Building your own DVR Part II

This is a continuation from Raspberry Pi + HD Homerun Dual = OTA Dvr

Ok so first things first, we want to get a list of stations. What I did was go to antennaweb, enter in your zip code, then open the console debugger on your browser, look at the timeline, and hit refresh, once it's done, click the "type" header so it sorts by type. Look for Application/JSON in the list (maybe all lowercase). The link should be something like this:
http://www.antennaweb.org/Stations.aspx/GetAntennaPredictions

Click on the network downloaded item, to look at the message/response/etc.

Click on Response

Copy the response, mine looked something like this initially.



I took it out of there by clicking in the window and hitting home, then holding shift I hit end.

I pasted it in here http://jsonprettyprint.com/

Got this:



Then I went through and got rid of all the surrounding stuff for stations, and left this:



Save this as stations.json on your desktop or something temporarily

I manually created a "DVR" path in my firebase so for example.

dogs.firebase.com/dvr would point to the DVR section.

I clicked import and select stations.json, and finally you have a list of stations we can select from when scheduling DVR events.

This is going to be a very step by step tutorial as I go through things :)

Go read Building your own DVR Part I (named a little different though) if you haven't

Raspberry Pi + HDHomeRun Dual = OTA DVR

My latest project has involved working towards a cord cutting world.

Lets get started.

The Parts

(prices as of current posting)
35.09 Raspberry Pi Model B+ (I initially used, Raspberry Pi Model B but don't expect any difference)
About $10 Research your own microsd card (for Model B I used this, I will post what I use when I get my B+)
18.99 Powered USB Hub (Any version should work, I just picked something cheap)
110.77 HDHomeRun Dual (There is an upgrade the HDHomeRun Connect-2, I haven't tried it but if you're feeling luck here's the link HD Homerun Extend-2, looks like it'll encode to other formats which is nice).
45.74 HD Antenna (This one picks quite a few channels up and has worked really well thus far, Antennaweb.com recommended a different one, but after adding a mount it was more than this one).
47.99 Router (I'm using the WRT54G because it was a spare one I had on hand).
64.99 1 TB Harddrive (I had an existing one, so some of these costs I'm not accounting for myself so my break even is sooner)
This comes out to a grand total of about $300. In my case I pay around $28 per month for my Dish Network Subscription. This means it'll take to about 12 months and I'll be ahead for costs (assuming I buy everything at once, and don't have spare parts I can just use).

Note: I didn't include powering the Raspberry pi in this calculation of cost, I plan to see if I can plug directly into the powered usb hub, and plug in the HDD from there, but I don't know for sure on that, however it uses the same plug as MOST new phones out there these days, so you probably already have a cable. (one can be found here though)

Setup

The HD Home Run Dual is a REALLY Easy piece of equipment to use. All I did was plug it into the wall, plug into the router, and plug into the antenna.

You ABSOLUTELY need to be connected over ethernet with the raspberry pi (So NO raspberry pi Model A since it doesn't have an ethernet port).

I installed Rasbian (at some point in the past).

For the setup I booted into LXDE, (login and type startx).

I found this useful to remove a few unnecessary programs, but since we have a powered usb hub we are going to be storing the data on an external drive as the size of the saved file is a bit large.

http://www.sbprojects.com/projects/raspberrypi/tweaks.php

The Raspberry Pi will also need the following:

Download libhdhomerun, HDHomeRun Config GTK from here:
http://www.silicondust.com/support/downloads/linux/

Here is a GIST of the commands I used after I downloaded and extracted the above zip files, and I entered into the hdhomerun_config_gui folder.



Finally I ran the following to test that the tuner was running.

hdhomerun_config_gui

I then updated the firmware on the tuner (Disclaimer, do so at your own risk, not sure if it's required, but I did it).

Clicking on the Update tab, you can select the firmware also downloaded from Silicondust website above,

If you're using the DUAL it should be this driver: HDHR3-US (hdhomerun3_atsc).

If  you're using the Extend you'll have to research which version of the firmware is right.

Recording

At this point I believe I exited the gui and re-opened it once I got the firmware updated (I got worried for a split second cause it couldn't find my tuner anymore, but it was something as simple as that to get going again). I was able to scan and see some channels and click on View to see them playing.

If you note on the left side the name of the tuner is listed (I believe it's id - 0,1), you'll need this number, also if you type hdhomerun_config discover via command line you should be able to get it right.

My general process for recording TV is this: (may be improved in the future)

1. Set Channel
2. Save Stream for some period of time.
3. Open Handbrake and transcode to another format.

I decided to just save the default format of the stream (TS?).

Looking at the developer gui You will see there is the ability to pipe into another program.

As of right now I believe that the "save" command will basically just write bytes to a file. So there is very little processing overhead happening, adding transcoding into the mix might be too much for the pi (but may not be, I really haven't verified).

I haven't tried it but you MAY be able to record BOTH tuners from one raspberry pi at a time.

Here is the single line command I used to record something last night, I'll explain what each means in a minute.

date; sleep 3600; date; hdhomerun_config set /tuner0/channel auto:27; timeout 3700 hdhomerun_config save /tuner0 test_show.ts;

Ok so I'll break down each section.

date prints the date/time
sleep will sleep the number of seconds allocated, I put in the dates around to verify it is waiting the right amount of time, and it appears to be.
hdhomerun_config ID set /tuner0/channel auto:27; This will set the first tuner to channel 27 auto selecting the modulation
timeout 3700 run a command for just over an hour (When I ran the .ts file, it was usually a little shorter than the timeout time, so I just expand it over a bit, you can edit it back if you need to using video editing software).
hdhomerun_config save /tuner0 test_show.ts; This is what actually saves your OTA channel.

Note: Remember to navigate to your external hard drive when you run this (you may be able to point the .ts file to the path, but I haven't tried it), otherwise you'll run out of memory pretty fast. When I recorded about 4.5 hours it came out to 26.1 GB of data. Transcoding down should come out to 5-7 GB so it'll go quite a bit down (using Normal on Handbrake and MKV, other settings may come out smaller).

Good luck and let me know what you come up with!

Keep an eye out for a future post, I'm planning on building a NODEJS server that will allow me to schedule recordings from the internet this will be similar to my post about controlling my roku/chromecast from the internet, I'll be using Firebase as an intermediary. (I'd love to go full on DVR solution but just worry MythTV or some other equivalent would be too heavy).