[addon] BTVSmartie 5.0 (July 24 Update)

[ZetaVu]

79DieselRabbit, I was going to make a second monitor for my recording tuners, I wanted to use something like ledsdriver, but I need to figure out how to setup the tuner events. In BTVsmartie, I have it set to put up a string when a particular tuner is recording (tuner1 recording, lcd displays #1, etc) Could you tell me what event you monitor to make this happen? (or whatever phrasing is appropriate)

Thanks

[mpp_mpp]

Originally Posted by ZetaVu

79DieselRabbit, I was going to make a second monitor for my recording tuners, I wanted to use something like ledsdriver, but I need to figure out how to setup the tuner events. In BTVsmartie, I have it set to put up a string when a particular tuner is recording (tuner1 recording, lcd displays #1, etc) Could you tell me what event you monitor to make this happen? (or whatever phrasing is appropriate)

Thanks

I don't want to hijack this thread

There are no events in the sdk you have to monitor different areas to see if you are recording

use BTVDispatcher.GetActiveRecordings part of the sdk to see if you are recording right now and for how long

you can also use the BTVScheduler.GetUpcomingRecordings to get when the next record is to occur (so you don't have to constantly peg the Dispatcher method to see if you are recording)


Of course this does not do live tv (have to look at BTVLiveTVManager.GetSessions)

if you want to talk more about this lets move the conversation to the Development Discussion

[79DieselRabbit]

What mpp said.

It basically just loops every x number of seconds polling these functions to get the status of the tuners...basically.

[ZetaVu]

Ok, started a thread here. http://forums.snapstream.com/vb/show...841#post306841

Specifically I am looking for what btvsmartie uses to say tuner1 or tuner2 is currently recording.

[79DieselRabbit]

Ahh, I think I understand your question now.

That's actually a pain in the a**.

To get the tuners, I use BTVSettings.GetDevices. The order of the devices in the returned propbag array happens to be the order of the tuners in the web admin. That's how I determine what tuner is what number.

For if a tuner is recording, The propbags returned by BTVDispatcher.GetActiveRecordings contain a "SourceGuid" property. If a tuner's "Guid" property matches an active recordings "SourceGuid", that tuner is recording.

LiveTV is a similar process, but with more steps.

[ZetaVu]

Ok, so say I know my tuner numbers, do I still need to do anything with BTVSettings.GetDevices? It sounds like if you call BTVDispatcher.GetActiveRecordings it will give you replies, one of which is the SourceGuid, or the id of the tuner in use. What I would want to do is have ledsdriver or whatever plugin poll this function and if the sourceguid matches one of the tuners I'm interested in, I can have it turn that led on, is this correct? (clearly I'm a novice but any help is appreciated)

[79DieselRabbit]

Well BTVSettings.GetDevices gets you your list of tuners which in turn gets you each tuners "Guid". If you already have that then all you need to do is match an active recording's "SourceGuid" to a tuner's "Guid".

[ZetaVu]

Cool, gives me a place to start. I'm playing with the outdated btv tutorial now, (told you I'm a n00b) and sadly it is not up to date with the current api (but I think I can figure out most of the issues). First goal is to get it to make the correct logical arguments, after that I'll worry about how it executes, if I just start a batch command to enter a user input in ledsdriver (which would make it universal for any plugin) or if it replaces ledsdriver (like the media portal plugin, which shoudl give me a starting point).

Long term, I'd like to see if I can use it to send a disable-remote and enable-remote commands to my STB via the serial controller, thus keeping family from changing channels during recordings.

[john1221]

Does this plugin display recording errors if they occur? I primarily would like to add a display to indicate if my HD-PVR is not working again so I know to reset it!

[ZetaVu]

Good question. As far as I can tell, no. There is a status parameter that you can assign to a tuner, but the only responses are "Live TV", "Recording", "Live TV/Recording", or "Idle". However, if when the HD PVR fails it locks in the recording position, you might be able to see this with a combination of tuner status and recording schedule. If nothing is scheduled to record and the status says tuner is recording you know you have an error.

Ideally since BTV will list the errors, would be nice if those would display directly. Unfortunately it looks like the author 79DieselRabbit hasn't been to the forums in a year and his website is down, but you could still try to email him.

Another option is to build a custom post process step that checks for errors at the end of a recording. There's been talk of this on other threads, and ideal solution would be to have it send a signal to an x10 module to powercycle the HD PVR, which in most cases corrects the error. If this is done early enough, and you set enough padding on your recordings, you could theoretically detect a bad start, reboot your HD PVR, and restart the existing recording without missing anything. Someone with a better feel of the API would probably need to write this.

[HomeyFour]

For anyone using this plugin, it looks like the .NET 4 recent update from Microsoft causes btvsmartie.dll to fail in LCD Smartie with an error of "external exception E0434F4D". Uninstalling the .NET 4 did the trick for me.

[SnakeDoctor]

Yes, I use it. Thanks for the heads-up.

[SmokeWatcher]

Thank you!