Remote channel tuning on PVR 250/350 ?

Frater Kork · Postby **Frater Kork** » 11 Jun 2004 10:35

Hi All

I have finally got my PVR 350 to work flawlessly with VLC.
TV is beautiful, *audio* is beautiful, streaming works beautifully!
All is joy and I can watch TV from any box in my house and I can script file or pvr streams over the internet via my own command line client.
In windows...

Life is good

There is only one tiny cloud blocking my sunny disposition...
How can I change tv channel on the PVR remotely while VLC is capturing/streaming from it?

The toolbar util that comes with the current release of wintv2k makes it possible for me to zap tv channels at will, as long as I dick around with a mouse... I can't find any mention of command line parameters for this anywhere.

Is there an agent/tool/app/green smelly imp/whatever that will enable me to *change* tv channel on a PVR 250/350 from the command line so I can script this in whatever fasion i want?

I think BigBen once mentioned that vlc had the ability to do this using parameter strings but I cant find this.
Anyone?

Cheers!

zorglub · Postby **zorglub** » 14 Jun 2004 15:55

Hello,

If I understand correctly, you use your PVR under Windows.

At the moment, the DirectShow input does not allow frequency tuning, so unfortunately, it is not (yet) possible to do so using vlc's parameters.

I don't know of any windows command-line based tools to achieve this...

markfm · Postby **markfm** » 14 Jun 2004 21:12

Take a look at:
http://www.shspvr.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3939

The site specifically discusses startup command line parameters for WinTV2000, as well as another applet, "WinTvCap is a command line only utility" .

http://wintvcap.sourceforge.net

It looks like WinTVCap is designed to be a recorder, but it does include channel changing, so you might try using it, leaving off the recording filename from the command line, see if that handles the channel change for you.

(since it's sourceforge, open source, if push came to shove you could go in and stub out the parts related to the recording, just leave in the channel change stuff).

Good luck!

Frater Kork · Postby **Frater Kork** » 23 Jun 2004 19:05

Thanks for the answer Markfm and Zorglub.

I have tested WinTVCap earlier for just those purposes but it seems that these apps need exclusive access to the DirectVideo drivers, none of them will init properly when VLC is running.

There is an applet called WinTVOCX that can be found here: ftp://167.206.143.11/latest/Untested/2_ ... nTVOCX.EXE
This applet has functions for channel tuning and preview of video etc, however I have still not been able to get it to work properly.
If I have VLC capturing and then try any of the demo apps in that package all PVR presets get zapped and VLC shows white noise, or nothing.

I have asked about this in the shspvr forum a couple of times (here for instance: http://www.shspvr.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=4312 )
but response seems to be a bit on the slow side...

There is mention that the DirectShow standard supports channel tuning, but that the hauppauge drivers use proprietary keys and values that do not synch with that standard. However A Good Soul built an app to import the PVR channel presets into the DS channel registry.
It can be found here: http://www.prize.nl/software/freqcopy
So.. is there a plan for adding tuning functionality to the DirectShow input in VLC? Should I add it to the wishlist?

One possible way of getting my command line channel switching would be to use a macro app like girder etc to record the mouse moves and stuff to do it in the wintvsel tray app, but that feels like a totally horrendous workaround to a relatively simple programming problem... Sadly my programming skills suck.

Cheers!

Guest · Postby **Guest** » 27 Jun 2004 01:10

Problem solved using Girder!

The WinTV Source Selector needs to be in the tray and Girder 3.3 needs to be running, Channel presets needs to be scanned and sorted.

Below is an example girder file that has the ability to tune the first two channels in the channel suite, it is easy to copy/paste the comands and enumerate them to cover the rest of the channels.
Presumably it is possible to create one simple lua script that can select any number of channels from one function, this is just my first girder script

Assuming that girder is in the system path then the channel switch can be invoked by running "event.exe 1 -silent" where "1" is the fist channel etc.

The channel tuning can be invoked in any manner of ways like IR remote or network connection.

Ok, below is the code, copy it into a file called "WinTVsel.GML" and run:

Code: Select all

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<Girder>
<Group Name="WinTV Channel Presets" Identifier="2" Enabled="TRUE">
	<Command Name="1" Identifier="3" Enabled="TRUE">
		<StateCount>1</StateCount>
		<StateBegin>1</StateBegin>
		<StateCurrent>1</StateCurrent>
		<StateInvert>FALSE</StateInvert>
		<OSD>FALSE</OSD>
		<Target_name>WinTVsel</Target_name>
		<Target_class>WINTVSEL</Target_class>
		<Target_exe>WinTVsel.exe</Target_exe>
		<Submatch>TRUE</Submatch>
		<Topmost>FALSE</Topmost>
		<MatchBy>2</MatchBy>
		<OneMatch>FALSE</OneMatch>
		<UseVar>TRUE</UseVar>
		<MatchHidden>TRUE</MatchHidden>
		<MatchNum>1</MatchNum>
		<ActionType>3</ActionType>
		<ActionSubType>1</ActionSubType>
		<iValue1>50000</iValue1>
		<bValue1>FALSE</bValue1>
		<bValue2>FALSE</bValue2>
		<bValue3>FALSE</bValue3>
		<EventString Name="EventString" Identifier="6" Enabled="TRUE" Invert="FALSE" Device="18" IrStr="1"></EventString>
	</Command>
	<Command Name="2" Identifier="7" Enabled="TRUE">
		<StateCount>1</StateCount>
		<StateBegin>1</StateBegin>
		<StateCurrent>1</StateCurrent>
		<StateInvert>FALSE</StateInvert>
		<OSD>FALSE</OSD>
		<Target_name>WinTVsel</Target_name>
		<Target_class>WINTVSEL</Target_class>
		<Target_exe>WinTVsel.exe</Target_exe>
		<Submatch>TRUE</Submatch>
		<Topmost>FALSE</Topmost>
		<MatchBy>2</MatchBy>
		<OneMatch>FALSE</OneMatch>
		<UseVar>FALSE</UseVar>
		<MatchHidden>TRUE</MatchHidden>
		<MatchNum>1</MatchNum>
		<ActionType>3</ActionType>
		<ActionSubType>1</ActionSubType>
		<iValue1>50001</iValue1>
		<bValue1>FALSE</bValue1>
		<bValue2>FALSE</bValue2>
		<bValue3>FALSE</bValue3>
		<EventString Name="EventString" Identifier="8" Enabled="TRUE" Invert="FALSE" Device="18" IrStr="2"></EventString>
	</Command>
</Group>
</Girder>

Frater Kork · Postby **Frater Kork** » 27 Jun 2004 01:19

And that was me posting... seems I took too long to write the message

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Remote channel tuning on PVR 250/350 ?

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