MythTV with Foxtel Cable - possible?

[rstuart]

Hi Everyone.

I decided to move away from the USB Phenoix reader and invest in a OminKey 3121. It seems to have done the trick. The newcs output is now

[ 21:28:47 ] [ Loader ] Init NDS card
[ 21:28:49 ] [ KeymaN ] Adding key 0000000024dXXX type 0 on Provider 000000 for caid XXXX ID=0
[ 21:28:49 ] [ KeymaN ] Adding key 0000000024dXXX type 1 on Provider 000000 for caid XXXX ID=0
[ 21:28:50 ] [ Loader ] Card XXXX on port pcci ready
[ 21:28:50 ] [ Loader ] Starting Newcamd Server on port 15000
[ 21:28:50 ] [ Newcamd ] Newcamd thread Server started on port 15000
[ 21:28:50 ] [ NewCS ] Ready to GO! :)

which looks all good. The open-sasc-ng output is

Mar 23 21:39:28.669 : Version: 0.0.2-49M/49
Mar 23 21:39:28.670 CAM: initializing plugin: SoftCam (0.9.0-Unknown): A software emulated CAM
Mar 23 21:39:28 [general.info] SC version 0.9.0-Unknown initializing
Mar 23 21:39:28.670 CAM: starting plugin:
Mar 23 21:39:28 [general.info] SC version 0.9.0-Unknown starting
Mar 23 21:39:28 [core.load] ** Plugin config:
Mar 23 21:39:28 [core.load] ** Key updates (AU) are enabled (active CAIDs) (no prestart)
Mar 23 21:39:28 [core.load] ** Local systems DON'T take priority over cached remote
Mar 23 21:39:28 [core.load] ** Concurrent FF recordings are NOT allowed
Mar 23 21:39:28 [core.load] ** Force transfermode with digital audio
Mar 23 21:39:28 [core.load] ** ScCaps are 1 2 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
Mar 23 21:39:28 [core.load] ** Ignored CAIDs 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000
Mar 23 21:39:28 [general.info] loading cardclient config from ./sc_files/cardclient.conf
Mar 23 21:39:28 [cardclient.newcamd] now using protocol version 525 (cdLen=8)
Mar 23 21:39:28 [cardclient.core] hostname=localhost port=15000 emm=1 emmCaids 1700/ff00
Mar 23 21:39:28 [cardclient.core] Newcamd: username=dummy password=dummy key=0102030405060708091011121314
Mar 23 21:39:28 [core.net] netwatch up
Mar 23 21:39:28 [core.net] connecting to localhost:15000/tcp (127.0.0.1)
Mar 23 21:39:28 [cardclient.login] Newcamd: CaID=090b admin=1 srvUA=000000000024D9A5 provider 000000/000000000024D900
Mar 23 21:39:28 [cardclient.core] client 'Newcamd' ready
Mar 23 21:39:28 [general.error] failed open ./sc_files/SoftCam.Key: No such file or directory
Mar 23 21:39:28 [general.error] failed open ./sc_files/smartcard.conf: No such file or directory
Mar 23 21:39:28 [general.error] no keys loaded for softcam!
Mar 23 21:39:28 [core.load] ** registered systems:
Mar 23 21:39:28 [core.load] ** Cardclient        (pri -15)
Mar 23 21:39:28 [core.load] ** Conax             (pri -10)
Mar 23 21:39:28 [core.load] ** ConstCW           (pri -20)
Mar 23 21:39:28 [core.load] ** Cryptoworks       (pri -10)
Mar 23 21:39:28 [core.load] ** Irdeto            (pri -10)
Mar 23 21:39:28 [core.load] ** Nagra             (pri -10)
Mar 23 21:39:28 [core.load] ** Nagra2            (pri -10)
Mar 23 21:39:28 [core.load] ** SC-Conax          (pri  -5)
Mar 23 21:39:28 [core.load] ** SC-Cryptoworks    (pri  -5)
Mar 23 21:39:28 [core.load] ** SC-Irdeto         (pri  -5)
Mar 23 21:39:28 [core.load] ** SC-Nagra          (pri  -5)
Mar 23 21:39:28 [core.load] ** SC-Seca           (pri  -5)
Mar 23 21:39:28 [core.load] ** SC-Viaccess       (pri  -5)
Mar 23 21:39:28 [core.load] ** SC-VideoGuard2    (pri  -5)
Mar 23 21:39:28 [core.load] ** Seca              (pri -10)
Mar 23 21:39:28 [core.load] ** @SHL              (pri -10)
Mar 23 21:39:28 [core.load] ** Viaccess          (pri -10)
Mar 23 21:39:28 [general.warn] no smartcard interface defined!
Mar 23 21:39:29.775 frontend: Starting thread on /dev/dvb/adapter3/frontend1
The thread scheduling parameters indicate:
policy = 0
priority = 0
Mar 23 21:39:29.776 demux: Starting thread on /dev/dvb/adapter3/demux1
The thread scheduling parameters indicate:
policy = 0
priority = 0
Mar 23 21:39:29.781 dvr: Starting thread on /dev/dvb/adapter3/dvr1
The thread scheduling parameters indicate:
policy = 1
priority = 99
Mar 23 21:39:29.781 : Listening on port 5456

I'm no expert with sasc-ng but I think this is also correct?

My next question is what is the best way to test whether it is working and how do I configure it in MythTV? Is is as easy as setting up the channels in Shepherd and tying together the Capture Card and Input Source? Because I have tried this I can't seem to get it to work. I'm really after an answer to the following questions:

1. Does the output from sacs-ng look correct?
2. How do I test it is working properly?
3. How do I set it up in MythTV?

Cheers

[Shonky]

Since I've got this working it's going to about 90% satisfaction. I get glitches in my recordings it would seem from a key not being obtained. If I watch LiveTv it pauses and I miss about 10 or 15 seconds. Obviously this is what happens on the recordings, but you don't get the pauses.

I was using NewCS 1.65 and newcamd protocol on a remote machine. I've since moved it to a local machine using a USB-serial converter (PL2303) with no change. I also changed to the radegast protocol with NewCS server. Neither made any difference. I was unsuccessful in getting the actual radegast (rdgd) server to work at all.

Sometimes it will run for a whole show with no problem. Sometimes it will happen 10 or more times an hour so it's slightly annoying. The logs don't show much

Sasc log. Got a glitch about 1440

Apr  4 14:05:23.594 CSA: Got command(7): O idx: 1 pid: 0 key: c8b4...87
Called cSascDvbDevice::SetCaDescr
Apr  4 14:05:23.997 CSA: Got command(7): O idx: 2 pid: 0 key: 71af...35
Called cSascDvbDevice::SetCaDescr
Apr  4 14:05:24.396 CSA: Got command(7): O idx: 3 pid: 0 key: d09a...da
Called cSascDvbDevice::SetCaDescr
Apr  4 14:05:33.664 CSA: Got command(7): E idx: 2 pid: 0 key: 0dea...e4
Called cSascDvbDevice::SetCaDescr
Apr  4 14:05:34.066 CSA: Got command(7): E idx: 3 pid: 0 key: 38c1...84
Called cSascDvbDevice::SetCaDescr
Apr  4 14:05:34.467 CSA: Got command(7): E idx: 1 pid: 0 key: 88cf...ff
Called cSascDvbDevice::SetCaDescr
Apr  4 14:05:43.738 CSA: Got command(7): O idx: 1 pid: 0 key: 90d1...6a
Called cSascDvbDevice::SetCaDescr
Apr  4 14:05:44.142 CSA: Got command(7): O idx: 2 pid: 0 key: 771a...be
Called cSascDvbDevice::SetCaDescr
Apr  4 14:05:44.541 CSA: Got command(7): O idx: 3 pid: 0 key: 59cc...d5

Newcs has nothing in the log.

Any ideas?

[Shonky]

My next question is what is the best way to test whether it is working and how do I configure it in MythTV? Is is as easy as setting up the channels in Shepherd and tying together the Capture Card and Input Source? Because I have tried this I can't seem to get it to work. I'm really after an answer to the following questions:

1. Does the output from sacs-ng look correct?
2. How do I test it is working properly?
3. How do I set it up in MythTV?

Cheers

1) Looks pretty OK, but you won't know until you try and tune a channel
2) Set it up in MythTV
3) Just configure MythTV to use the virtual tuner created by sascg. You should be able to scan but will need to enable "encrypted channels" during the scan.

[covert]

Shonky I to get missed keys and get a 10 second gap in a show but it only happens about once in a 45 min show now if at all. Since changing to vdapu and having my CPU free most the time it has help.

Try disabling commercial flagging for a day or 2. It uses up a lot of CPU. Use top to check there is not anything miss behaving.

I need to take my own advice and disable commercial flagging myself to see if it fixes it for good.

[Shonky]

Not sure that would be the problem for me but I do run commercial flagging whilst recording. My MythTV box has a fair bit of CPU behind it. It's a AMD X2 4600 (dual core). Commercial flagging an SD channel only takes about 30% of one CPU so there's definitely a lot of headroom.

I will give it a try though. At least if it happens the same amount I can rule it out.

I thought getting the key would not be CPU intensive. I would expect the decrypting to be CPU intensive but that's done by sasc-ng and even then I'd still expect it to decrypt and perhaps buffer up the data a bit.

It is a bit random though. Sometimes it's good and sometimes it's quite bad.

[covert]

Seems like the same specs as my system. 2GB AMD2 4800. Turn of commercial flagging and take not if it occurs more often when watching as opposed to when it is idle. Using VDPAU in both xbmc and mythtv has seemed to reduce my dropped keys to very few.

[Shonky]

3GB RAM here with multiple drives effectively spreading the load from the multiple tuners (I have 2 x Dual USB DVB-T and 2 x PCI DVB-C)

OK. I am trying it. But really it's not a long term solution and really shouldn't make any difference. It's quite effective so I'd prefer to keep it if possible. Doing that I can't even run it afterwards since it may be recording something else by then.

I'm not using the VDPAU stuff yet (don't really see the need to be honest since I've got enough CPU to even play HD without issue).

Have you seen any reference to CPU load affecting getting keys?

[covert]

I have not seen any reference to CPU load. It is just a theory I had. I don't recommend you use it as a long term solution, just to test it. My setup is almost the same as yours. 2 x dvb-t 2 x dvb-s. Only one of my drives holds Myth recordings but I have not seen any spikes in HD loads I needed to deal with. At one stage I did have to enable slow deletes in Myth setup since my HD was going to 100% load when deleting large files.

Also I might if played with nice at some stage and increased the priority of open-sascng. Will check my notes.

[Shonky]

Well I've applied "nice -n -19" to both my newcs.i686.usb and sasc-ng process.

Seems to be working better so, but it does depend on the channel it seems and sometimes is better than others.

At this stage I've left the commflagging on.

[Shonky]

Me again. An Update:

Niceing the processes (newcs and sasc-ng) to -19 didn't make any real difference. Some channels seem better than others for some reason. e.g. Discovery Channel is quite a bit better than National Geographic.

So I managed to change from newcs (with radegast protocol) to radegast (with radegast protocol) as my card server.

Basically the same result although when a key is missed, the amount of the stream lost is more like 1 second instead of 10 seconds. So it's a little better but still not great and quite annoying really. If it was 1 miss an hour it that would almost be acceptable, but it's more like 1 a minute when it's at its worst.

Is the problem really a "missing key" do you think? The logs don't seem to reflect that.

Not sure what to try now really. There must be something simple to this.

[covert]

Having a battle with my dvb-t tuners atm. When I have some time we should try recording the same show at the same time and see if we get the same results. Mythbackend log shows encrypted when it happens. Need to check what newcs / sasc-ng logs are doing at the same time. With the 2 of us banging our heads together we might get somewhere.

[Shonky]

I'm pretty certain any glitches are going to be random so recording the same thing at once might not tell us much. We can try if you want though. Something likely to please us both...

Obviously yours is working better than mine at the moment. Either that or I'm fussier than you.

Using radegast I found I seemed to get more glitches but the amount of data lost was significantly less. So I've changed back to NewCS for now. I have it set up so it's easy to switch over.

I hadn't really looked at the MythTV backend log much yet. I probably should. If it's saying encrypted then that's a fair sign the key is wrong or late or something. Hmm... There are a bunch of "Encrypted" lines in there at random times but generally they appear immediately after a recording is started (note the time is often on the hour and the pair is probably the audio and video) so perhaps just the first packet until the key comes through. I will watch for this some more.

2009-04-09 02:00:05.668 PID 0x3f3 status: Encrypted
2009-04-09 02:00:07.076 PID 0x3f4 status: Encrypted
2009-04-09 10:00:05.850 PID 0x41b status: Encrypted
2009-04-09 10:00:07.189 PID 0x41c status: Encrypted
2009-04-09 13:52:57.693 PID 0x439 status: Encrypted
2009-04-09 13:52:57.699 PID 0x43a status: Encrypted
2009-04-09 15:46:40.363 PID 0x439 status: Encrypted
2009-04-09 15:46:40.466 PID 0x43a status: Encrypted
2009-04-09 15:47:36.942 PID 0x43a status: Encrypted
2009-04-09 15:47:37.544 PID 0x439 status: Encrypted
2009-04-09 17:37:13.281 PID 0x439 status: Encrypted
2009-04-09 17:37:13.283 PID 0x43a status: Encrypted
2009-04-09 17:40:03.008 PID 0x43a status: Encrypted
2009-04-09 22:00:06.304 PID 0x3fd status: Encrypted
2009-04-09 22:00:07.122 PID 0x3fe status: Encrypted
2009-04-09 22:38:21.132 PID 0x43a status: Encrypted
2009-04-09 23:00:06.510 PID 0x3fd status: Encrypted
2009-04-09 23:00:06.964 PID 0x3fe status: Encrypted
2009-04-10 07:00:05.842 PID 0x41b status: Encrypted
2009-04-10 07:00:06.509 PID 0x41c status: Encrypted
2009-04-10 10:53:06.797 PID 0x444 status: Encrypted
2009-04-10 12:19:50.587 PID 0x43a status: Encrypted
2009-04-10 12:19:51.247 PID 0x439 status: Encrypted

[nic55]

Anyone able to help me out with a channels.conf or the correct syntax for scan on IS8?

Not sure of the fec for is8?, i assume can see freq/sec out of my dm, this is an included sample for C1.
# freq pol sr fec
S 12278000 H 30000000 2/3
S 12305000 H 30000000 2/3
S 12358000 H 27000000 2/3


Cheers.

[lovely2]

I'm pretty certain any glitches are going to be random so recording the same thing at once might not tell us much. We can try if you want though. Something likely to please us both...

Obviously yours is working better than mine at the moment. Either that or I'm fussier than you.

Using radegast I found I seemed to get more glitches but the amount of data lost was significantly less. So I've changed back to NewCS for now. I have it set up so it's easy to switch over.

I hadn't really looked at the MythTV backend log much yet. I probably should. If it's saying encrypted then that's a fair sign the key is wrong or late or something. Hmm... There are a bunch of "Encrypted" lines in there at random times but generally they appear immediately after a recording is started (note the time is often on the hour and the pair is probably the audio and video) so perhaps just the first packet until the key comes through. I will watch for this some more.

I have the same glitching problem. It almost never happens on sci-fi or the movies channel, but happens all the time on TV1. I too thought it was load related, however It doesn't make any or much difference reducing/removing all the load.

It started happened when all the pids where changed back about 8 or so months ago. When we started getting the videocrypt II keys, as well as the nds2 keys in the stream. (I think they started just rebroadcast the satellite data with no modification). I thought this might of been the cause, but modified opensasc-ng to ignore videocrypt, and it made no difference.

I'm running opensasc-ng and newcs, Mythtv makes no difference because the glitches are still there when you do recordings on the cmd line.

[couchpotato]

Im running a similar setup and have the same issues. It seems to be only on the channels which have dual dcw's instead of alternating odd/even cw's. It doesnt appear to happen at key time though.

I have a tt DVBC Full featured card with an the hardware CSA/ECD chip and I dont get these glitches on this card.

My other card a budget DVBS using FFDECSA has these glitches. This tells me the issue is somewhere in the software ffdecsa implementation.

We can try to fix or wait till some others have the same issue and a fix is committed.

Andy

[covert]

Here is a interesting thread that might be related to the lost key problem. Trying to wrap my head around it all now. First trying to work out how to put sasc-ng into debug mode..

[Thalass]

Thanks for this thread, folks. I've been planning a Mythtv setup for a while (while the house is being built), and everything was fine until the missus said she wanted foxtel!

So now at least I know it's possible to intergrate foxtel with mythtv. I suppose the question is how do I get foxtel to rent me the card, but not the box?

[jalyst]

I've seen a few people mention....
SATELCO EasyWatch and the Technotrend C-1501.

Are these two the best when it comes to solid Linux support?
Does DVB-C even work properly?

I thought Foxtel kept their encoding mechanism a secret?
Hence one could not get a cam + decoder card + DVB-C tuner to work!

If they packaged tuner cards along with their plans I'd gladly pay for one but alas they dont!

[covert]

I've seen a few people mention....
SATELCO EasyWatch and the Technotrend C-1501.

Are these two the best when it comes to solid Linux support?
Does DVB-C even work properly?

I thought Foxtel kept their encoding mechanism a secret?
Hence one could not get a cam + decoder card + DVB-C tuner to work!

If they packaged tuner cards along with their plans I'd gladly pay for one but alas they dont!

I use DigiWave cards so I cannot comment on the other ones.

As for the Foxtel encoding mechanism I highly recommend you spend some time reading these forums, including all of this thread.

[jimbo123]

Not sure of this, so figured I'd ask in this thread,.. I thought I read somewhere that the SAT card needed to be local to the frontend box, i.e. in a combined FE/BE environment.

Is that the case ? Or can it be just as the DVB-T setups, where the tuners are associated with the BEs and FE can be separate hosts ?

Thanks,

Jim.....