[mythtv-users] I got my Ceton InfiniTV 4 working in 0.24-fixes (compiled with custom code)

[Ronald Frazier]

Last Friday I got my cablecard for my Ceton InfiniTV 4. Getting that
configured was an ordeal that lasted 3+ hours, most of that time on
the phone with someone from the NOC. It was a bit of a pain, and I can
elaborate on it later if anyone is interested. But when it was all
said and done, I had access to all of my HD channels in linux via
catting the /dev device entry into a file or into mplayer.

So, as was previously elaborated on, I couldn't get this card hacked
into mythtv via the demo or import recorders, and the official code
for 0.25 was not yet ready for use, so I set off to write my own
custom code for myth...a new recorder class. Last I reported, I had it
just barely starting to work in trunk, but I planned on starting over
to get it working in 0.24.

It took me about a day to get the code roughly there, but I didn't
know that because I had about a 3 day snag with MPEG file format
issues. The problem was difficult to address, because when I generate
the files with myth, I was running into a bug in myth's MPEG handling
code (it was apparently an obscure corner condition in the code). When
I generated the files by catting the /dev entry into a file directly,
it was generating mpeg files that were perhaps technically valid, but
that most of the media players (myth, VLC, windows media
player....basically everything EXCEPT mplayer) were choking on at one
time or another. It took me a while to realize I was dealing with 2
separate issues and address them accordingly.

Once I figured that out early Wednesday evening, I had it roughly
working in myth 0.24. I spent Wed/Thu evenings ironing out some bugs,
and last night I finally setup myth to run all 4 tuners. I scheduled a
dozen recordings to run overnight. This morning 10 of them were
there...then I realized I screwed up and setup the other 2 of them on
a station I didn't actually subscribe to. Ooops. The files that were
generated appear to be fine. I played with them briefly this morning.
Playback seems fine, commercial flagging was fine. They play perfectly
in every other media player I've tested. As far as I can tell, there
are no issues with the recordings.

At the moment, I'm aware of 2 issues. The first is a thumbnail
generation issue. They currently appear like this:
http://www.ronfrazier.net/ceton/bad_preview.png

The other issue is a channel change failed on me once. When it
happened, all 4 tuners changed channels within 1/2 second (3 of the
tuners did it within 3/100 of a second), so I'm pretty sure it's a
concurrency issue. I'm thinking of redesigning that part slightly so
that 1) The requests get serialized with a mutex so they don't happen
simultaneously, and 2) setting up something that checks a few seconds
later to make sure the channel change actually took place and then
retrying again if necessary (though #2 might be unnecessary once #1 is
in place, but I'll probably do it anyway as a precaution).

Other than these 2 issues, everything initially seems to work fine so
far. Hopefully I can put it through the paces better this weekend. If
everything pans out as expected, anyone interested in giving this a
shot can have a copy of the code next week.


-- --
Ron Frazier