oldschool 7 Posted February 5, 2014 Share Posted February 5, 2014 I'm not sure if it matters, but I'm using Drive Bender to pool my hard drives on my server. LiveTV doesn't work at all for me at this point, and I can't even look at the Recordings menu on the WebUI. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
danswan 13 Posted February 6, 2014 Share Posted February 6, 2014 Oh, right, I'll do some reading up, thanks Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
danswan 13 Posted February 6, 2014 Share Posted February 6, 2014 I wonder if someone can answer a few questions, I'm really interested in this project and am considering buying a bit of hardware to utilise it, but I'm not sure about a couple of things. I'm a long-time WMC/MB2 user, however I gave up on live TV in WMC as the signal through the aerial is pretty poor and I couldn't rely on it. I have a virgin media cable box that we used for TV instead. I've recently moved to MB3 (currently using MB classic on the HTPC and I've also purchased the android app) and despite a few niggles I'm really impressed. I would like to adopt it a bit further by trying out the TV side of things and ditch the virgin box altogether (we only have the free channels on virgin). The MB3 server is in the loft and it wouldn't be too big a job to put a dish on the wall outside and run cable through to a DVB-S2 card in the server (I've not got a card yet). From my understanding, this means that providing I had enough available tuners I could then watch live and recorded TV on any connected device via the web client, and any other clients that adopt live TV in future. The real question comes down to WAF - for this to be doable I would need to have a seamless way to access live tv from the HTPC downstairs. I gather that currently this isn't really possible. Is it likely that live TV will be implemented in MB Classic in the not too distant future? Or alternatively is there/will there be a way of accessing it from within MB Classic? We tried MB Theater and it wasn't a hit with the wife but she likes MB Classic... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lee 204 Posted February 6, 2014 Share Posted February 6, 2014 ^you could do what you want now with dvblogic tv source. Sent by my HTC8X using Tapatalk Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lee 204 Posted February 6, 2014 Share Posted February 6, 2014 @@danswan within WMC that is.. Then use mediabrowser from there, until mb3 liveTV matures. Sent by my HTC8X using Tapatalk Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wallaceff 3 Posted February 6, 2014 Share Posted February 6, 2014 Not sure where to post this as there isn't a LIVE TV forum...Just wondering about other Live TV servers.... Specifically Argus TV... I messaged the developer but he says he is waiting on the MB team to get back to him? Any updates on this? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
moviefan 184 Posted February 6, 2014 Share Posted February 6, 2014 (edited) I am very interested in setting up this LiveTV and want to make sure that I understand everything right. I just read through this entire 30-page thread and think I understand most of the concepts but have some questions still so please bear with me. My main goal is just being able to watch actual LiveTV (not recorded) in different places eventually without putting cables boxes everywhere. I have other methods of obtaining recorded TV, so the primary purpose for our existing cable box is just my wife watching news and me watching sports and this would be the primary purpose of this setup as well. We live in the US and our cable provider is Comcast. I do not have any tuners besides the regular Comcast box right now so the first thing I am trying to do is select the right type of tuner. For my purposes I think a network tuner would be best and the recommendations I have seen seem to point to either the SiliconDust HD HomeRun Prime or the Ceton InfinitiTV 6Eth The Ceton is twice the price of the SiliconDust so my first question is if there is any legitimate reason to shell out the extra money for it versus the HDHomeRun outside of the six tuners versus three? We will never be watching more than two streams at once so that is not a feature that is needed. I also read on Ceton's FAQ that none of their solutions support the WMC environment being in a VM which I don't fully understand because how would it know or care? Has anyone tried this setup? I have seen several talking about upcoming products potentially from these companies so is there some reason I should be waiting before making a purchase? This isn't an urgent need for me but something I am interested in after reading through all these forums; so I am okay with waiting but if there is no reason to wait I'm also ready to start putting this together. I see a lot of people talking about how WMC is dying and everything; so is it a bad investment to get something like the HDHomeRun Prime? Or could this type of tuner also be utilized in the future with the other potential backends being disussed? My plan is to make a dedicated VM on my UCS chassis for this. I really can't stand Win 8 in general so would prefer Win 7 unless there is some feature I would be missing out on. Is there anything I should be considering in this regard? I have read about needing local storage to the WMC and I can provision as much storage as I want from the server so this should not be an issue. But are all of the recordings (if I were to record) stored here permanently and MBS is always just accessing them over the network and then streaming to clients that way or would it be somehow migrated to the MBS main storage eventually? If I don't have any recording scheduled setup and am only watching LiveTV would any of the storage even be used? Does anyone see anything wrong with this setup? Anything else I should be thinking about or considering as I set this up from scratch? Thanks! Edited February 6, 2014 by moviefan Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
scarecrow420 8 Posted February 6, 2014 Share Posted February 6, 2014 (edited) Ill leave others with direct experience ot comment on your network tuner questions but I agree I cant see how it wouldnt work from a VM, how would a network tuner know or care what the PC accessing it is... I also would expect any other backend that comes along, would be likely to be able to use these tuners as well so I dont think that's a concern. In terms of operating system, there is no problems running Windows 7 and you wouldnt be missing out on anything (in terms of WMC and ServerWMC backend). Yes the storage is used for LiveTV - we are actually recording the channel you are watching and then remuxing the WTV file to TS on the fly and MB3 server is then accessing that (over the network via a share on the ServerWMC box). You wouldnt need much storage if you are only watching live TV. Yes any recordings are also stored here permanently however we do have the ability to perform custom external actions on recording status change (eg cancelled, completed, etc) so you could use that to run a script that moves the completed recording to a share on your main MB3 storage area if you wanted to. You can even add that secondary network share as a "watched folder" in WMC which we would then also watch and when providing the list of available recordings to MB3 we would include recordings in either location, with the normal recording metadata (channel, show, etc) and all that as well. To give you an idea on specs, my ServerWMC server is a HTPC running a sandy bridge pentium G620, 4GB RAM, 60GB SSD, 250GB RecoredTV drive iSCSI mounted to a NAS over GB LAN, running windows 7. Not only does it completely handle any backend TV requirements it's also a completely capable HTPC running XBMC, 1080P video, bitstreamed HD audio etc etc. In other words, a very basic VM should suffice if you are only using it for a ServerWMC backend. I would think 1 or 2 vCPU and 2GB RAM if you can get away with it. I never go less than 50GB for an OS drive as they grow over time, and then allocate whatever you need to your recorded TV drive (also used for liveTV buffering etc) - perhaps 50GB as a starting point which Im sure would be ample ify ou dont record much or will be moving them elsewhere anyway. So yeah, it sounds pretty good - a VM running WMC configured to use the network tuners, and ServerWMC installed with the Recorded TV folder shared. Minimal HDD space allocated - probably 50GB would be plenty. Secondary watched folder on your normal MB3 server/storage and use our external actions to move completed recordings there. I dont see anything wrong with the setup and cant think of anything else I would consider "best practice" that you aren't already doing. Also, you have a UCS chassis at home? Lol... cool! Edited February 6, 2014 by scarecrow420 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mediacowboy 438 Posted February 6, 2014 Share Posted February 6, 2014 I will say if you buy a network based tuner that you can use it with other solutions. I am currently using the Prime with mediaportal and having no issues. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
moviefan 184 Posted February 6, 2014 Share Posted February 6, 2014 I dont see anything wrong with the setup and cant think of anything else I would consider "best practice" that you aren't already doing. Also, you have a UCS chassis at home? Lol... cool! Thanks for your response. Yah I have a full Cisco setup at my house. At my last job I consulted for a bunch of big enterprise companies and after leading one through a 30+ million dollar data center and campus re-architecture which was heavily Cisco gear they told me to just create a BoM for my personal use and I did not hesitate at the opportunity. Got about $75k worth of equipment for my house. Totally unnecessary but very cool in a geeky sort of way! :-) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ArCaDe 2 Posted February 7, 2014 Share Posted February 7, 2014 Hey Moviefan, I currently run mostly everything virtual, I have a Window 7 VM running MBS with no issues. I installed ServerWMC & the MBS plugin on it & only got LiveTV working twice. It would work once, then never again until I restarted both MBS & SWMC. I then put ServerWMC on a Zotac Zbox I use as a cable box on 1 TV & LiveTV via MB worked but when that was accessed it would freeze liveTV on the Zotac. So I have a VM I use for Gaming with a dedicated gfx card & I put SWMC on it & it works better but still works only sometimes. So i've given up on it now until there are some improvements. But running WMC on a VM is a bit of a pain. i actually have another VM I use for TV via WMC on another TV. It works but you have to make some change to get HDCP to pass since the VMWare vid driver isnt HDCP compliant. LiveTV via WMC works for me but you get a display driver error until you minimize & maximize the window which I have a button on my Harmony remote that runs a macro via Eventghost. Your lucky to have the Cisco gear & other stuff for free, I wish I had a client that was that giving, lol. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jcain 7 Posted February 7, 2014 Share Posted February 7, 2014 Thanks for your response. Yah I have a full Cisco setup at my house. At my last job I consulted for a bunch of big enterprise companies and after leading one through a 30+ million dollar data center and campus re-architecture which was heavily Cisco gear they told me to just create a BoM for my personal use and I did not hesitate at the opportunity. Got about $75k worth of equipment for my house. Totally unnecessary but very cool in a geeky sort of way! :-) i thought all of us were running highly unnecessary and overkill equipment in our homes??? surely we all have wives that equally hate this hobby of ours 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
scarecrow420 8 Posted February 10, 2014 Share Posted February 10, 2014 Hey Moviefan, I currently run mostly everything virtual, I have a Window 7 VM running MBS with no issues. I installed ServerWMC & the MBS plugin on it & only got LiveTV working twice. It would work once, then never again until I restarted both MBS & SWMC. I then put ServerWMC on a Zotac Zbox I use as a cable box on 1 TV & LiveTV via MB worked but when that was accessed it would freeze liveTV on the Zotac. So I have a VM I use for Gaming with a dedicated gfx card & I put SWMC on it & it works better but still works only sometimes. So i've given up on it now until there are some improvements. But running WMC on a VM is a bit of a pain. i actually have another VM I use for TV via WMC on another TV. It works but you have to make some change to get HDCP to pass since the VMWare vid driver isnt HDCP compliant. LiveTV via WMC works for me but you get a display driver error until you minimize & maximize the window which I have a button on my Harmony remote that runs a macro via Eventghost. Your lucky to have the Cisco gear & other stuff for free, I wish I had a client that was that giving, lol. It's hard to assist or trouble shoot without logs being posted. There shouldnt really be any situations where things work sporadically. We are interested in getting to the bottom of it if you are. So if you havent already, post some logs from ServerWMC and we will try to help! When referring to running it on the zbox and you say when MB3/ServerWMC liveTV worked it froze liveTV on the zbox, what do you mean there? What was playing liveTV on the zbox? When it comes to the TV tuners (even networked ones) just making sure you know, you can only have 1 machine "owning" those tuners and even more so, only ServerWMC and WMC will share the tuners correctly since they use the WMC database to share infromation about what tuners are in use etc. If you have a different application (eg MediaPortal or whatever) also attempting to access the tuners then things will not work well since neither application is aware of the other's use of tuners. Similarly if you have a networked tuner like HDHomeRun Prime etc, and try to have 2 different machines directly accessing the tuners, conflicts occur. Not sure if you are doing any of this or not, but when referring to LiveTV working on one place causes another to freeze up I thought I should at least mention it Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
blade005 172 Posted February 12, 2014 Share Posted February 12, 2014 WMC CHANNEL GROUPINGS Any chance that we could have an option to select a channel grouping view that we have set up in WMC in the GUIDE section of the WebUI? I would prefer to have a smaller and cleaner one page view in the WebUI of the channel grouping I have set up in WMC. Or, alternatively, an option to set up a channel grouping in the WebUI of FAVORITE channels. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
krustyreturns 191 Posted February 12, 2014 Share Posted February 12, 2014 @@blade005, We can import this on the serverwmc side (we do it in xbmc), but currently the mbs live-tv interface doesn't support channel groups. We did discuss doing it when we were putting this thing together but decided to wait as we had enough to do. So to answer your question, there is a very good chance. Helps to know people want it. I think its important too, especially when you have 700+ channels. We are looking at putting an option into swmc to have certain clients only have access to designated channel groups (a request from parents who have TVs in their kids bedroom and what to limit the channels they can view there). If we extend this to mbs, then the mbs interface wouldn't need to change - but it would be locked to only that channel group. 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wally007 6 Posted February 12, 2014 Share Posted February 12, 2014 Hello Krusty, I'm not sure where to post this as there is no Live TV section so I hope it's relevant to sWMC. Which app decides how Recordings are grouped and shown in the Web UI ? Is it sWMC or MBServer ? Reason I ask is that Recordings is one part of the WebUI that is NOT like WMC and groups recordings different way than they're visible in WMC. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Spaceboy 2498 Posted February 12, 2014 Share Posted February 12, 2014 @@blade005, We can import this on the serverwmc side (we do it in xbmc), but currently the mbs live-tv interface doesn't support channel groups. We did discuss doing it when we were putting this thing together but decided to wait as we had enough to do. So to answer your question, there is a very good chance. Helps to know people want it. I think its important too, especially when you have 700+ channels. We are looking at putting an option into swmc to have certain clients only have access to designated channel groups (a request from parents who have TVs in their kids bedroom and what to limit the channels they can view there). If we extend this to mbs, then the mbs interface wouldn't need to change - but it would be locked to only that channel group. Also to separate sd channels from hd channels for lower powered devices! Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
blade005 172 Posted February 12, 2014 Share Posted February 12, 2014 @@blade005, We can import this on the serverwmc side (we do it in xbmc), but currently the mbs live-tv interface doesn't support channel groups. We did discuss doing it when we were putting this thing together but decided to wait as we had enough to do. So to answer your question, there is a very good chance. Helps to know people want it. I think its important too, especially when you have 700+ channels. We are looking at putting an option into swmc to have certain clients only have access to designated channel groups (a request from parents who have TVs in their kids bedroom and what to limit the channels they can view there). If we extend this to mbs, then the mbs interface wouldn't need to change - but it would be locked to only that channel group. Krusty, Great to know it is under consideration for future versions. Thanks for all the great work. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
krustyreturns 191 Posted February 12, 2014 Share Posted February 12, 2014 @@wally007, Good question. The user interface stuff is all on the app side, my plugin and swmc just provide data and receive commands from the app via mbs' live-tv interface.. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wally007 6 Posted February 13, 2014 Share Posted February 13, 2014 @@krustyreturns, Thanks for letting me know. Now that we've got Live TV section I will try to take few screenshots and post it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
allen00se 18 Posted February 13, 2014 Share Posted February 13, 2014 Just wanted to say that I have been an XBMC/mythtv user for a few years, and even though I prefer linux I really dislike MythTV. So yesterday I set up a ServerWMC+MB3 backend and it was so simple it is ridiculous. My setup is as follows: IBM x3650 running VMWare ESXi 5.0 Multiple virtual guests one of which is Win7 x64 Ceton Infinitv 4 USB 1. I installed Ceton drivers for Win7 2. Set up Windows Media Center (since I am running a VM I had to do the hack to pass the DCA). 3. Installed ServerWMC 4. Installed MB3. Within about 30 minutes total I was watching liveTV on my web browser!! Keep in mind when I first set up my mythTV backend it took me a total of about 2 weeks and lots of headaches. So all that to say great work! My one beef is that I really don't like depending on Win7 but beggars can't be choosers. Also I am really digging the MediaBrowser backend for streaming videos over the web and editing metadata, this was a function that XBMC has been lacking. I do however still think that the XBMC frontend is much further along. I tried the MBT client for Windows 8 and although it was pretty, it had quite a bit of lag, and HD video playback was a bit choppy. Sorry about the rambling! -Krys 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
allen00se 18 Posted February 13, 2014 Share Posted February 13, 2014 Then give our XBMB3C client a shot and you can use Xbmc as your front-end. I might in time, I just dont want to dive all the way in before I am really sure of what I am going to use long term. Thanks again for all of your hard work! Oh and I am just curious what everyone else is seeing for channel tuning times? For example, from the web interface when I go to play live tv, from the moment I press play on a channel it seems like about ~8 seconds before i start receiving the video feed. Is that about normal? Is there anything I can do that would speed this up (better CPU, GPU, disk speed, etc)? -Krys Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mboehler 94 Posted February 13, 2014 Share Posted February 13, 2014 Like a lot of others on here, I have some questions regarding setting Live TV. I currently have Windows Home Server 2011 running on a SUPERMICRO 1U 2x L5420 Xeon QC 2.5GHz with 8GB RAM and a 500GB HDD. I run MB3 Server and MCM on it server, and that's basically it. I also have a Synology NAS with 12 TB of storage in it. This is where all my media goes. Then I have 4 Zotac Z-Boxes connected to TVs that we watch all of our TV shows and Movies on via MB Classic. I want to set up Live TV but would like some advice about the best way to do it. Should I get another box, like a Zbox for example, to install Win 7, WMC, and ServerWMC on? Or should I create a Virtual Machine to run under WHS 2011? Before I discovered Media Browser a couple of years ago, I was using Beyond TV. I do actually have two older XP machines that have been decommissioned and are sitting in the basement that have Hauppage tuners in them. I don't know if those cards would be of any use at all. I forget which models they are, but I don't think either of them would fit in the server if I tried to go that way. So I guess I will need to go with either a USB tuner or a network tuner. I haven't done much research into which tuner to buy, so advice on that would be helpful as well. Thanks so much! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Spaceboy 2498 Posted February 13, 2014 Share Posted February 13, 2014 It definitely takes a few seconds but as much as 8 is not normal. We'd probably need information about your setup in order to diagnose. really? seems reasonable from my experience. what is really key is testing change times through WMC and the MB3 plus serverwmc. as long as they are the same-ish then its fine. the dvblink backend to the wmc backend adds further delay to my setup i acknowledge Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
allen00se 18 Posted February 13, 2014 Share Posted February 13, 2014 really? seems reasonable from my experience. what is really key is testing change times through WMC and the MB3 plus serverwmc. as long as they are the same-ish then its fine. the dvblink backend to the wmc backend adds further delay to my setup i acknowledge So to clarify, are you saying that the MB3 web client should tune as fast as WMC does? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts