I've considered grabbing my wife's label maker, and at least labeling the Onn devices "#1" and "#2", etc., and maybe even putting their IP addresses on them.
The NBC app is a complete sh*tshow for me - can't seem to get Adguard to enable a client rule to let DNS queries pass through - so I set up the Onn Box for static IP and set 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 as DNS servers and set rule for the Onn Box DNS to get out, then the NBC app comes up, but when I try to go to the "live" tab, it says user must re-authenticate, so I sign out and sign back in and it still says the same thing - so I can't even get the app to watch live TV manually - when NBC makes it so hard to view their programming with DRM, DNS and forcing unnecessary re-authentications, I have to ask, is this really worth it? They deserve to lose viewership and go bankrupt, IMO
I'll try the NBC app soon, I am interested to see how different these apps are going to be and how much documentation that would be needed.
In other news Amazon had a sale on Fire Cube and decided what the heck, let's see what 4* faster looks like and oh boy, I am returning the other boxes and purchasing an additional Cube and calling it a day.
Here's a video of hulu launching (warm) Fire Cube launch time - YouTube
I'm running YTTV with a Chromecast dongle (not the 4K version) and it has been working pretty well. However, now I'm seeing more and more cases where the video freezes and I get the spinning circle icon. Most times it recovers but it seems to be getting worse. I'm trying to figure out what is causing this. Is it a bottleneck at YTTV, the internet connection or the WiFi connection to the CC dongle or something else. Anybody else see this?
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Wow. I might have a new purchase in my future.
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Since we're sharing, here's a picture of how we used to do this in the old days - circa 2017, I took all of this equipment out of service - 2 Verizon FIOS set top boxes, 2 HD-PVRs, 1 USB-UIRT used to record content that was DRMed over cable - shortly before the time of this picture, Frontier purchased Verizon and subsequently turned off all the DRM, so I was able to record everything freely using an HDHR Cable Card Tuner, but then I cut the cord and moved to Channels+YTTV - now, DRM is getting turned on for TVE, so I feel like things are going backwards...
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This is what mine looks like under coffee table in my office I just shove them back under after taking pic. .. I use FireSticks wirelessly
It's insanely fast compared to all these "sticks".
The 1st of my pair is the same model and I am not experiencing that issue. I am using it with YTTV as well, and have it streaming for many hours on end. Hmm, not sure what to suggest but just wanted to offer up my experience for comparison.
I was thinking of replacing it with the 4K version if only for, I dunno, speed (?) but this one is performing admirably without any hiccups so I don’t really see the point. I’ll keep an eye on it though. My other device is the Onn box and it seems to me that its performing identically. At least I can’t tell the difference between them.
Yeah, this is why we use Apple TV's as our primary playback devices. All of the "stick" type devices (and most smart TVs) are massively underpowered when it comes to rendering user interfaces and such.
I'm going to keep an eye on that Fire Cube. Last year it dropped to $60 on "Prime Day." If that happens again then I'm in.
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The most recent one (3rd gen)?
Nah. The current model wasn't available last July, but it was the current model at the time that was on sale.
Aside from changing the IP address, did everything work the same with the Cube? I was trying to get things going with my Fire Stick yesterday to compare speeds, and was having trouble with an error message (I didn’t wrote it down, unfortunately).
Do you love this idea, but don't want to invest in new hardware, have concerns about reliability, or do not like Android apps? Well...
I haven't quite gotten that far. Hopefully later this evening. I can say that the code I use to verify the stream is actually playing has been different on pretty much every device but its minor changes that are required to the grep statement.
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Some further testing has revealed that recordings made by this system often indicate a run length shorter than they should be - running Fix Video Timestamps and/or Regenerate Video Index seems to fix the videos to the proper length and then they play back nicely - is it possible to automatically run the fix/regen to cleanup HDMI recordings when completed? Anyone else noticing this?
Yeah I agree, this is a big hack to go back to the bad old days of bypassing DRM crap with AV capture and remote control. It's sad that we're having to revert back to this.
At least we don't have to rent STBs now but you're looking at $75-$100 minimum for each tuner.
And of course you're going to have to play whack a mole if apps or web links change and break playback...
FWIW I got my tuner pair on eBay for $50 each. Such sales seem pretty frequent too.
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+20 for onn box... It's going to be 75 easy unless you get some kind of killer deal.
Up and running on Fire Cube. Just needed to update the IP address in all the scripts. The last code I used to detect disconnect worked as the previous device so it seems Android 9+ is the same.
I can also verify that checking the playing state via a keep alive script will save you on popups, etc.
adb shell dumpsys media_session | grep "state=PlaybackState {state=3"
State 3 is playing. Anything else time to bounce it. And one other thing dont bounce more than once every 15-30 seconds or you can end up in a loop.