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Premium channels with Kodi WMC client and Server WMC


Sycorax

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Sycorax

I am so close to having access to premium channels on multiple Raspberry Pi's (running Kodi).

 

In general, all the software is working flawlessly. I have an HTPC running Win 7 with WMC and Server WMC fronting for an HDHomerun Prime and a Hauppauge HD PVR for a total of four tuners. Throughout the house house I have three Raspberry Pi's running Kodi with the WMC add-on.

 

As we know the HDHomerun Prime can only show DRM Restricted premium channels (HBO, Showtime, etc) on the host machine Running WMC. But the Hauppauge HD PVR tuner has no such restriction, since its tuner captures the video stream as it "passes through" the PVR rather than at the digital level, which is locked.

 

All of my Kodi Pi's can display the premium content with Live TV IF and only if the tuner selected is the Hauppauge tuner rather than one of the HDHomeRun prime tuners.

 

I've tried many things to influence which tuner Server WMC selects when opening a premium Live TV stream, to no avail (specifically, I have edited the channel sources in the Channel Editor in WMC on the host HTPC and I have fiddled with the configuration file settings in Server WMC).

 

Has anyone else found a solution that gets Premium content working on the raspberry Pi? Or does anyone know how to control which tuner is selected for specific channels in Live TV?

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krustyreturns

Editing the sources for the HBO channel should do it.  The obvious way would be to eliminate the hdhr primes as a source for hbo and just leave the hauppauge tuner.  What have you tried?

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Sycorax

First I reordered the tuners with the Hauppauge in the #1 slot in the hopes it would be selected when available. That didn't work. The Kodi's seem to choose the HDHomerun Prime tuners whenever they are available. I can force the Kodi's to select the Hauppauge tuner if that is the ONLY tuner checked, but while that almost gets me there, it is not ideal.

 

Most of what I record is on these premium channels. Obviously, it's great to be able to record multiple streams. IF my Kodi clients would respect the tuner order specified in the WMC Channel Editor or if I could specify which tuners the Kodi's have access to, I could watch a premium channel while recording another. If, however, the only way to get premium content on the Kodi's to is to restrict ALL of the premium content to the one Hauppauge tuner, then any scheduled recordings of premium content will fail if I happen to be watching premium content on one of the Kodi's.

 

I did experiment with changing the true/false setting in the Server WMC config file for the "OnlyCopyFreeTuner" and the "OnlyNoDetectDRMTuners" parameter . . . But that was just trial and error because it looked like it had something to do with tuner selection. It did not work.

 

Essentially, I'm happy to let my primary HTPC Windows Media Center handle all the recording tasks for my system. I'd just like to reliably have access to ALL my cable channels via LiveTV throughout the house via your excellent Kodi add-on on those beautiful little Raspberry Pi's.

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krustyreturns

Serverwmc by default takes the tuners in the opposite order to what is specified in the channel sources (long explanation as to why).  To make it take tuners in the same order, open the setting file for serverwmc and search for Decoy_LiveStreamProtectLevel, set it to:

 
  <Decoy_LiveStreamProtectLevel>0</Decoy_LiveStreamProtectLevel>
 
Then save the file and restart serverwmc.  
Edited by krustyreturns
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Sycorax

Reverse order? That's not a bug, it's a feature!

 

Knowing that the Kodi's will choose the tuners in reverse order and the primary HTPC running WMC will pick them in the order specified in the Channel Editor effectively solves my problem.

 

Specifically, I can set the tuner order in the channel editor to select my HDHomerun tuners first with the Hauppauge tuner in the last slot. Thus, when requesting a tuner for LiveTV (or presumably, a scheduled recording), any of the Kodi's will be assigned the Hauppauge tuner (which has no DRM restrictions) thus providing premium content via LiveTV to my networked Kodi's . . . AND when my WMC requests a tuner for recordings, it will reliably be assigned an HDHomerun tuner for the recording (which will play on the HTPC since DRM does not affect playback on the WMC machine that records it).

 

Yes it's true that I can only play recordings of premium content on my primary HTPC and they will not play on the Kodi's . . . But until such time as XBMC is blessed by the DRM Demon Police, I'm thinking this is about as good as it can be.

 

Thank you so much for fine work on this and for sharing your insights!

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Sycorax

The Kodi WMC client doesn't seem to select the tuner for a scheduled recording in the same manner as when viewing a LiveTV stream.

 

That's no big deal, but perhaps worth noting.

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krustyreturns

Right, that's because it's windows doing the recording not serverwmc - it just send recording commands to the windows recording service.  Live tv is being handled by serverwmc directly.

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  • 1 month later...

Did you have any luck with this?

 

I didn't even know this was a thing, cause I didn't have any DRM channels till yesterday.

 

I have a Win7 Pro TV Server with an infinitv 6 (internal).

 

Running serverwmc to serve several Linux/Kodi boxes, and Emby.

 

I finally thought I had the perfect, whole house + mobile solution.

 

Then I got Showtime.

 

Bah'

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  • 2 years later...

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