ePVision PHD-VRX Owners Thread - Page 4

I agree.


Fascinating. I wasn't aware that this DVR ran on water.


I think this is an excellent idea, but would modify it in two ways: provide a Duration field, instead of EndDate + EndTime. First off, because that's how I normally think of things , and translating to an end point gets annoying. But also because it completely avoids the problem of ambiguity introduced by DST transitions. [e.g. a half-hour program that starts at 1:30am and ends at 1am, because the interval from 1am-2am transpires twice.] And secondly, add a WhichDays field at the end, for regular periodic programming. This contains a list of days, with an empty list meaning 'doesn't repeat'. So "SMTWhFa" would mean every day of the week (with h=Thu, and a=Sat, because their first letter is already taken. Or use lower-case for those.). This makes it easy to specify M-F programming, or shifted Tue-Sat programming (late-nite shows). Or any other combination ("MWF").


Agreed.


Or be located on a network drive, if the DVR was told to look there for it.


I agree about the override, but I'm not sure whether it makes more sense to have this file "always there" (which makes it a bit more difficult for the DVR to know when it needs to read it because it changed). Or if, like a firmware update, it gets processed when it appears, then automatically gets deleted. That would be quick, simple, and easy for the DVR to handle. And the user only provides a new RecordingList file whenever they want to replace the current EventList in the DVR. [If you wanted to have it just add new items to the existing internal EventList, then you'd need to add a mechanism where you could specify item deletion.]


Absolutely. And it puts a lot of control back into the user's hands. PSIP data dependency will be an unending source of aggravation.
Edited by VideoGrabber - 6/13/12 at 3:01pm

This does not bode well for their ability to manage other external Guide info, when they can't even keep track of more than one channel's data at a time. I understand the limitations of PSIP, and the fact that you can't get at that data without actually tuning to the channel. But flushing that data, so painfully acquired, every time you change the channel, makes NO sense to me at all (unless they're severely RAM constrained, in which case they have a poor hardware design).

Bruce,

I meant to say "thanks" for the great job presenting lots of information, and all the time you've spent evaluating and testing the device. It's much appreciated.

My question is, will the folks at ePVision have someone following this thread? Or do we each need to accumulate all our comments and suggestions, and forward them directly to the company individually?

After reading your explanation of how it "works", I would not say that you are the one with egg on their face.


Fan-freaking-tastic! Drill, baby, drill! Could they not have buried it any deeper, or made it any more inconvenient to access?


It depends. If this was a game, with a maze full of twisty passages, many the same, and when you arrived at a destination what was possible depended on what treasures you had accumulated, THEN the UI on this DVR would be perfect. Unfortunately, this is NOT a game, and regardless of HOW you got to a particular screen, the options available to you should be the same. Why anyone would strive to make a UI even MORE complicated than it already has to be baffles me.

An external guide should not care if the box is receiving PSIP data. I know TVGOS and the TiVo guide don't care. I do agree that the box should keep track of what is valid data when moving through the PSIP based guide if there is a reasonable chance it hasn't changed. That should be fixed.

Based on the way the DVR is configured, there doesn't seem to be a way to silently grab PSIP data, either. One benefit of having a single antenna input is that the DVR can use its second tuner to scan channels and pick up PSIP data in the background, while the user views a single channel with the first tuner. The down side of the VRX having separate antenna inputs (ostensibly to let it use both OTA and cable simultaneously) is that it has no way to do any channel scanning. While it should be capable of remembering PSIP data once the user tunes to a channel, there's probably no way to let it populate the guide automatically.

I assume the people who want external guide data are the ones using the VRX for cable, because it seems to me that the OTA side doesn't have enough content to warrant ePVision adding an external guide option, especially if the user is going to have to download and copy it to the DVR manually for every update. The VRX is still going to use time-based recordings whether it has a guide or not, so why not just look up the schedule online and set the timers accordingly, rather than downloading a CSV or XML guide, copying it to the DVR, and then selecting programs to record from the schedule? That sounds more tedious to me than setting the timers yourself, so I must be missing something.

You're right. If this is a repetitive manual operation, here's not much point. I think the idea was that the process would be automated in some way (e.e. from a local PC over the network), and the DVR would get its Guide populated w/o user intervention.


Yes, that would be tedious. Which is why I liked RamKat's other suggestion, which was the simplest of all. I.e., it involved nothing more than creating the EventList externally (even if by hand, entering program names is easier with a real keyboard, as he pointed out), and loading that into the DVR when the List needed to be adjusted. With my additional suggestion for handling repeating shows, that might not be very often (mostly to add special events, or new shows).

BTW, I'd be curious to hear how well it handles back-to-back recordings, on the same channel and same tuner. I.e., how much is lost shutting down one recording, and starting up the next one.

I've tried that and it doesn't give you the option to record for 30-minutes, 60-minutes, etc. I DID find a workaround, though. I hit the "record" button and instead of selecting "Record Now" I select "Create a Manual Recording." I set the manual recording to start recording a minute from the current time and then set the duration of the recording for as long as I want it to record (30, 60, etc.)

From what I've read about other DVRs on this forum, it seems to me like it's exactly the opposite for many users. They want two independent tuners and inputs so they can record both OTA and QAM without having to use A/B switches or rescan channels. I agree with you that having one input split to both tuners is better, but I get the feeling we're in the minority on this.

To get the functionality of having the EPG automatically populated would require a constantly updated TiVo-style connection. I'm really not sure what people are suggesting in this topic: do they want the VRX to be able to manually load user-compiled CVS/XML-formatted guide data for free (which raises the question of where such data would come from), or do they want ePVision to start providing a paid guide service? The former sounds so inconvenient that using the manual timers based on information obtained from TV-guide websites would be easier, and the latter would make little financial sense. Why go to the trouble of finding a subscription-free DVR only to ask the manufacturer to implement a subscription system? There's already a company doing that.

Well, it's easy to achieve the configuration you desire, just by adding an inexpensive splitter, and a couple short pieces of coax. HDHomerun folks with a single input did this to drive dual-tuners for years. OTOH, if ePVision had hardwired that in, then independent operation (which many would like) would not be possible at all. IMO, they made the right choice, with the most flexibility.

[NB: what if you happened to have 2 OTA markets, and set up an antenna to serve each? What would you do then without 2 separate inputs?]

Of course, the ideal situation would have been to have a 2-way switch on each external input, so that each internal input could be driven from either source. So both tuners driven from a cable feed, both from antenna, or any combination, via a programmed switching voltage.


I think the answer to that is yes.


If an interface file format was defined for the VRX, and if someone were to write a free or Open-Source app to process the data, then SchedulesDirect provides a data service for $25 per year (per household) that could populate any market you'd like. I used it myself for a year (before I got SageTV, with its own Guide info), and it worked quite well.


I kind of agree with you, now that I've looked at the Recording Features Guide. It looks like the existing repeating-recording options for manual recordings are fairly decent. (I.e., you don't have to re-enter your entire lineup every week.) They don't cover every scenario (e.g. Tue-Sat at 1am), but they do enough. If the unit was also smart enough to look at the EPG when it does each manual recording, and save the Name/Episode in the title when it made the recording (rather than the normal raw date/time info), then this could work out fairly nicely.

[Oh, and Bruce, I found a mention that the Active setting works as you thought. I.e., it allows you to set up and reserve an Event, but disable it temporarily. E.g., a re-run you've already recorded airs that week, or a special preempts it. Then just make it Active again afterwards. Pretty smart.]


Agreed. I don't think that's the best approach either.
Edited by VideoGrabber - 6/13/12 at 11:32pm

Bruce,

I had asked:

I asked because the codecs in VLC seem fairly fault-tolerant. And you responded,

I guess I'd be really interested in what else this breaks? E.g., if its MPG files aren't readable by VideoReDo (which handles both TS and PS formats), due to not really being MPG-compliant, then that reduces a lot of interest in it for me.

And of course, if the earlier speculation about how discarding TS information results in loss of sync when there's a reception glitch (which happens fairly often here) turns out to be the case, that would be an even bigger downside.

The main cycle options that you need are generally:

1. Once
2. Daily
3. Mon-Fri
4. Every (specific day)
5. Every (specific day +1, e.g. Mon-Tue, Sat-Sun)

You can get any type of cycle you need with one or two scheduled events this way. As for naming the recorded files, you can somewhat get away with not naming them if they are sorted into folders by channel. Naming the recordings by PSIP title works, but it would also be advantageous to allow the user to hard-code a name to insert into each recording for channels that have no data. Another pitfall with using PSIP data is that if the user pads the program to start a few minutes early, the VRX needs to avoid using the PSIP title of the previous program that's just finishing and pick the name of the program that coincides with the bulk of the recording duration. Without doing that, your recordings can end up with the name of the previous program, rather than the one you recorded.

An alternative way to handle this is to allow the user to actually set the date of the recording, rather than just the day of the week. If you have access to a full monthly calendar, you can simply set the next recording event to the date of the next new episode, rather than having to remember to disable the event and then enable it again after the repeat(s) has aired.

LOL When I got my first "hydro" bill I thought I had to pay twice for water, then I learned that is what Canadians call the electricity bill due to some electricity being generated by Hydro plants.

I like the Duration field better.

Keep the ideas rolling! This is exactly why I opened the discussion here so that we could brainstorm a bit to improve this product and hopefully epvision will take note of our ideas. We should invite them to read the discussion here. I will jump in again in 4 weeks time when my visitors are gone. By that time I should also have my unit.

I wrote one for myself using Basic. I download the raw data in XML format using a utility from the Schedules Direct list of approved apps. Then I run my app to parse it out and build a csv file.


I then import the csv file into a database. The database has an Android version so it winds up on my phone.



This process is a weekly ritual for me, and it's why the vagaries of PSIP data never concerned me.

I did try a couple more test recordings, using an external drive formatted NTFS which was empty of content. The first thing I did was to run the write test routine, takes several minutes, just start it and let it finish. The results for my 500Gig drive was a 5Mb throughput according to the test. Then I set a manual 1 hour recording, the only time parameter I could adjust was the start time and duration of the recording. I played back the entire recording and it seemed to play without issue, no breakup or pixelizing as noted on previous recordings. The gripe I do have is unlike the tuner which remembers your picture settings, the picture settings for the playback don't seem to invoke unless you bump one of the numbers up or down. Also the sound level was significantly below the live tuner levels. While there are audio settings on the player, output level was not one of them. So it's an annoyance to have to boost your volume control for play back and remember to lower it before you go back to live tuner or risk being blasted out of your chair. There is an "auto level" setting in the audio controls, but it doesn't help this problem. I will next try to re-format my drive using the VRX built-in utility and try some ext2 recordings.

The picture settings are different for the media player than the tuners, the problem is they don't seem to remember they are there unless you go to the setting and bump a number, then the picture "jumps" to the desired settings. They should automatically recall when starting the player. And yes, both the picture and audio settings are on the quick button while in player mode.

Thank you for mentioning Schedules Direct. They have some really interesting programs there.

http://www.schedulesdirect.org/approvedsoftware

I dunno.... But it sounds like it would be pretty tough on your monitor . . .

It takes me '2min 10sec' to download the raw data. I'm currently in an RV park, at the far end of the park. So I'm as far away from the park's router as I can get. I'm using the park's free cable rather than OTA and I ask for 8 days of data. That produces over 6,000 individual programs. Each program has Title, Category, Start Time, Channel, Description, etc, so 6,000 programs produces alot of data.

It takes my parsing app 45 seconds to build the csv file.

Putting 6,000 records into a database designed to run on a smart phone is asking alot of that database, so I have an Adjustment.ini text file that my parser uses to reduce the number of programs. I can enter a Category and it will ignore all programs of that category. You know, all those programs listed as "Paid Programming" that are 30 minute commercials for some product? Or programs that I don't care about and they're listed in 30 different time slots. So I can enter individual program names and it ignores all occurances of that program. Last is a list of favorites. I can enter a program name and the Favorite checkbox is checked for me in the database. That's the programs I want to record.

As far as "Screen-scrape", if you're asking me, I don't have a clue.

It simply means that you run a program on a PC that extracts data from what gets shown on a screen by some other Guide type web site in your browser. It's free data, but I wouldn't want to rely on something like that when there are other, much higher quality alternates, available very cheaply. (At least I'd consider $25/yr pretty cheap, for a quality data stream.) With scraping, you have to generate multiple screens, for each day of programming. And sometimes each channel as well. It's kind of a PITA.

Like DB100, SchedulesDirect was a weekly download for me as well, with an occasional extra if I knew something had changed.

I took me over three hours to get it. I'm getting older faster.