receive a signal from more than one transmitter which means quite a lot of extra coding, and it would take time I didn't really have.

If you wish to see all movies you can do this via the Search option, click 'Search in specific categories' and tick one or more of interest and then click Search and leave the 'Search for' text as blank and it will return all events flagged as Movies for you.

The reason the EPG does it in day blocks is to keep it fast and responsive, so all the data for that day is all loaded in one go so it doesn't stop or stutter as it nears the end of the day to load more data as you scroll across. I agree the 'No Program Data' blocks at the start of the day (because the program started before midnight) could be better handled to show the program on at that time, and I will take a look at that.

Good luck testing.
 
Regarding the Guide I had a feeling that would be why it was done that way! Perhaps one option might be an extra column at the end/start of the grid, with buttons to take you to the next/previous 24 hours, so if on day one you selected it, the guide would move to day 2 from midnight onwards, with a similar column appearing at the start of the guide for days 2 and onwards.

Thanks for the tip about search, I did not realise you could leave the search text blank and still get results.

My first recording went well. I am only using a single Quatro at the moment. At some point I'll introduce a 2nd one and let you know how I get on :)
 
I've done loads of recordings now and had (touch wood) zero issues so far, which is fantastic :). I shall probably retire the first of my 2 HDR-Fox T2's next and connect up a 2nd Quatro to centralise all my recordings.

@lc200 Did you have a look at Git or perhaps finding a home somewhere outside of this forum? I think this software is really good and deserves at lot more interest/users. To facilitate that I think it really needs its own home/forum where users can find/download it, create a community around it and if you are open to it, additional developers can get involved as well!

One feature I'd really like to see is more control over file naming. I'd like to be able to have separate file naming for movies (Name+year stored in a single directory location) and tv series (Program name, series no (zero formatted), episode no (zero formatted) and if available episode title, stored a directory per series. Having tokens like sweeper would be great for this (see HERE). It would also be nice to have the option to hook into it at certain points (e.g after the recording has ended) so users could say call a script/program with token parameters to do something like advert removal perhaps that the software does not currently support.

Anyways thanks again for creating it and putting it out there.
 
I'm not speaking with any authority here, but my thoughts are that with our HDR-FOXes obsolescent and numbers in service declining, there would be no harm and much to benefit from at least sharing this forum. The only real impediment I can see if that the HDHomeRun isn't a "hummy"! It is not a trivial exercise to set up a new forum, obtain critical mass, and oversee it – why re-invent the wheel?

It would be easy enough to set up an entire forum section dedicated to the HDHomeRun hardware and whatever it is you call the software, enabling multi-threaded discussion instead of being confined to one cover-all thread. Traffic in that section would contribute to the running costs of the overall forum.
 
Black Hole said:
I'm not speaking with any authority here, but my thoughts are that with our HDR-FOXes obsolescent and numbers in service declining, there would be no harm and much to benefit from at least sharing this forum. The only real impediment I can see if that the HDHomeRun isn't a "hummy"! It is not a trivial exercise to set up a new forum, obtain critical mass, and oversee it – why re-invent the wheel?

It would be easy enough to set up an entire forum section dedicated to the HDHomeRun hardware and whatever it is you call the software, enabling multi-threaded discussion instead of being confined to one cover-all thread. Traffic in that section would contribute to the running costs of the overall forum.
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Of course there are downfalls in using this forum. It only relies on one member and as far as I can make it , the member is ill. This forum could just disappear. Much nicer for the software owner to have control, right?
 
sceptic said:
I've done loads of recordings now and had (touch wood) zero issues so far, which is fantastic :). I shall probably retire the first of my 2 HDR-Fox T2's next and connect up a 2nd Quatro to centralise all my recordings.

@lc200 Did you have a look at Git or perhaps finding a home somewhere outside of this forum? I think this software is really good and deserves at lot more interest/users. To facilitate that I think it really needs its own home/forum where users can find/download it, create a community around it and if you are open to it, additional developers can get involved as well!

One feature I'd really like to see is more control over file naming. I'd like to be able to have separate file naming for movies (Name+year stored in a single directory location) and tv series (Program name, series no (zero formatted), episode no (zero formatted) and if available episode title, stored a directory per series. Having tokens like sweeper would be great for this (see HERE). It would also be nice to have the option to hook into it at certain points (e.g after the recording has ended) so users could say call a script/program with token parameters to do something like advert removal perhaps that the software does not currently support.

Anyways thanks again for creating it and putting it out there.
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Great to hear all is working well.

It should be possible to easily get recordings to go into separate folders, but how do you identify a movie as opposed to a program? Is it simply enough to use the Freeview EPG Movie category? I will also look at the option of adding events so the software can start up another process at the end of the recording.

I'm not sure if having a dedicated website would allow discovering the software easier as then we get into realms of having to optimise for search engines (SEO stuff), and I just don't think there will ever be a huge interest outside of us folks here for something like this, given you need extra hardware (HDHomeRun tuners) and an always on Windows box. Also it seems that real-time terrestrial TV such as Freeview has its days numbered and PVRs have largely given way to catch-up services, and streaming from services like Netflix mean people don't need to record stuff as they can already watch at their leisure.
 
sceptic said:
@lc200 Did you have a look at Git or perhaps finding a home somewhere outside of this forum? I think this software is really good and deserves at lot more interest/users. To facilitate that I think it really needs its own home/forum where users can find/download it, create a community around it and if you are open to it, additional developers can get involved as well!
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I would agree that using Github or other site would help make this software visible to the many HDhomerun user who have never heard of Humax but who could benefit from this software and suggested it earllier in this thread.
 
lc200 said:
It should be possible to easily get recordings to go into separate folders, but how do you identify a movie as opposed to a program? Is it simply enough to use the Freeview EPG Movie category? I will also look at the option of adding events so the software can start up another process at the end of the recording.
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I know its not 100% accurate but I was thinking by EPG category yes, I suppose in an ideal world a sweeper rule style approach would be idea so users could define however they want the store/name their recordings as per the rules they define.


lc200 said:
I'm not sure if having a dedicated website would allow discovering the software easier as then we get into realms of having to optimise for search engines (SEO stuff), and I just don't think there will ever be a huge interest outside of us folks here for something like this, given you need extra hardware (HDHomeRun tuners) and an always on Windows box
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Yes I take your point. I was also assuming that if it had a home then potential users could be made aware of it via a post in Freeview/HTPC sections of other forums. If purchased on offer the HDHomeRun tuner is a less expensive than most PVR's (and how many have 4 independent tuners?) and if potential users have a Windows PC available then they might consider it a good option... I don't know what the feasibility is of a Linux port is, I am aware this can be an option in certain circumstances utilising Mono/.NET Core, this would also help open up the potential user base.
 
sceptic said:
I know its not 100% accurate but I was thinking by EPG category yes, I suppose in an ideal world a sweeper rule style approach would be idea so users could define however they want the store/name their recordings as per the rules they define.
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In Humax Sweeper runs after recordings are complete so similarly it should be possible to port Sweeper to Windows or write an an equivalent to move recordings around and perform other processing (ad detection pehaps) independent of the recording software though of course it would be nice if they were in the 'right' place to start with.
 
sceptic said:
I don't know what the feasibility is of a Linux port is
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I think I've already suggested that a Linux version might put a control unit within the abilities of the Raspberry Pi (ie a cheap, low energy, computer with the possibility of running it headless), although I think I've heard of a version of Windows for RPi. Any porting required should be much easier if an agnostic (rather than Windows-oriented) SDK was used.
 
MymsMan said:
In Humax Sweeper runs after recordings are complete so similarly it should be possible to port Sweeper to Windows or write an an equivalent to move recordings around and perform other processing (ad detection pehaps) independent of the recording software though of course it would be nice if they were in the 'right' place to start with.
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Yes agreed, if DvrOnTime could provide the ability to hook user defined commands into events (as I already mentioned) and provide all the various attributes via variables/tokens (i.e, programme name, series no, epsiode no, programme title, category, year etc) which could be used as arguments, then I could aways knock up something in the language of my choice to name them, but I agree it would be nice if it was built in so users could select the right naming convention that fits in with their library standards (Plex, Kodi etc).
 
@lc200 Sorry another question. If I decommission one of my Humax boxes and add a 2nd Quatro in its place, am I right in thinking I only need to set its device priority in settings and thats it, so no need to tune the channels again?
 
sceptic said:
@lc200 Sorry another question. If I decommission one of my Humax boxes and add a 2nd Quatro in its place, am I right in thinking I only need to set its device priority in settings and thats it, so no need to tune the channels again?
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Yes, just set the priority and the software doesn't need to tune the second Quatro, it will just work.
 
@lc200 Just a thought but Sourceforge might also be worth a look as a potential home for your project, if open sourced. I've not created any projects there myself but on paper it seems to offer all the main options you would expect to see including discussion forums as standard, see HERE and HERE
 
I have been giving this excellent software a try and have a few suggestions/wishes for future releases:

  • Please include the instructions on setting up a NAS destination from this post into the PDF instructions - it took a bit of thread trawling to find them and new users wouldn't know where to start looking.
  • It would be nice if instead of typing destination path you could use file explorer to browse to pick destination.
  • In Epg view it would be nice if view was positioned to current time rather than midnight and had a current time bar like the Humax webif
  • I also prefer the Humax style day/time selector over the pull down list
    1637701977703.png
  • (I never use the Now/Next format EPG so have no interest in that and Channel icons are probably more trouble than they are worth)
  • It would be nice to be able to assign channels to Favourites groups to reduce size of EPG display, Group name would be another option in the EPG Include: bar
  • It would be nice to override default recording path for each series to allow for series like F1 that have a different programme name for each episode and to segregate children's programmes from adult programmes. Use File explorer type interface to navigate to target folder or create target folder.
  • Recording file names don't contain start time so back to back episodes have same name, would also be nice to have option to include Series and Episode numbers when available.
  • Option to specify a user exit program to be called at Start of recording and End of recording which would be passed the Programme name, Channel, Recording destination etc. This could be used to trigger ad detection and other processing and/or modify the recording path and file name
Edit: Correction Series & episode is included in file name but can still have duplicate file names if recording restarts following error
 
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