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).No Longer Needed.
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).

Ripping DVD's in Ubuntu 12.04 -- Handbrake

It took me a little while to figure it out, but these are the steps I use to setup a fresh install of Ubuntu with the necessary software to rip dvd's.

Let me know if you have any additional tips and/or tricks to install that will setup everything!

Random Post: "Handbrake Perl Script"

I have Google Analytics setup on my blog and I can see the keywords that have actually brought people to my site.... I find this interesting and this inspires me...If it's obscure, why not try to "guess" what the person was searching for and then do a post on that subject, if it's pretty straight forward,why not solve it..

Today's keyword subject is : perl script handbrake windows

This one doesn't look too bad.

Per Handbrake.fr's site:

HandBrake is an open-sourced, GPL-Licensed,multiplatform, multithreaded, video transcoder, available for Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows

Looking at the documentation on handbrake's site, there is a command line interface, so we can use that to make any calls to the handbrake program.

The basic command we are going to use would be:

HandBrakeCLI -i source -o destination

So we can immediately start with a perl script like this:

$source = "sourcefile";
$destination = $source . "_converted";
print `HandBrakeCLI -i $source -o $destination`;

This will simply take whatever specified source file we have and output to the destination location.

But if that was all we wanted to do we wouldn't need a perl script would we?

How about if we have a list of files in a document (along with paths)?

We can open that document grab all the paths then simply do a mass conversion!

The final "guess" would simply grab all files of extension x and convert them and dump them in a folder. Again this isn't hard as well.

Lets start with this one, it shouldn't be too bad, of course we'll want to do some error checking, such as if we already have a converted filename of the same type then we definitely want to hold off on converting.
Regardless let's see what we can come up with real quick!

@file_list = <*.mpg *.avi *.vob>;
@converted_list = <*.mp4>;
$extension = ".mp4";

Here we are grabbing a list of all the files we might want to convert, note that you can update that list to contain whatever extensions you might have/like to use. We also grab the list of converted files in there just to do some error checking (in case you leave all your files in the same folder), also the output type should match the type of files you are trying to convert to. We also should define our extension for later use!

Now it's a matter of rolling through each item in the filelist, so we'll start a for loop:

foreach $file (@file_list)
{
@filename = split(/./, $file);
$exists = 0;
}

Something to note is that we want to do a search on the filename in the converted files so in order to do that we'll need to break up the filename from the extension.

Now inside this loop we'll want to do a quick check to see if the file we have a handle on is already listed

foreach $converted (@converted_files)
{
if ($converted =~ m/@filename[0]/i)
{
$exists = 1;
}
$baseName = @filename[0];
}

So now we've done a check and if we have a file that our converted files contains.

What we can now do is make an if/then that will basically skip the file altogether if we see that $exists contains a 1!

if ($exists == 1)
{
print "File already converted!!";
}
else
{
$source = "$file";
$destination = $baseName . "_converted" . $extension;
print `HandBrakeCLI -i $source -o $destination`;
}

Something to remember:

If you want to save to a separate folder I would recommend doing a check for whether that folder exists rather then grabbing a list of files in the current directory.

Entire Script (small text...just copy paste):

@file_list = <*.mpg *.avi *.vob *.AVI>;
@converted_list = <*.mp4>;
$extension = ".mp4";


foreach $file (@file_list)
{
@filename = split(/\./, $file);
$exists = 0;

foreach $converted (@converted_list)
{
if ($converted =~ m/@filename[0]/i)
{
$exists = 1;

}
$baseName = @filename[0];
print @filename[0] . "\n";
}

if ($exists == 1)
{
print "File already converted!!";
}
else
{
print "Converting";
$source = "$file";
$destination = $baseName . "_converted" . $extension;
print "Ready?\n";
$asdf = <>;
print `HandBrakeCLI -i $source -o $destination`;
}
}

The only difference between the above script and one that will open a document and pull all the filenames from it is that you would use the command:

open DATAFILE, "$inputfilename" or die "Missing $inputfilename file.\n"; open (DATAFILE, $inputfilename);
@file_list = ;
close (DATAFILE);

The above would replace the line:

@file_list = <*.mpg *.avi *.vob>;

That's really the only difference!

Well let me know what you think in the comments and if you happen to have found this site looking for just this random post please let me know!!!