Dan_Austin 62 Posted December 29, 2020 Share Posted December 29, 2020 (edited) With the news that Silicon Dust would be killing off their new 6 tuner cablecard box, I went looking for options. As expected there wasn't much. I did not want a PCI or USB adapter, but could tolerate either if it worked with Emby. Again not much found. I then stumbled over the long defunct Ceton and their Eth6 tuner box. It was exactly what I wanted, absent Emby support. But it did lead to a couple of threads here that mentioned Cetopnproxy. It got me closer, but that is a Windows app, and not designed to be run as a service. I also found a used eth6 on ebay for a fair price. The final piece of the puzzle came together when I found a project on github that was a fork of locast2plex. It had a few key improvements, particularly a web interface to manage the channel list, and well structured code that kept all HDHR emulation code separate from the code to interact with the media source. Despite not knowing any Python when I started, I was able to use a packet capture between Cetonproxy and the eth6 to have a working prototype in a few days. The developer of the code I based the project on agreed to host the result with his other projects, so any updates to the core emulation code would be included. So after all that background, I'd like to announce fHDHR_Ceton located at https://github.com/fHDHR/fHDHR_Ceton It should be considered beta, as only one developer and one non-developer have installed it. As mentioned it is written in Python, depends on version 3.7 or later and has a fairly small number of package requirements. At the moment ffmpeg is needed by it to "rewrite" the Ceton RTP stream to the format Emby expects. The core (fHDHR) also supports VLC, but I have not been able to test that. Early next year there will be an attempt to remove the FFMPEG requirement. It is unclear if the Ceton PCI tuners will work with this. And due to a quirk of how the Ceton eth-series works, the device this app runs on should allow all UDP ports from 40000 to 49999 from the Ceton through any loca host-based firewall. Edited December 29, 2020 by Dan_Austin Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BillOatman 502 Posted December 30, 2020 Share Posted December 30, 2020 A little late I suppose, but there is also a open source Go Language app that makes IPTV look like a HDHomerun as well. Has a web UI for config etc. And works very well, and is not in python (my personal prejudice ) xTeVe Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Carlo 4331 Posted January 4, 2021 Share Posted January 4, 2021 I do not believe xTeVe works with a Ceton tuner however. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dan_Austin 62 Posted January 4, 2021 Author Share Posted January 4, 2021 It doesn't. This project was intended to try and make old, but still functioning Ceton stand-alone tuners work with Emby. I looked at several of the locast2plex forks and selected the fHDHR series for a couple of reasons. It is not intended to be an alternative to any other project, except Cetonpoxy which while fine, depends on a Windows platform being available. 1. It had a web GUI for channel management, so disabling unwanted channels before they got imported to Emby was possible 2. The code was cleanly separated, with the HDHR emulation in one set of files and the media source files in another. Which made writing the small number of functions to support the Ceton relatively easy. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BillOatman 502 Posted January 4, 2021 Share Posted January 4, 2021 Yeah I didn't expect xteve to work with the tuner out of the box. But more as a open source starting point for a proxy what would work with the addition of ceton specific functions like what was done. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Carlo 4331 Posted January 4, 2021 Share Posted January 4, 2021 Does the ceton tuners support BDA? If so and you have this on your OS then in the Next Version of Live TV (one in dev) the tuner should be directly supported. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
emveepee 112 Posted January 4, 2021 Share Posted January 4, 2021 The Cetons use the Windows DRI UPnP interface not Windows BDA for digital tuners. Martin 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Carlo 4331 Posted January 4, 2021 Share Posted January 4, 2021 Thanks for that info. I've never had a ceton tuner so I wasn't sure. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BillOatman 502 Posted January 5, 2021 Share Posted January 5, 2021 1 hour ago, cayars said: Does the ceton tuners support BDA? If so and you have this on your OS then in the Next Version of Live TV (one in dev) the tuner should be directly supported. Wow BDA support coming? That is great news! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Luke 37272 Posted January 5, 2021 Share Posted January 5, 2021 Yes, stay tuned. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dan_Austin 62 Posted January 5, 2021 Author Share Posted January 5, 2021 I do not have a Ceton PCI device to test, so I cannot say for certain this project will support them, from reading up on them, I think it might. The Ceton cable card devices are a bit odd, but for non-DRM channels, it does not take a lot of hoop jumping to get media flowing from them. The act of selecting and tuning a channel is just a series of three http POST commands. Where is gets odd is that the Ceton then sends an RTP stream to an IP:port that was specified in one of those POST requests. The good news is ffmpeg has no issues processing the RTP stream, but does need several seconds of media to figure out what it is, so tuning is not exactly fast, but not too far from a true HDHR. I suspect xTeve could have been a starting point, but the fHDHR_Locast code had all the core features needed and very little I didn't need to get started. I don't have a personal use for xTeve, so I wasn't familiar with the code. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BillOatman 502 Posted January 5, 2021 Share Posted January 5, 2021 20 hours ago, cayars said: Does the ceton tuners support BDA? If so and you have this on your OS then in the Next Version of Live TV (one in dev) the tuner should be directly supported. 18 hours ago, Luke said: Yes, stay tuned. Ohhh time to dig out some hardware it seems! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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