Messages

Hi all.

A recent test1.sh from wellenvogel solved the problem: http://www.wellenvogel.de/software/vomp/test1.sh

Thanks yo very much Andreas. Great work.

ekluba.

Hi all.

Some tests regarding the sound quality issue had the following results:

- mp3 files worked perfectly
- mp3 streams worked without any quality at all
- using a FIFO to buffer the stream didn't make any difference
- copying a short mp3 file to the FIFO before reading the stream to this FIFO with wget does the trick.

Great. A small buffer with mp3 sound. (How small? We will see.)

To turn this into a nice feature a script may read the name of the station to the FIFO: "You are now listening to <Name of Radiostation>." Could be enough material. Or may be we have to add "on vomp version ...."

Thanks to all of you. Computing and radio are much more compatibel than computing & tv.

Have fun
ekluba.

Hi all.

My MVP now streams internet radio simply using VOMP. No patches etc. so far.

The search for this feature once more showed how poor VOMP is documented. There are only few examples on the net and you have to find out that VOMP knows directories and commands to be able find to find a few brief descriptions on how this works. Chris once thought of a wiki. Good idea. Please start it. I would like to contribute. At least with providing empty links pointing to topics I need to know more about.

But now back to streaming internet radio with vomp:

According to the net all you have to do is add a [Media] section to vomp.conf


This is how the distributed vomp.conf ends:

## Base directory for TFTP server
## If you leave this blank the plugin config
## path will be used - i.e. where this file is

TFTP directory = /usr/share/vdr-plugin-vompserver
#---------------------------------------------------------------------

This is what you may add:

[Media]
#
Dir.1=/mnt/nas/audio
Dir.Name.1=AUDIO
#
Command.Extension.8=dir
Command.Type.8=LIST
Command.Name.8=/usr/local/bin/test1.sh
#
Command.Type.10=AUDIO
Command.Name.10=/usr/local/bin/test1.sh
Command.Extension.10=http-audio
#


The channels are described in directory /mnt/nas/audio
For testing I have added one channel: Deutschlandfunk;/http://dradio-mp3.t-bn.de/dlf128k_live.http-audio
to file radio.dir:

<myserver>:/mnt/nas/audio# cat radio.dir
Deutschlandfunk;/http://dradio-mp3.t-bn.de/dlf128k_live.http-audio
<myserver>:/mnt/nas/audio#

This works. VOMP know presents "radio.dir" and it's contents for selection and my audio equipment now produces enough output to clearly identify "Deutschlandfunk". The quality is very low indeed. I hope to find out how to improve it. Again without using patches.

Any ideas on how to produce crystal clear sound quality?

TIA
ekluba.

Hi rdoac.

Thanks. Never seen this before. Good to know it is possible to put it to work without a patch.

Most of what this solution does is understandable from the script. As far as I can see mplayer and ffmpeg do some conversion. From asx files to MVP compatibel format. My favourite channel here offers flash, wmp, ogg and mp3/m3u. But hopefully this is even easier to transform if not directly usable. But for know I'd be interested to know what vdr-iptv is used for? Does it provide OSD channel selection? Or MVP Radio or Media channel selection? Having no OSD on my budget vdr only the latter would be usable for me.

ekluba.

Hi All.

Right now I am trying to play internet radio over MediaMVPs running vomp. (TV works for years now.) I have spent some hours searching and tried vdr-plugin-mp3 but this seems to work only with full featured cards. (I have a budget system and no reason so far to "upgrade" it.)
AFAIK the only chance to play internet radio with MVPs are patches developed by AVVDR and/or Andreas Vogel. But a patched vdr installation is harder to maintain...

Any ideas?

TIA
ekluba.  

Hi izeman.

It may help to switch power off and on again. Up to three times or until success.

If you want to know why read the following:

I have three mvp. Revision H4. Two of them just work. The third one fails to reboot when powered down. How long it is powered down doesn't seem to be important. I tried several intervalls. Between seconds up to a quarter of an hour. No differences. What always helped was to repeatedly switch power off and on. I didn't need to do this more than 2 or 3 times.

The same mvp has another bad habit: It sometimes freezes a few minutes after cold start. The only remedy is to power it off and on again. Maybe it works only properly if it's internal temperature is high enough? But that's only a guess.

Coud be interesting to start a query to all users. Maybe it's a hardware or firmware problem.

Hope this helps
ekluba.

Warning: this topic has not been posted in for at least 120 days.
Unless you're sure you want to reply, please consider starting a new topic.

I have a quite similar setup with a ds101j acting as dhcp server (with optware packages).
Here is the setup I use (always nfs rooted dongle - but alos works for normal of course).
NSLU2 should be very similar.
(/opt)/etc/dhcpd.conf
....

Hi Andreas.
The forum software ist right. This topic was indeed asleep for more than 120 days... A year has passed since. During this time my vdr/vomp/mvp configuration worked without any failures. Something else came in. An old IBM Thinkpad replaced the nslu2. A lot more cpu, mem, storage and only 2 Watts more power consumption.

During this activities I remembered my promise here to try to load the dongle.bin from the server instead from vdr. So i tried this along the guideline of your posting.
Meanwhile I can invoke tftp from any other client and get dongle.bin. Works. But my mvp's are not impressed at all. A tcpdump shows an mvp get's it's ip from dhcp3-server. But after this it sends a broadcast on port 16881. I assume it searches it's server.

Hm. All my mvp's are revision H4. What are your's? Can you tell me? And perhaps post a tcpdump of the booting process?

TIA
ekluba.



Anyway. If you read this you might be able to help me. So please have a look.

Hi again.

Problem solved by adding mvprelay to the server.

This means that all information on booting (like bootp, booting, file-name, next-server) in dhcpd.conf is meaningless to the mvp startup process.  Everything worked well with these options removed from dhcpd.conf (and after restarting dhcpd3-server) and with mvprelay, bootp and tftp set to "no" in vomp.conf.

It seems to me many people have to spend too much time to find out what is going on during mvp's startup process. It would be good to have a description in a central place....

Thank's to all of you.
ekluba.

Hi hondansx.

Thank you for the hint on the full duplex patch of the vompclient. Maybe I will give it a try in the future.

For now I am more interested to stabilize the loading process. And - as Chris pointed out - it is the Haupauge firmware which is responsible for the half duplex settings. So I will first try to update the Hauppauge firmware and then or additionally try to find out which network settings or hardware characteristics are responsible for the loading problems.

@all
I will report on the results.

Kind regards
ekluba.

Hi Chris.

If the configured behaviour is the same the different behaviour at runtime may appear because of timing considerations. Perhaps the following test results may help:

The mvp in our studio works fine. Another mvp in our cellar forever did "Loading application" followed by "Failure to .. GUI ..". And this didn't change after both mvps were exchanged.  Studio worked. Cellar didn't.

Both mvps were connected to different switches. A third switch exchanged the one in the cellar. Same problem. Then the mvp in the cellar was directly connected to the main switch of the household. And it worked fine.

(All switches are 10/100 Mbps or above. All mvps are H4. vdr is an up-to-date tobi (including vomp).)

Other devices - PCs - don't have problems while connected to the respective switches. No problems playing vdr video recordings with vlc.

Speculation:
Is it possible that vomp-client is timed out by other equipment? Perhaps because this equipment uses full duplex while vomp-client uses half duplex?

Greetings
ekluba.

Hi again again.

Now I'am puzzled. Home again after nearly one week if find my mvp able to play fast forward. !

The mvp was booted last weekend several times when i tried to find out what was wrong and the vdr was restarted. The only thing that might make the difference is that the vdr hat several reboots within that period. (A server (nslu2) wakes it via WOL before the next recording.)

What did i miss? Any ideas?

Tia.
ekluba.

ekluba: This can't really be anything to do with your fast forward problem. What version of VDR are you using?

Everything on my vdr is taken from tobi:
vdr:~# dpkg -l|grep vdr
ii  vdr                               1.6.0-6ctvdr1                        Video Disk Recorder for DVB cards
ii  vdr-addon-tvmovie2vdr             0.5.14-1                             VDR addon for using online programme guides
ii  vdr-plugin-vompserver             0.3.0-2                              vdr-plugin for vdr on mediamvp(VOMP)
ii  vdr-vompclient-mvp                0.3.0-1                              mediamvp client firmware for vomp
ii  vdradmin-am                       3.6.2-1                              Web-based administration tool for vdr

ekluba.

It sounds like the ver file from the e-tobi package is old.

ekluba, you are correct - to get this working the ver file needs to be regenerated from the dongle file. This can be done like this:

Code Select Expand

dd if=vomp-dongle-0.3.0 of=vomp-dongle-0.3.0.ver bs=1 count=40 skip=52

@Chris.

Using

Code Select Expand

dd if=vomp-dongle-0.3.0 of=vomp-dongle-0.3.0.ver bs=1 count=40 skip=52

didn't work for h3 and h4 in the past if the version number in the mvp was too big. Looking in the 0.3.0 version of dongle.bin it looks as if a maximum version number is used. Is this correct? If so I will change the wiki article appropriately since the above command is a lot easier to use then to download an additional script from somewhere else.

BTW: how will tobi knew it's using the old dongle.bin.ver?
ekluba.

Also the dongle might not boot on wireless MVPs as I haven't fiddled the version numbers yet.

That's true. My H4s didn't boot until the version numbers were increased. See:
http://www.loggytronic.com/forum/index.php?topic=355.0

Greetings
ekluba.

Hi again.

Perhaps there ist something else beside the version number ...

What i have done is to create the vomp-dongle-0.3.0.ver from the vomp-dongle-0.3.0 file installed from tobi. I did it with the script
create-dongle-bin-ver.sh from http://www.vdr-wiki.de/wiki/index.php/MediaMVP_-_create-dongle-bin-ver
.

What i have done in steps:

# cp vomp-dongle-0.3.0.ver hd vomp-dongle-0.3.0.ver.tobi
# create-dongle-bin-ver.sh vomp-dongle-0.3.0 vomp-dongle-0.3.0.ver

The resulting files look very different. As follows.

#hd vomp-dongle-0.3.0.ver.tobi
00000000  00 00 00 00 39 40 00 00  01 08 00 00 00 00 00 00  |....9@..........|
00000010  15 89 00 00 01 08 00 00  00 00 00 00 16 89 00 00  |................|
00000020  01 08 00 00 00 00 00 00                           |........|
00000028
# hd vomp-dongle-0.3.0.ver
00000000  48 43 57 20 4d 56 50 00  00 00 00 28 00 01 00 00  |HCW MVP....(....|
00000010  01 01 00 00 80 80 ff 03  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  |................|
00000020  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00                           |........|
00000028

The mvp now loads the dongle.bin. I can watch live TV and recordings. But there is a problem I didn't had with the old version: Pressing fast forward ends the replay. By now i do not know if this has got something to do with the contents of the dongle.bin.ver.


ekluba

Hi posde.

You are right.
I tried Version 0.3.0 from tobi with a H4 and it failed to connect unless the version number in the dongle.bin.ver was increased.

Good luck.
ekluba.