HDR-FOX T2 to HDHomeRun, my journey

[Black Cloud]

I have acquired a Fitlet with Win10Home on it. The Fitlet is a very basic tiny PC that you can put in the glove compartment of your car, and use it for mobile entertainment. It is very slow, though. It does not have a fan, so it can go in the tv room without annoying anyone. I am not recommending the Fitlet, just experimenting with it. It is not connected to the internet, so it cannot update, which otherwise would stop it working until I intervene to say I don't need the tour of Win10's latest enhancements.

I installed DvrOnTime and it all went well, and the OTA EPG loaded successfully. I noticed right away that HD channels 101 to 105 all had programmes starting on the next hour, so I set up five simultaneous recordings to check out the four tuners on my HDHomeRun.

Woohoo: Five perfect glitch free recordings that started on time and finished on time. Way to go! I'm hooked now.

All I need now is a PC utility to detect the ad breaks and life will be idyllic.

 

[sceptic]

Just got back around to looking at this again now. I'm converting the innards of an
existing noisy NUC into a fanless case to use as the server Just wondering @lc200 if there is a later version of the software now than the one in this thread or is that still the lastest release?

 

[lc200]

Just got back around to looking at this again now. I'm converting the innards of an
existing noisy NUC into a fanless case to use as the server Just wondering @lc200 if there is a later version of the software now than the one in this thread or is that still the lastest release?

Yes still the latest version, although a couple of bugs I've spotted that cause problems at rare times so will be fixing those soon.

 

[tonylon]

(Message moved to this forum from the Plex.tv forum)

Did you ever have any further thoughts on how to automate the copying of downloaded media files from the PC running your program to the NAS where Plex is running.

I’m still having to manually copy over which is not ideal.

The fundamental issue still seems to be that I can map the network file location (of the NAS storage) on the PC but this is not recognised as a valid file location by your program. (I suspect because your program runs as a service rather than a normal user?)

Tony

 

[dearleuk]

All my TV gets recorded to a raspberry pi via a samba share, so not sure what the problem is

In settings

Path on server to save recordings to:

\\RASPBERRYPI\pishare\TV

 

[tonylon]

Running this on a W10 PC.

I can map a NAS network drive as a user logged into that machine but DvrOnTime runs as a service so doesn't recognise that mapping.

 

[dearleuk]

Mine is a win 10 machine too. I haven't mapped the drive just used the network location. Have you got samba running on your NAS?

 

[tonylon]

Mine is a win 10 machine too. I haven't mapped the drive just used the network location. Have you got samba running on your NAS?

No I haven't got Samba on my NAS.

Why would I want to / need to?

It's a standard Synology NAS box running DSM 6.2

 

[Black Hole]

No I haven't got Samba on my NAS.

How does it provide a file sharing service to the network then?

 

[alanofcleeves]

No I haven't got Samba on my NAS.
It's a standard Synology NAS box running DSM 6.2

I also have a Synology NAS running DSM 6.2

Samba can be enabled very easily. Just sign on as Admin, open Control Panel -> File Services -> Enable SMB Service. Click 'Apply'. That's about it, works flawlessly.

 

[bottletop]

I also have a Synology NAS running DSM 6.2

Samba can be enabled very easily. Just sign on as Admin, open Control Panel -> File Services -> Enable SMB Service. Click 'Apply'. That's about it, works flawlessly.

Maybe tonylon had this enabled already? Because this was mentioned, which suggest some form of file sharing for NAS to Windows is in play.

Running this on a W10 PC.

I can map a NAS network drive as a user logged into that machine but DvrOnTime runs as a service so doesn't recognise that mapping.

But that contradicts this bit...

No I haven't got Samba on my NAS.

Why would I want to / need to?

It's a standard Synology NAS box running DSM 6.2

 

[bottletop]

Right click on your shared drive (eg z, properties - it should show you the full path for the share.

You should be able to use the full path for DvrOnTime settings, (rather than the shortcut eg z). This was mentioned on an earlier post.

All my TV gets recorded to a raspberry pi via a samba share, so not sure what the problem is

In settings
Path on server to save recordings to:
\\RASPBERRYPI\pishare\TV

 

[Black Hole]

No I haven't got Samba on my NAS.

Why would I want to / need to?

Maybe tonylon needs this fleshing out a bit. For background:

Mass storage connected only via a network requires software to make it accessible to an operating system which is not the same as for mass storage connected directly to that computer system. In your case, the network storage is your Synology, in dearleuk's case he's using a Raspberry Pi system as a NAS.

The two major protocols for mass storage access over network are SMB and NFS. If your NAS is visible from Windows it must be running an SMB service, and the SMB service is provided in Linux (and similar OSes) by Samba. And the last link in the chain: to provide NAS services at all, the Synology is actually a dedicated computer system running a specialised version of Linux, therefore it must (most likely) be running Samba.

From Glossary (click):

NAS

Network-Attached Storage - an external hard disk drive accessed by an Ethernet (or other networking) connection instead of a USB cable. This means its content can be accessed by anything on the network, not just the PC it happens to be plugged into, and doesn't rely on the PC being turned on.​

SMB

Server Message Block - a communications protocol for accessing file storage via a network, favoured by Windows.​

NFS

Network File System - a communications protocol for accessing file storage via a network, favoured by Linux and Apple.​

Samba

Windows PCs can share their drives over a network so that the PCs can access the files on a remote PC as if they were on the local PC. The Linux method for sharing drives (compatible with Windows shares) is Samba.​

 

[lc200]

I see some info has been added regarding the sharing aspect across a network. @dearleuk so you are using DvrOnTime and it happily records across to the networked drive? If so good to hear. In theory the software should be able to access a shared network drive using the support provided by the .NET Framework, however there can be issues with permissions when running as a service gaining access to the remote resources. Did you need to change the permissions for the service?

It is hard for me to replicate as I don't have exactly the same setup but there are known issues around permissions.

 

[dearleuk]

I see some info has been added regarding the sharing aspect across a network. @dearleuk so you are using DvrOnTime and it happily records across to the networked drive? If so good to hear. In theory the software should be able to access a shared network drive using the support provided by the .NET Framework, however there can be issues with permissions when running as a service gaining access to the remote resources. Did you need to change the permissions for the service?

It is hard for me to replicate as I don't have exactly the same setup but there are known issues around permissions.

I suppose I should say a network share rather than a network drive.

The only thing I had to change was to enable SMB1 in Windows 10, once I'd done that it worked flawlessly.

Just wanted to let you know that the search in DvrOnTime is far superior to the one in Plex. Plex finds only about half of my searches whereas DvrOnTime finds them all

 

[tonylon]

Many thanks for all your suggestions re my issues connecting to a NAS from DvrOnTime.

Yes the Synology is running SMB and yes SMB is enabled on the Windows machine.

But when I try entering the path of a drive on my NAS in the Settings field on DvrOnTime (eg: \\NAS_DS718\MEDIA\) I get "Could not find a part of the path '\\NAS_DS718\MEDIA'."

 

[MymsMan]

Many thanks for all your suggestions re my issues connecting to a NAS from DvrOnTime.

Yes the Synology is running SMB and yes SMB is enabled on the Windows machine.

But when I try entering the path of a drive on my NAS in the Settings field on DvrOnTime (eg: \\NAS_DS718\MEDIA\) I get "Could not find a part of the path '\\NAS_DS718\MEDIA'."

Cant you just map the NAS to a windows drive letter and specify the windows drive letter in the settings field eg on my system S: refers to one partition on my NAS

 

[tonylon]

Cant you just map the NAS to a windows drive letter and specify the windows drive letter in the settings field eg on my system S: refers to one partition on my NAS

That's what I tried originally but DvrOnTime runs as a service and doesn't recognise drive mappings that are set at a user level. (And yes have already tired running that service as that different users but that didn't work either...)

 

[Black Hole]

SMB is enabled on the Windows machine.

Is SMB1 enabled? Win10 defaults to SMB3.

 

[lc200]

@tonylon you could try running the program in interactive mode as a normal windows user, that will help identify if it is a permission issue due to the Service aspect. To try this:

1) Stop the windows service for DvrOnTime
2) Navigate to the Program Files\DvrOnTime folder
3) Double click the DvrOnTime.Exe file

This will run DvrOnTime as a normal program and will open a command prompt showing debug information, and then navigate to the website as usual and try adding the folder location. It should work with a mapped drive if the same logged in user can see it, and it would be possible to leave this running all the time if it works, however you would need to keep the user logged in and lose the failsafe options of having the service always start up on a reboot. Note that when the command window running the program has any focus then pressing any key will shut down the program cleanly.

Let us know how you can get on with this test.