104 replies to this topic

[Sjaaky]

Direct recording writes chunks of 512KB. This gives bursty traffic, but I don't think bursty traffic in itself is a problem.

Due to the invaluable help of dweeb4 I've found some bugs in zapstream. Thank you very much! They come down to differences between his dm500c and my dm500s and some differences in how his cable provider arranges channels etc. I'll try to fix those this week and I hope I can release a new version end of the week.

[RedFury]

Aha! So this affects Cable Tuners?
Hmm.

dweeb4: Maybe then your problem is going to be solved finally!

I was almost saving money for the trip to Ireland to see the box myself

[dweeb4]

Thank you both, especially Sjaaky for his tenaciousness in not giving up until he found the bugs - all I did was test his updates! I'm certainly looking forward to his final release & possibly the same techniques applied to the recording module!

Indeed RedFury, thank you also not giving up!

So your 500 gives error free direct recordings because they're satellite receivers? Is it the nature of the transmissions or tuners that is responsible for the error free effect, do you think ?

I'm sorry if every answer is followed by a question but so much to learn

[RedFury]

Don't bother. If you followed the swap-file thread a bit you'll see I'm as much curious as you!

[dweeb4]

Hey Red, I would still love to see an MPeg2Repair analysis of you error free direct recording when you get the time!

[RedFury]

Hmm, me too. The only thing thats keeping me is a dead DM500.
Trying to get it to work with a modified image at the time.

[dweeb4]

Maybe one of the Linux gurus could help me?

I want to automate the process above whereby every time I boot the box I have to kill inetd and start the new one to point to the new zapstream so I picked up this little snippet which should do the job but I have two questions:
ps | grep inetd | grep -v grep | awk '{ print $1 }' | xargs kill
inetd /var/etc/inetd.conf

It's not finding the /sbin/inetd process to kill - can anyone see what's wrong?
is there any script I can add it to which is started at every boot?

I know the answer is to leave the box turned on but I turn off all these electrics at night - safety & energy issues you know!

[Sjaaky]

killall inetd does the job.

[hemispherical1]

try creating a /var/etc/init file that contains:

killall inetd
inetd /var/etc/inetd.conf

.. it might work...

--
hemi

Ps. Not a Linux guru...

[dweeb4]

Thanks guys,
will do that

[dweeb4]

Flawless streaming now with zapstream - I recorded the stream & it shows 5 frame errors in 1hr 15mins, so not technically flawless but visually perfect!

File Size Processed: 1.75 GB, Play Time: 01h:15m:18s
720 x 576, 25.00 fps, 7.98 Mbps (2.90 Mbps Average).
Average Video Quality: 14.18 KB/Frame, 0.28 Bits/Pixel.
MPEG Audio.
5 of 112964 video frames found with errors.
0 of 0 audio frames found with errors.
41941 corrupted video bytes in file.

[RedFury]

Flawless streaming now with zapstream - I recorded the stream & it shows 5 frame errors in 1hr 15mins, so not technically flawless but visually perfect!

After a hard fight with your dreambox, I'm glad you finally got it working the way you want!
Let this be an example for all other disbelievers in the DM500's recording capabilities! :smt041

[dweeb4]

Thanks Redfury,
I agree with your sentiments - now to get the same techniques applied to the recording module for direct recording - I did this recording using the following VLC command on the PC:

vlc.exe http://192.168.0.24:31344 :sout=#duplicate{dst=display,dst=std{access=file,m ux=ts,url=c:\jk.ts}}

So as you can see it's a manual recording to jk.ts .Still want to be able to do timed recordings and again I would hope that the next version of Helenite could include an option to turn off TV playback in the hope that it could eliminate the last vestiges of errors you see above.

[bartender]

Did this change make it's way into Iolite... as I have been having problems with my Cable tuner doing direct recordings using Iolite 2008 Edition.

Or was this doing streaming via Streamts / zapstream over the network, not recording to a CIFS/SMBFS share.

[Sjaaky]

We didn't change recording in Iolite. I must still apply zapstream techniques to improve direct recording. I hope to finish this before the next release.

[bartender]

Any way I could do anything to help this, if you could PM me any code updates I would be happy to test / recommend any changes.

It's a bit annoying with the DM500C, as I have near flawless recordings on the 500S, the 500C gives me slightly more choppy recordings on almost exactly the same hardware. It's very noticeable on the higher bitstream channels that run at ~6MB/s in 720x576 rather than the regular non-widescreen 544x576 channels.

I have modified / rebuilt the Iolite 2008 image with the following options:
DVR - Updated the insmod cifs line to have larger R&W buffers as per one of the first posts in this thread + mounted the SMBFS NAS with increased R&W settings as well.

Streaming - streamts: Using updated streamts from ridax. Probably gives me the best streaming of the bunch.
Streaming - zapstream: Using stock Iolite 2008
Streaming - streampes: using stock Iolite 2008, also tried streampes from bitcontrol site. Using Digital TV Link from Bitcontrol as well integrating into WMP & System tray.

So far the best I get is from using the ridax streamts, better than zapstream & streampes, which give me equal quality streaming off the 500C. The DVR recordings with insmod cifs and mounting tweaks gives me the worst recordings. But still they are ok... just not good enough for future playback.

However it's the pesky direct recordings that I can't seem to get solved on the 500C. The 500S streams a lot better than the 500C... go figure.

Am happy to give someone a 500C with cable connection remote ssh access if they need something to test against. The cable provider here use Irdeto cards so it's using CCcam 2.0.5 to unblock the channels, would love it if there were FTA channels on the cable so then I could do a comparison without needing a softcam. As the 500S is recording FTA channels so no softcam is needed. Unsure if the lack of softcam is meaning that the load on the 500S is less so the recordings are fine. Food for thought.

[shogo]

If you got problem with recording on DM500 you shuld try to decrease network speed, my guess is that it gets mor stable, run telnet to the box and run the following command: ifconfig eth0 10baseTX-HD and then do a reboot, i got less errrors on recording when using this. If you want the old networksettings back run: ifconfig eth0 100baseTX-FD

[timo2]

Maybe some of you will find it useful. A small script which tests network speed borrowed from http://wiki.dbox2-tu...eutrino:Skripte. Originally, it is for nfs mounts but I suppose it can be easily changed to handle also cifs mounts.

#!/bin/sh
# IP of your NFS server
serverip=192.168.0.1
# exported directory on your NFS server
exportdir=/var/exports/dbox2
# mount point on dbox
dboxmountpoint="/mnt"
# filesize to transfer in MBytes.
# At least 8 MByte. Good values are 32 or 64 MByte.
# Try 128 to be more accurate (takes much longer!)
filesize=32
# block sizes to test in KBytes, possible values are 1 2 4 8 16 32.
# values have to be separated with spaces. See examples below.
# blocksizelist="4 8 32"
# blocksizelist="16"
blocksizelist="4 8 16 32"
# wether to enable synchronous reading, writing. Possible values are "yes"
# or no. Normally synchronous reading or writing should be slower than
# asynchronous, so to save some time most people would say "no" here.
enablesynctests="no"


##################################################################
########             don't edit below this line           ########
##################################################################

bs=8192
count=`expr $filesize \* 1048576 / $bs`
wlist=""
rlist=""
synctests="async"
if [ $enablesynctests = "yes" ]; then
  synctests="sync "$synctests
fi

echo
echo "Measuring NFS throughput..."
for factor in $blocksizelist
do
  for protocol in udp tcp
  do
    for synchronized in $synctests
    do
       size=`expr $factor \* 1024`
       bitcount=`expr $bs \* $count \* 8`
       umount $dboxmountpoint 2>/dev/null
       mount -t nfs -o rw,soft,$protocol,nolock,$synchronized,rsize=$size,wsize=$size $serverip:$exportdir $dboxmountpoint
       echo "Mount options: "$protocol", "$synchronized", wsize="$size
       echo "writing "$filesize" MBytes..."
       a=`date +%s`
       dd if=/dev/zero of=$dboxmountpoint/test bs=$bs count=$count 2>/dev/null;
       if [ $? = "0" ]
       then
         z=`date +%s`
         duration=`expr $z - $a`
         throughput=`expr $bitcount / $duration`
    echo "Success after "$duration" seconds"
       else
         throughput="Failure"
    echo "Failure"
       fi
       wlist=$wlist$throughput" with "$protocol","$synchronized",wsize="$size"\n"
       
       echo "Mount options: "$protocol", "$synchronized", rsize="$size
       echo "reading "$filesize" MBytes..."
       a=`date +%s`
       dd of=/dev/null if=$dboxmountpoint/test bs=$bs count=$count 2>/dev/null;
       if [ $? = "0" ]
       then
         z=`date +%s`
         duration=`expr $z - $a`
         throughput=`expr $bitcount / $duration`
    echo "Success after "$duration" seconds"
       else
         throughput="Failure"
    echo "Failure"
       fi
       rlist=$rlist$throughput" with "$protocol","$synchronized",rsize="$size"\n"
       echo
    done
  done
done

echo "Results for write throughput:"
echo -e $wlist | sort -nr | sed 's/^\([0-9]*\)\([0-9]\{3\}\)\([0-9]\{3\}\(.*\)\)/\1.\2 Mbit\/s\4/g'

echo "Results for read throughput:"
echo -e $rlist | sort -nr | sed 's/^\([0-9]*\)\([0-9]\{3\}\)\([0-9]\{3\}\(.*\)\)/\1.\2 Mbit\/s\4/g'

One can easily find optimal buffer sizes for his network

[ksada2]

I always put the next lines in my rcS. The reason I put them there is not because it's better for performance, but because it's easier for me to prepare an image after I installed it with flash wizard pro.

echo 50 > /proc/sys/vm/dirty_writeback_centisecs
echo 200 > /proc/sys/vm/dirty_expire_centisecs

#extra cifs options
rmmod cifs
insmod /lib/modules/2.6.9/kernel/fs/cifs/cifs.ko CIFSMaxBufSize=64000

#mount /hdd
mount -t cifs -o user=jack,pass=pw,rsize=8192,wsize=8192,nobrl,forcedirectio //192.168.1.6/hdd /hdd

#mount dvds
mount 192.168.1.6:/mnt/dvd /hdd/dvd -o rw,soft,udp,nolock,rsize=4096,wsize=32768

Hi everyone,
After 12 months of trying all images under the sun, I have tried the latest Helenite and really like it! Especially the Radio Times EPG plugin, and the general picture quality.

Sjaaky,
I'd like to ask you what you mean by your "rcS" ? and also why you use different rsize settings for your DVD mount? Lastly what does "insmod /lib/modules/2.6.9/kernel/fs/cifs/cifs.ko CIFSMaxBufSize=64000" do and where do I need to add that?

I mounted my share via the web interface, and added "nobrl,forcedirectio" in the Extra field, as I was unsure what rcS was.
It produces very bad recordings though, even worse than the latest Gemini did! However, I have one or two recordings that a friend made with his 500+ and they play back very nicely.
Is there anything I may have done wrong here, or can improve, before I throw in the towel and go and buy a different receiver?

Many thanks to the whole PLi team for creating this image.
Ksada2

[Sjaaky]

That's too bad. rcS is a file in /etc/init.d, but it's only writable with multiboot. You might use /var/etc/init for this purpose. It probably doesn't exist, but it will be executed on startup if it exists.

Did you supply the rsize and wsize parameters with your mount? I guess there are more reports of forcedirectio worsening recordings. Maybe it doesn't help for all of us.

The reason for using nfs instead of cifs for DVD playback is because nfs didn't stutter as cifs did. But cifs does a better job in recording. The 500+ is a different box, better network performance, more memory, newer kernel, different drivers.

You can always buy a different receiver to be sure. I'm currently improving the recording code. Results are promising, but I can't say it will ever be pixel perfect.

To be sure your box and network are capable enough you can try zapstream. Start vlc and open a networkstream to http://<ip-of-dreambox>:31344 . The helenite version doesn't work well with wifi tough, the Iolite version does.

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