I have one of the 5 Channels ones and it has been great. I have two of the spots occupied and have had no complaints. I also recently helped a coworker set one up at his family's bar. He has all of the ports occupied and has not had any issues.
My Amazon account shows a coupon for an extra 10% off, making it about $238. And this one ships from Amazon so no slow delivery from China. My ENC5 v2 has been great and this deal is about $80 less than what I paid.
If you were thinking of joining the LinkPi Club and are in the market for multi port, this is a crazy good deal.
Great find!
I was an early adopter, maybe the first on this forum to order an ENC5. Mine has been great with no issues so far. Never had a Uray for comparison but do have a similar (firmware, SoC) Jtech single encoder. The updated LinkPi devices (August 2023) are noticeably better performers than the Jtech. Uray has better warranty. Happy to answer any questions. Ordering the one from Amazon gives you 30 days returns.
Thanks for the replies - I bought one and it arrives tomorrow
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Congrats. Let me know if you have any questions.
I actually just ordered one of the 5 port models and was wondering if you reported the 59.94 issue to their support? Im looking ahead trying to prevent unnecessary mode changes on my gear since everything I do is 59.94. Hoping they have at least acknowledged the issue....
To get 59.94 try this. On the Encode tab select the Video Config tab on the bottom half of the screen. Then set NTSC Compatible button to ON. With this on, a framerate setting of 60fps should output 59.94fps and a setting of 30fps will output 29.97fps.
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I received my LinkPi, bought another Onn TV 4K and got everything working with Adb tuner - after reading the above post, I configured the linkpi for 59.94 and confirmed during playback on my Nvidia Shield - I was surprised that my URaycoder streams indicated 60fps, not 59.94 - those are set to match the input framerate and are also attached to Onn boxes - so now, I’m wondering why I’m seeing 2 different frame rates
I have two Onn TV 4K attached to a ENC5. When I test streams in VLC, both show Frame Rate at 59.940059. The Onn TV 4k, like yours, show 1080P 59.94. I'm not seeing any issue with redraws.
To confirm, my Encode Config is set to 60 for Frame Rate, but I have also set my Video Config to NTSC compatible.
For some reason, the URaycoder boxes encode 60.0 fps per the Nvidia Shield - but the ENC5 is 59.94 -
I experienced a problem today - after having HDM1 working with an Onn TV 4K, I tried to plug the other two Onn TV 4K's into the ENC5 HDMI2 and HDMI3 and it crashed - the admin web pages became inaccessible - had to revert to the single Onn TV in HDMI1 and then it came back after multiple power cycles...
Odd. Never had a lock up on my LinkPi. I have all five HDMI ports active and have tested with all active. Are you on the latest firmware?
Yes - I updated the ENC5 to the latest firmware before testing - I didn't spend too much time on this, so I am hopeful to get this working - will try again this week - EDIT: Got 3 channels working - web interface is a little bit buggy - had to reboot to get 3rd stream working despite being configured correctly - also preview images stopped working - will report back after testing
After setting up 3 Onn boxes with the ENC5V2, the preview on the "dashboard" tab was consistently broken for days - this morning I changed from CBR encoding to AVBR and now it appears fixed - otherwise, testing has gone well with this device and I have started using this instead of my two URaycoder devices
Know it probably wasn't part of your problems but I forgot to power down the unit once before attaching another hdmi and it messed with the unit and needed hdmi unplugged and plugged back in ...I think I even powered down/reset unit before i got them all working again....
Also I used to be able to "Break" the Mix/Preview by using -1 in the framerate encoding. They may have fixed this by now. They have updated the firmware 2x since then...Don't remember if it also did it with fractional framerates like 59.xx
2 Likes
Show and tell time here:
You can do a lot with a POE switch, 2 usb micro ethernet adapters, 2 poe to 5v usb micro power adapters, 1 poe to 12v LinkPi power adapter, and some gorilla tape. Only 1 power cord for the whole setup.
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How goes the testing with your ENC5v2?
It’s working really well with 3 Onn TV 4K boxes and YTTV - I’ve taken the URaycoders out of service - for anyone interested in HDMI capture who hasn’t yet purchased hardware, I would recommend buying the ENC5V2 - the price per channel (especially on sale) can’t be beat - I really like the upgrade button on the web interface - URay makes you email them to get updates- and the ENCV2 has a nice front panel display indicating it’s IP address - picture quality looks the same as the URay boxes but for both I just cranked up the bit rate to 16Mbps
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Hello Linkpi aficionados
Ive got a weird problem and could use some insight.
I just purchased a brand new apple tv 4k 3rd gen with ethernet, so I can swap my older apple tv 4k 2nd generation and use it as a tuner along with my linkPi. ENC1-V3
At the moment, Im feeding the new ATV as the tuner into the LinkPi HDMI input. I am observing strange dropped frames in my custom capture channel in the Testflight channels beta on my client ATV. The count increases rapidly - snapshot below
Ive been trying to narrow this down and am racking my brain on this. In all the scenarios below, Im using the brand new apple tv 4k as a source for the linkpi hdmi input. Im on the latest LinkPi firmware.
What I have observed is that the dropped frames are dependent on what TVOS app is used when using the LinkPi.
1: If I use my ISP providers app to play any content, including TVE channels or local channels, I get dropped frames.
2: If I use Netflix, or Amazon Prime, or even apples own TV app, I get dropped frames on the dubbed recordings when played back on my client apple TV, or when viewing the delayed stream “live”
3: If I play back a local file using plex on the “tuner” apple tv, and capture that through the linkPi using the same “tuner”, the client apple tv sees NO FRAMES dropped - with the same exact LinkPi encode settings
4: This is also STRANGE. I set up a test scenario where I had channels dvr on the “tuner” ATV play a local recording. When captured through the LinkPi, and played back either live, or dubbed on the client ATV, there are also NO DROPPED FRAMES.
Heres another data point.…
If I use my iPad as a client to view the same custom channel THERE ARE NEVER ANY FRAME DROPS.
Im using the default video driver in the channels clients on the ATV and the iPAD, and im using the latest testflight beta. I also tested with the release version of channels on the client ATV and the same thing happens with the dropped frames based on the streaming app used vs playing a local file.
Ive tried several LinkPi encoding settings. Here is the one that I have been using almost from day one many moons ago along with a firestick 4k, which is now sitting on a usb hdmi encoder on the USB port to give me a second 720p channel via the LinkPi. The firestick had been on the HDMI, and as best as I can tell never had any dropped frames. I may have to go back and swap it back to see if the issue follows the new ATV 4k.
Ive also tried soft rebooting the linkPi, hardware powering the unit on and off. Ive replaced the HDMI cable with an 8K compatible high speed cable.
Ive played with the ATV video settings (currently set to 1080p SDR, YCbCr, match content to OFF (I also tried ON). I tried fixing the ATV tuner frame rate to 60hz to no avail. The ATV defaults with the LinkPi to 59.94hz, and is currently set that way. I also used the ATV test HDMI utility with the LinkPi
Any insight would be greatly appreciated. I bet you there is something really dumb that Im missing.
Thanks in advance
Try ABR instead of CBR
Nope. Tried CBR, VBR, AVRR, and FIXQP (which channels barfed on )