AverTVHD Volar Max (h286DU)

AverTVHD Volar Max (h286DU)

[aschuler]

Hello all,

I'm currently working on an automated process to increase the 
number of online Closed Captions for the hearing-impaired 
community on a popular video-streaming service. I've had a 
successful proof-of-concept on mac and PC platforms, but to 
take this process to scale, I'd like to design a linux 
solution.

The device I'm currently using is the AverTVHD Volar Max 
(h286DU). I've attempted to use the Aver-supplied drivers in 
Ubuntu 10.4 and 9.10 to no avail. Any help in developing a 
working driver / installation method for my device would be 
greatly appreciated by me, and, potentially, a very large and 
very under-represented audience of hard-of-hearing.

Thanks for any support in this matter, and for all the 
development done up to this point.

Andy

Re: AverTVHD Volar Max (h286DU)

[Devin Heitmueller]

On Fri, Jun 29, 2012 at 12:49 PM,  <aschuler@bright.net> wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> I'm currently working on an automated process to increase the
> number of online Closed Captions for the hearing-impaired
> community on a popular video-streaming service. I've had a
> successful proof-of-concept on mac and PC platforms, but to
> take this process to scale, I'd like to design a linux
> solution.
>
> The device I'm currently using is the AverTVHD Volar Max
> (h286DU). I've attempted to use the Aver-supplied drivers in
> Ubuntu 10.4 and 9.10 to no avail. Any help in developing a
> working driver / installation method for my device would be
> greatly appreciated by me, and, potentially, a very large and
> very under-represented audience of hard-of-hearing.
>
> Thanks for any support in this matter, and for all the
> development done up to this point.

Given you're looking to do this on a large scale, you might be better
suited to choose a device that is actively maintained by the LinuxTV
community rather than a device that the vendor shipped a driver for
years ago, is not in the mainline kernel, and as far as I know doesn't
work with current kernels.

Just a suggestion though.

Devin

-- 
Devin J. Heitmueller - Kernel Labs
http://www.kernellabs.com

Re: AverTVHD Volar Max (h286DU)

[aschuler]

Hi Devin

I agree. What device would you suggest? Is there one which seems 
to be most popular / robust?

Thanks
Andy

Re: AverTVHD Volar Max (h286DU)

[Devin Heitmueller]

On Fri, Jun 29, 2012 at 1:19 PM,  <aschuler@bright.net> wrote:
> Hi Devin
>
> I agree. What device would you suggest? Is there one which seems
> to be most popular / robust?

That depends largely on your use case.  Do you need to actually save
the video, or just extract the captions (if you want to save the
video, getting a board with an onboard MPEG encoder would be useful).
Do you need to support digital ATSC/ClearQAM streams as well as
analog?  How many streams do you need to capture in a single PC?  Any
restrictions on bus type (USB/PCI/PCIe)?

Devin


-- 
Devin J. Heitmueller - Kernel Labs
http://www.kernellabs.com

Re: AverTVHD Volar Max (h286DU)

[aschuler]

I don't need to save the video, except that I'm using CC 
extractor, which expects an Mpeg-2 file. I'd like to capture as 
many streams from one tuner as possible (one reason for working 
in the Linux environment), the vendor-provided applications do 
not allow me to run parallel instances. I'm hoping I can get 
around that - does that seem naive?

I do need ATSC/Clear QAM support. Analog is not necessary. USB 
is preferable because I'm testing with a laptop.

Thanks again for the advice,
a

Re: AverTVHD Volar Max (h286DU)

[Devin Heitmueller]

On Fri, Jun 29, 2012 at 1:57 PM,  <aschuler@bright.net> wrote:
> I don't need to save the video, except that I'm using CC
> extractor, which expects an Mpeg-2 file. I'd like to capture as
> many streams from one tuner as possible (one reason for working
> in the Linux environment), the vendor-provided applications do
> not allow me to run parallel instances. I'm hoping I can get
> around that - does that seem naive?
>
> I do need ATSC/Clear QAM support. Analog is not necessary. USB
> is preferable because I'm testing with a laptop.

If you don't need analog then that makes things considerably simpler.
The tuner will already deliver MPEG-2 (since that's what the
broadcaster is sending), and tuners can be configured to deliver a
full stream for cases where there are multiple channels on the same
frequency.  That said though, you are limited by the number of
physical tuners in that a single tuner can only be on one frequency at
a time.

What you need to understand is that different products have different
numbers of tuners.  For example, the Hauppauge HVR-950q has a single
tuner which can be shared for analog and digital while the HVR-2250
has two tuners (each of which can tune to a single analog or digital
channel).

There is no inherent limitation under Linux which prevents you from
having multiple tuners in use in parallel.  In fact it's actually
quite common (many MythTV users for example record several programs at
the same time since they have multiple tuners installed).

Devin

-- 
Devin J. Heitmueller - Kernel Labs
http://www.kernellabs.com

Re: AverTVHD Volar Max (h286DU)

[aschuler]

Great info. I'm less familiar with the way that Cable is 
transmitted, but I do understand that ATSC carries multiple 
channels per frequency. Are you suggesting that I could 
capture a single stream from a single tuner which would 
contain several channels, and pull the CC data for all of 
those channels from a single stream? Would QAM work similarly? 
( Assuming the feed is unencrypted )

I've found that most, if not all, cable boxes do not pass 
through CC data, because they are meant to interpret it and 
pass it on with customized formatting and whatnot, so another 
scaling challenge will be finding a feed that I can use 
without a cable box. OTA broadcasts have been my testing 
ground because they are so readily available.

a

Re: AverTVHD Volar Max (h286DU)

[Devin Heitmueller]

On Fri, Jun 29, 2012 at 3:10 PM,  <aschuler@bright.net> wrote:
> Great info. I'm less familiar with the way that Cable is
> transmitted, but I do understand that ATSC carries multiple
> channels per frequency. Are you suggesting that I could
> capture a single stream from a single tuner which would
> contain several channels, and pull the CC data for all of
> those channels from a single stream? Would QAM work similarly?
> ( Assuming the feed is unencrypted )

Yes, QAM is very similar.  On many cable systems, while there may be
fifteen or twenty unencrypted channels, they are spread across only
three our four actual frequencies (meaning 3-4 tuners could grab
effectively all the unencrypted channels at the same time).

> I've found that most, if not all, cable boxes do not pass
> through CC data, because they are meant to interpret it and
> pass it on with customized formatting and whatnot, so another
> scaling challenge will be finding a feed that I can use
> without a cable box. OTA broadcasts have been my testing
> ground because they are so readily available.

Yeah, the fact that many cable boxes don't provide a way to expose CC
data other than their inserting the decoded text into the video is
pretty frustrating.  Bear in mind though that since you don't care
about the video then as long as the cable box has standard definition
outputs then it may very well include the CC data (HD component and
HDMI don't have a way to send CC data, but the older standard def
outputs still do).

You should definitely look at the Cablecard based devices such as the
HD HomeRun Prime, Ceton InfiniTV, or Hauppauge DCR-2650.  These
devices will allow you to get to the unencrypted streams including CC
data (assuming that the channel is marked "copy freely").

Devin

-- 
Devin J. Heitmueller - Kernel Labs
http://www.kernellabs.com

Re: AverTVHD Volar Max (h286DU)

[Andy Walls]

On Fri, 2012-06-29 at 15:55 -0400, Devin Heitmueller wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 29, 2012 at 3:10 PM,  <aschuler@bright.net> wrote:

> > I've found that most, if not all, cable boxes do not pass
> > through CC data, because they are meant to interpret it and
> > pass it on with customized formatting and whatnot, so another
> > scaling challenge will be finding a feed that I can use
> > without a cable box. OTA broadcasts have been my testing
> > ground because they are so readily available.
> 
> Yeah, the fact that many cable boxes don't provide a way to expose CC
> data other than their inserting the decoded text into the video is
> pretty frustrating.  Bear in mind though that since you don't care
> about the video then as long as the cable box has standard definition
> outputs then it may very well include the CC data (HD component and
> HDMI don't have a way to send CC data, but the older standard def
> outputs still do).

And for the SD analog outputs (CVBS or S-Video) of such boxes you would
need an analog capture device in you Linux system.  There are at least a
few devices supported under linux that provide VBI data (e.g. CC) output
independent of the digitized video.

FWIW, I have noticed that ATSC OTA to analog NTSC converter boxes output
a very nicely formed CC signal in the VBI.  I have no experience with
cable boxes.

Regards,
Andy