HDR-FOX T2 to HDHomeRun, my journey

Working on a few updates:
  • Support for multiple HDHomeRun tuners on the same network with the option to set a preferred device, and so with 2 Quatro tuners you can then utilise both and record up to 8 programs simultaneously!
  • Better handling of series linked recordings that have come to an end and sit pending for 13 weeks
  • Better handling of accurate recordings to avoid the situation of a program failing to record due to a very last minute reschedule
  • Faster display of the Guide when it has been filtered
  • Service now starts correctly even if no HDHomeRun device found on the network, previously it might have failed to start if the service came up before a network connection was available, for example a PC reboot
  • Fixed a bug that meant tuning channels failed in FireFox
If anyone has any suggestions for things they want to see added or changed let me know.
 
Once again, effusive thanks for making your program available. I have a couple of suggestions that I feel would make the users’ experience even better – though I have the distinct feeling that I’m committing the sin of looking a gift horse in the mouth, as my mother used to say!

1) Disabling channels is a tedious process. In my case, most of the channels need to be disabled. I know the process only needs to be gone through once, but it’s still a bit of a pain. Ideally, I’d simply like a complete list of channels which a checkbox next to each, so that I can zip down it, marking all the ones I don’t want to see, then click one ‘make it so’ button at the end. It would also be useful as a readily-accessible list of all available channels, showing which are enabled. Currently, if you include ‘Hidden Channels’ on the guide, there is no distinction between enabled and disabled channels when they are all displayed.

Here’s a further thought about that: the same list could be used to group channels into a couple of ‘User’ categories in addition to HD, SD, Radio and Hidden. In my case, one category would contain the channels I always want to see on the guide – a mix of SD and HD, probably no more than a dozen altogether – and another would be channels that I might want to see occasionally – another dozen, probably. The User Groups would show up as checkboxes on the ‘include’ panel - ‘A’ and ‘B’, or ‘U1’ and ‘U2’, or whatever. If I had a couple of user categories, I wouldn’t use the HD or SD buttons at all.

2) This is about cursors, highlights and tooltips in the Guide. Currently, as I move the cursor around the guide, no highlight appears on the programme under the cursor (unless I’m hovering over the Series Link icon – when a tooltip says that this programme is part of a series – of course I already know that because... er... it has a Series icon on it!) When I click on a programme, I get the programme information and recording options in a pop-up window, but in order to close the pop-up, I have to move the cursor. So, after the pop-up has closed, my cursor is no longer on the program I’ve just clicked, and there’s no visible way of knowing that I’ve already looked at it. For an old codger like me, this can result in my clicking on the same programme several times when trying to find a particular episode in a run of several programmes with the same title. It would be easier to keep my place if the cursor position were restored after the pop-up closes, and better still if there’s some sort of highlight on the relevant programme box. Brighter letters, or an outline box, or a lighter grey back colour – the usual sort of thing.

The most useful option would be to see the programme description on a tooltip when hovering anywhere over the programme box - it would help decide whether to click on it for further information and recording options. I realise that this would mean pre-loading all the descriptions into memory to avoid delay while browsing, so perhaps it’s a no-no if you’re trying to keep the program light-footed and compact.

Anyway, that’s my 2p-worth!
 
mike_m said:
Once again, effusive thanks for making your program available. I have a couple of suggestions that I feel would make the users’ experience even better – though I have the distinct feeling that I’m committing the sin of looking a gift horse in the mouth, as my mother used to say!

1) Disabling channels is a tedious process. In my case, most of the channels need to be disabled. I know the process only needs to be gone through once, but it’s still a bit of a pain. Ideally, I’d simply like a complete list of channels which a checkbox next to each, so that I can zip down it, marking all the ones I don’t want to see, then click one ‘make it so’ button at the end. It would also be useful as a readily-accessible list of all available channels, showing which are enabled. Currently, if you include ‘Hidden Channels’ on the guide, there is no distinction between enabled and disabled channels when they are all displayed.

Here’s a further thought about that: the same list could be used to group channels into a couple of ‘User’ categories in addition to HD, SD, Radio and Hidden. In my case, one category would contain the channels I always want to see on the guide – a mix of SD and HD, probably no more than a dozen altogether – and another would be channels that I might want to see occasionally – another dozen, probably. The User Groups would show up as checkboxes on the ‘include’ panel - ‘A’ and ‘B’, or ‘U1’ and ‘U2’, or whatever. If I had a couple of user categories, I wouldn’t use the HD or SD buttons at all.

2) This is about cursors, highlights and tooltips in the Guide. Currently, as I move the cursor around the guide, no highlight appears on the programme under the cursor (unless I’m hovering over the Series Link icon – when a tooltip says that this programme is part of a series – of course I already know that because... er... it has a Series icon on it!) When I click on a programme, I get the programme information and recording options in a pop-up window, but in order to close the pop-up, I have to move the cursor. So, after the pop-up has closed, my cursor is no longer on the program I’ve just clicked, and there’s no visible way of knowing that I’ve already looked at it. For an old codger like me, this can result in my clicking on the same programme several times when trying to find a particular episode in a run of several programmes with the same title. It would be easier to keep my place if the cursor position were restored after the pop-up closes, and better still if there’s some sort of highlight on the relevant programme box. Brighter letters, or an outline box, or a lighter grey back colour – the usual sort of thing.

The most useful option would be to see the programme description on a tooltip when hovering anywhere over the programme box - it would help decide whether to click on it for further information and recording options. I realise that this would mean pre-loading all the descriptions into memory to avoid delay while browsing, so perhaps it’s a no-no if you’re trying to keep the program light-footed and compact.

Anyway, that’s my 2p-worth!
Click to expand...

Thanks for the suggestions, and I'll see what I can do :)


MymsMan said:
  • Support for other brands of network tuners
    In particular I would be interested in vbox support,
Click to expand...

I've looked at supporting other tuners and many use BDA drivers and it's a huge chunk of complex work, too much for something given away for free anyway, plus the other issue is I would have to buy the various tuners to test against. So in all honesty I can't see me supporting other tuners anytime soon, sorry.
 
lc200 said:
I've looked at supporting other tuners and many use BDA drivers and it's a huge chunk of complex work, too much for something given away for free anyway, plus the other issue is I would have to buy the various tuners to test against. So in all honesty I can't see me supporting other tuners anytime soon, sorry.
Click to expand...
I would be willing to do testing, but of course debugging via email is slow and much less convenient than having the hardware at hand
Would it possible to structure the code to separate the hardware specific functions into a module that could be replaced by other hardware specific modules which could be developed and tested by users with the appropriate hardware?
 
Would it possible to structure the code to separate the hardware specific functions into a module that could be replaced by other hardware specific modules which could be developed and tested by users with the appropriate hardware?
Click to expand...
Sorry to butt in, but...
Why? What's wrong with the HomeRun?
 
Just reporting a minor incident that happened tonight when recording back-to-back shows on ITV3...
Recording schedule as seen at 2235, when two shows should have been recording.

RecSchedBackToBack.png
Midsomer Murders ITV3 1900-2100 Ticked, recording completed [ correct ]​
Midsomer Murders ITV3 2100-2300 BLUE, tuner assigned, waiting for start signal [ incorrect, should have started one hour thirty five minutes ago]​
​
Did ITV3 cause this, or does DvrOnTime have a problem with back-to-back recordings?
I only ask because I was of the belief that the end signal for one show was also the start signal for the next show. If this assumption is correct, and the previous show stopped recording on time, which it did, then the next show should have also started.

As an aside, it seems to me that all ITV channels send start signals at a designated time, rather than altering the start signals if shows are running late or early. I record the ITV News at (approximately) 10 every night of the week, and only about half of the recordings fall completely within the start and end signals. All my recorders start and stop in sync with each other, but the News is rarely completely contained in the recording. Yes, ITV has start signals alright, but it doesn't seem to have accurate start signals.
 
Black Cloud said:
Just reporting a minor incident that happened tonight when recording back-to-back shows on ITV3...
Recording schedule as seen at 2235, when two shows should have been recording.

View attachment 5524
Midsomer Murders ITV3 1900-2100 Ticked, recording completed [ correct ]​
Midsomer Murders ITV3 2100-2300 BLUE, tuner assigned, waiting for start signal [ incorrect, should have started one hour thirty five minutes ago]​
​
Did ITV3 cause this, or does DvrOnTime have a problem with back-to-back recordings?
I only ask because I was of the belief that the end signal for one show was also the start signal for the next show. If this assumption is correct, and the previous show stopped recording on time, which it did, then the next show should have also started.

As an aside, it seems to me that all ITV channels send start signals at a designated time, rather than altering the start signals if shows are running late or early. I record the ITV News at (approximately) 10 every night of the week, and only about half of the recordings fall completely within the start and end signals. All my recorders start and stop in sync with each other, but the News is rarely completely contained in the recording. Yes, ITV has start signals alright, but it doesn't seem to have accurate start signals.
Click to expand...

There should be no issues with back to back recordings. Are both episodes contained in the 19:00 recording by any chance?

There is no start or stop signal as such. What they use is the Present and Future (Now and Next) data, this is updated in near real time to show what is on Now and what is on Next. In the data are the program identifiers. Accurate recording works by waiting until it sees the program identifier appear as the Now program, and stops when that code changes to something else. Channels that support accurate recording will coincide the Now program to appear at the time the program actually starts, whereas channels that don't support accurate recording, the Now program simply appears exactly on the scheduled time (as you correctly suspect :)), regardless if it is running a few minutes late or early.

So at 19:00 ITV3 on the Now data switched correctly with a Program CRID of www.itv.com/1001280887, this triggered the recording at 19:00, what should have happened is at 21:00 the Now program should have switched to a Program CRID of www.itv.com/7075152 to trigger the recording at 21:00, which would have also triggered the earlier recording to stop as that code is no longer seen. What has probably happened is some late change or correction, so that the code being broadcast at 21:00 was different to what was originally published in the guide. You can help mitigate some of these issues by having the guide update more often by changing it to update every hour, and as long as they don't mess with the series link and it is just changes to the program CRIDs it will be picked up, providing they do update the guide data before hand.

If you still have the recording shown in the Recording page, can you click the Options button for the failed recording and click More Information and let me know what the Program CRID is shown there.

If ITV3 isn't really doing accurate recording, you may find it more reliable to just use padding.

There is substantial debug logs made and in the next version I will make those available for downloading as this logs what is actually being broadcast in terms of codes so we know who to point the finger at :)

Did you also record it on any of your other devices and did it work on those? If yes it might point to a bug that I have not come across before in my own use.
 
Last edited:
@lc200
Are both episodes contained in the 19:00 recording by any chance?
Click to expand...
Unfortunately not.
at 19:00 ITV3 on the Now data switched correctly with a Program CRID of www.itv.com/1001280887
Click to expand...
At 1900 my successful recording generated this nfo file:-
XML: 
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>
<episodedetails>
  <title>Midsomer Murders (Sat 08-05)</title>
  <plot>King&apos;s Crystal: A glassware factory faces ruin, an accountant is murdered with a Masonic dagger, and a production of Hamlet seems to contain a message for DCI Barnaby. [S,AD] S10 Ep3 ITV3
Series Crid: www.itv.com/ebs44631 | Program Crid: www.itv.com/1001414547
EIT start: 08/05/2021 18:59:53</plot>
  <episode>3</episode> 
  <displayepisode>3</displayepisode>
  <aired>2021-05-08</aired> 
  <playcount>0</playcount>
  <studio>ITV3</studio>
</episodedetails>
at 21:00 the Now program should have switched to a Program CRID of www.itv.com/7075152
Click to expand...
At 2100 my recording schedule was expecting:-
Series CRID: www.itv.com/ebs44631
Program CRID: www.itv.com/1001280877
Scheduled start time UTC: 2021-05-08T20:00:00.000Z
Padding: No padding as this channel is enabled for Accurate Recording

Our Pcrids differ, so maybe ITV3 changed things too near the transmission time? I already have the schedule update at hourly intervals.

Unfortunately no other machines were running. My Hummy decided to have the day off - it does that occasionally, but comes back to work as soon as it gets deprived of electrons for a short while.

On the bright side, Madam admits that she has seen the episode that failed to record, so we all off the hook:)

If ITV3 isn't really doing accurate recording, you may find it more reliable to just use padding
Click to expand...
Is there an option to do that in DvrOnTime? If not, can it go on the wish list?
There is substantial debug logs made and in the next version I will make those available for downloading as this logs what is actually being broadcast in terms of codes so we know who to point the finger at :)
Click to expand...
Excellent!

Thank you for taking the time to reply in such depth.
 
That appears to have been what has happened then, they changed the scheduled episode or the Program CRID within an hour of the last Guide update, or did it sometime after even. Not sure why they would do that. I will have a think how I can handle those situations better, maybe having the guide update each 30 minutes might be a safer option. Although the guide update uses up a tuner to update the guide and can take around 10 or 15 minutes, if recordings are taking place and there aren't enough tuners available the guide update is automatically terminated to let the recording take place.

To set up padding click on the channel number in the Guide then select use padding and set the pre and post padding required. It takes effect for all currently set scheduled items on that channel only. It will still track programs in the guide using series link, but will not wait for accurate regarding triggers.

Good job your other half had already seen it :)
 
@lc200
To set up padding click on the channel number in the Guide then select use padding and set the pre and post padding required. It takes effect for all currently set scheduled items on that channel only. It will still track programs in the guide using series link, but will not wait for accurate regarding triggers.
Click to expand...
Brilliant! Thanks!
 
How would dvrontime handle back to back recording with padding?
  1. Use two tuners so each recording has padding, or
  2. Cancel padding and switch at scheduled time, or
  3. Something else
 
Results are in...

I added 5 minutes of padding to the end of 3 back to back shows recorded on E4.

First recording included 5 minutes of second show
Second recording started 5 minutes into second show, and included 5 minutes of third show
Third recording started 5 minutes into third show, and included 5 irrelevant minutes at the end.

I guess that means only one tuner was used.
 
Black Cloud said:
Results are in...

I added 5 minutes of padding to the end of 3 back to back shows recorded on E4.

First recording included 5 minutes of second show
Second recording started 5 minutes into second show, and included 5 minutes of third show
Third recording started 5 minutes into third show, and included 5 irrelevant minutes at the end.

I guess that means only one tuner was used.
Click to expand...

Yes should favour one tuner. I think perhaps it might be better if the padding was dropped in the middle like the Humax does, or maybe the option to use two tuners so that both recordings are padded, as the problem with dropping the padding in the middle is if someone comes along and watches one of the recordings then deletes it, the remaining program can have something missing!
 
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