It was hit or miss for me in Ubuntu. It would work fine for a bit then it wouldn’t. It was pretty unreliable. I’ve since moved on. I don’t have the streaming service that I was using with it anymore so I put it on the back burner before ironing out the bugs. I’d probably start with a linkpi.
And now with ESPN proper going DRM - this went from a "nice to have" to "really need this"
@tmm1 Any chance you can dig on the mac front here? This still plagued us, when checked last
I can't change macOS security restrictions unfortunately
Understood - I guess we were under impression that you were testing this on a Mac - guessing not, now. Sorry for the nag.
I want to give an update on my experience with this using Linux and the capture card linked in the first post. I’ve had it running reliably for a couple weeks now and am confident it is a reliable enough alternative to a linkpi. I think a linkpi would be more reliable but for under $40 for the entire setup it may be worth it for some people looking for a single tuner to cover a drm channel.
My initial problems I had running this with Linux was that usb power-managing PCIe USB controller was locking the card up. It would lock up the card and wouldn’t function reliably. After I disabled any power management it’s been fabulous. The other issue I was having was my machine wasn’t always “seeing” the input of the card, to troubleshoot I had a hdmi splitter handy so I plugged the Onn into it and that problem disappeared. At first I thought there must be some dhcp issue but I now believe the EDID communication between the Onn, card, and machine wasn’t working properly. When I added a splitter the EDID issue is corrected by the splitter. Whether you will need an hdmi splitter may depend on the streamer and the usb capture card you buy.
With these tweaks hdmi usb capture with ADBTuner on Linux has been very reliable for me the last couple weeks. If you have an unused android streamer laying around I would definitely buy a $10-$20 usb capture card and give it a try.
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I followed your lead here and set this up with Fastchannels. I've been working (for quite some time) to dial in DRM stations with FastChannels. I have a PrismCast bridge right now, but we all know Prism has it's own limitations.
I now have a prototype working with FC and I funnel all the DRM stations through Kodi. The capture card (on Ubuntu) is attached to a Firestick with Kodi installed. I then have custom m3u output from FC - and the m3u includes the kodiprop info (the DRM license server), then when user selects a channel from CDVR, FC hits Kodi and plays the stream on CDVR using Kodi's legal DRM EME.
The tune time is fantastic - and quality seems decent. Agreed with Rice - for a $20 encoder and $25 firestick, I think this is the path forward for a budget DRM bridge tool.
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Absolutely, I got a $12 Cenmate box that some people have reported issues with but mine works perfectly with an unused fire stick 4K Max I had laying around. On Windows 11.
Totally worth trying out, the PQ is excellent and I've had no A/V sync issues.
Anyone tried running Channels on a Synology NAS and using an HDMI capture card? If so, I'd be interested in the results.
If you are using the Synology package, i think the linux bersion of the URL would be the closest option.
I've found using a stand alone encoder to provide good results.
@Rice I'm just working on passing a Capture Card through to a Proxmox LXC running Channels DVR. What was the final capture:// command you ended up using?
I found it depends on the actual card and if YUYV or MJPEG is needed. The cheaper cards will advertise they can do 1920x1080@60fps but they don’t mention it can only do that by using MJPEG, if you try to use that card in the mode that channels ffmpeg uses they can top out at 5fps at 1920. Basically you don’t really know what you’re going to get from a card before you buy because they don’t specify supported resolutions for both YUYV or MJPEG. So your card may very for required capture command.
For the card listed in post number one I use the following. This card I had disable power management for it to behave in Linux. This is used for YUYV source type card ffmpeg encode
capture://v4l2/video2/hw:Video,0/?framerate=60&width=1920&height=1080
My other card was $6 and while it behaves nicely in Linux it requires a different command because it needs to use mjpeg to get more than 5fps. This card supports up to 1920x1080@60fps with mjpeg but whatever version of ffmpeg channels uses limits encoding to 720@60fps or 1080@30fps when source stream is mjpeg. This card uses this command for 720@60. This card requires using source as MJPEG instead of YUYV.
capture://v4l2/video0/hw:MS2109,0/?framerate=60&video_size=1280x720&pixel_format=mjpeg
You could also change the above for 1080@30 by changing the resolution and framerate entries.
You can check supported card resolutions by running this substituting you particular /video0, /video2 ect. First running this to see what /video# has been assigned to the card.
v4l2-ctl --list-devices
Then to see supported resolution(substitute/video0 with video/ from above command)
v4l2-ctl -d /dev/video0 --list-formats-ext
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