*** EDIT *** Should have been posted in HDR-FOX T2 section, sorry ! *** EDIT ***
“When you are up to your arse in alligators, it’s easy to forget the original idea was to drain the swamp”.
I am the only technophile in a family of technophobes. My mother was the first to get a PVR, a 9300T, so everybody else got one too (12 units). Each of them is full, 500G, with programs they want to keep. Hrwconv will do the job on an HDR-FOX T2. Scaling up the time from a single file I got 250 hours, so I decided I needed a better estimate. I took a full 9200T disk, 160G, and the conversion took 80 hours.
IN THEORY, provided the processor has enough “umph”, the limiting factor should be the disk access speed, so it should be worth porting hrwconv to work on a PC because 1) the timeshift buffer is not being written 2) a new 2T drive used for an update will have SATA III which is twice as fast as SATA II (which the humax uses). My main PC is a full tower (mobo has 4 processor sockets and 32G of max 64G fitted) so is not exactly portable, so my laptop is probably what I will use (should have enough “umph”). It’s internal drive has 500G spare (just) and the mobo has a second SATA connector (like cars having the same wiring harness for all the models in the range because it is cheaper, more than 50% of laptops have a second SATA connector because the top of the range has an optical drive). The good news is that it supports SATA III and the bad news is that a laptop optical drive does not use 12V, so it is not present on the power connector, but a 3.5” drive needs it and the power/data connector are the opposite gender to normal. Ebay do a 1m male to female SATA data cable which should sort the data problem and I have a mini tower PSU pulled before it was scraped which should solve the power problem. I need a Linux, so a USB 3 memory sick set up as a bootable Ubuntu live gives me Linux.
On to testing, I got a static ffmpeg and sidecar for Linux. Ffmpeg worked fine, but sidecar didn’t. Long story short, a live linux distro only has the library elements required for the programs demoed, so I really need a statically linked sidecar. I tried “hunt the distro” but could not find a live distro that will run sidecar. ?If anybody knows of one, I would like to know?
I found two utilities namely statifier and Ermine. Statifier is old and usually results in a “Segmentation Error”. It needs ASLR disabled, but does not work on any other distro than the one it was produced on (installed or live version). I downloaded the trial versions of Ermine Pro and Light. I converted using Pro and got the announcement on the live distro, however, when I attempted to run it in anger I got “too many parameters” when anything other than the program name was on the CLI. ?If anybody has access to a licensed version of Ermine, can you tell me if it is a limitation of the trial version or if it has been defeated?
The trials I have done with sidecar running on the humax don’t give any control over times, so I attempted to write a truly platform independent piece of C. Hopefully I can post the planed attachment. (I could but had to rename the .7z to .zip, the .7z format is a lot smaller and 7zip is freeware) I would be the first to admit it is quick and dirty. If I can post the attachment I would like to know the following. ?Do I need new glasses i.e. have I duplicated something that already exists? ?Is it useful? ?Does it compile for the humax without modification? ?Does it do the same thing on the humax? At this point in time I do not wish to learn yet another tool set as I have “other fish to fry” proverbially speaking.
Off topic : I have had problems with AVI2HDR where some of the mpegs and VOBs resulted in file sets that would play but not fast forward, skip, resume… Using ffmpeg on these gave a warning about null time stamps in the headers and then sidecar on humax gave exactly the same results. The solution is to use Video Redo H264 and select MPEG version of .m2ts as the output file format, rename to .ts before FTP and sidecar on the humax. (Video Redo is not free, but the posts I have read suggest that the majority of users of the site have it)
Suggestions and comments on the above are welcome!
“When you are up to your arse in alligators, it’s easy to forget the original idea was to drain the swamp”.
I am the only technophile in a family of technophobes. My mother was the first to get a PVR, a 9300T, so everybody else got one too (12 units). Each of them is full, 500G, with programs they want to keep. Hrwconv will do the job on an HDR-FOX T2. Scaling up the time from a single file I got 250 hours, so I decided I needed a better estimate. I took a full 9200T disk, 160G, and the conversion took 80 hours.
IN THEORY, provided the processor has enough “umph”, the limiting factor should be the disk access speed, so it should be worth porting hrwconv to work on a PC because 1) the timeshift buffer is not being written 2) a new 2T drive used for an update will have SATA III which is twice as fast as SATA II (which the humax uses). My main PC is a full tower (mobo has 4 processor sockets and 32G of max 64G fitted) so is not exactly portable, so my laptop is probably what I will use (should have enough “umph”). It’s internal drive has 500G spare (just) and the mobo has a second SATA connector (like cars having the same wiring harness for all the models in the range because it is cheaper, more than 50% of laptops have a second SATA connector because the top of the range has an optical drive). The good news is that it supports SATA III and the bad news is that a laptop optical drive does not use 12V, so it is not present on the power connector, but a 3.5” drive needs it and the power/data connector are the opposite gender to normal. Ebay do a 1m male to female SATA data cable which should sort the data problem and I have a mini tower PSU pulled before it was scraped which should solve the power problem. I need a Linux, so a USB 3 memory sick set up as a bootable Ubuntu live gives me Linux.
On to testing, I got a static ffmpeg and sidecar for Linux. Ffmpeg worked fine, but sidecar didn’t. Long story short, a live linux distro only has the library elements required for the programs demoed, so I really need a statically linked sidecar. I tried “hunt the distro” but could not find a live distro that will run sidecar. ?If anybody knows of one, I would like to know?
I found two utilities namely statifier and Ermine. Statifier is old and usually results in a “Segmentation Error”. It needs ASLR disabled, but does not work on any other distro than the one it was produced on (installed or live version). I downloaded the trial versions of Ermine Pro and Light. I converted using Pro and got the announcement on the live distro, however, when I attempted to run it in anger I got “too many parameters” when anything other than the program name was on the CLI. ?If anybody has access to a licensed version of Ermine, can you tell me if it is a limitation of the trial version or if it has been defeated?
The trials I have done with sidecar running on the humax don’t give any control over times, so I attempted to write a truly platform independent piece of C. Hopefully I can post the planed attachment. (I could but had to rename the .7z to .zip, the .7z format is a lot smaller and 7zip is freeware) I would be the first to admit it is quick and dirty. If I can post the attachment I would like to know the following. ?Do I need new glasses i.e. have I duplicated something that already exists? ?Is it useful? ?Does it compile for the humax without modification? ?Does it do the same thing on the humax? At this point in time I do not wish to learn yet another tool set as I have “other fish to fry” proverbially speaking.
Off topic : I have had problems with AVI2HDR where some of the mpegs and VOBs resulted in file sets that would play but not fast forward, skip, resume… Using ffmpeg on these gave a warning about null time stamps in the headers and then sidecar on humax gave exactly the same results. The solution is to use Video Redo H264 and select MPEG version of .m2ts as the output file format, rename to .ts before FTP and sidecar on the humax. (Video Redo is not free, but the posts I have read suggest that the majority of users of the site have it)
Suggestions and comments on the above are welcome!
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