ggrab is better

suro

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Just to share experience.
I noticed that when using ggrab in Linux there are less frame errors and even when they are there is no frame skipping (just some frame errors say one time in a minute) unlike ngrab or nfs recording on Dreambox 5620.
 

minortom

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suro said:
Just to share experience.
I noticed that when using ggrab in Linux ...elided....

Can you give me some idea of how you are using ggrab ?

I've built it (redhat9) and finally figured out that you need to start it via sstream (not ggrab command) ... how do I kick off a 'record' If I use the web interface I just get some NFS activity (and a zero lenght file) but nothing seems to come my way via port 4000 ... is there some magic to start this off (I have a 500S)

I was gussing it was a simple matter ... start sstream on the linux server, do smething on the DM, it sends commands down to the linux server via port 4000, sstream kicks off ggrab and the file is sent over the port.

But nothing seems to come in on port 4000?
 

suro

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Dude, to be honest I've always manually grabbed videos from the pc by manually typing the video pid and audio pid, what you're saying is what I've never used (on Linux). I even can't say wheter it is possible to make ggrab record with the dreambox by remote control?
Anyway check out the manual (man ggrab), if not hard post some information here cause I'm not using linux now and am interested about the auto grabbing feature.
 

minortom

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suro said:
Dude, to be honest I've always manually grabbed videos from the pc by manually typing the video pid and audio pid, what you're saying is what I've never used (on Linux). I even can't say wheter it is possible to make ggrab record with the dreambox by remote control?

.. by PC, I'm assuming you mean a PC running Linux?

Anyway check out the manual (man ggrab), if not hard post some information here cause I'm not using linux now and am interested about the auto grabbing feature.

I've read the man page, the source code and sat tracing the IP traffic ! Still no joy.

If I launch ggrab 'by hand' with pids etc, I see inetd(8) lauch two processes on the DM500 however both of these have their connections go into FIN WAIT 2 so
I guess something is dying?

I've made a little progress though. Th ggrab works in the manner you describe, lots of complex options for apid/vpid etc. However there's no need to lanuch it that way, If you just start sstream, it sits and listen on port 4000. The 'record option' (e.g web interface) talks to sstream on port 4000, this sends commands which cause sstream to query the DM (there are http gets you can use) to find out the various pids etc. Once it has this it launches ggrab with the right options ... neat (if it worked :-( )


So my questions:

1: Are you doing this on a DM500S? (or a 70xx?)
2: Which image are you using?
3: Can you give an verbatium example of what you type and what files get created?

sorry if this is a lot to ask but this is driving me crazy, it all should work
 

suro

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Hi
Sorry for late post it seems that no one uses ggrab for grabbing videos :)
Also I haven't been in sat-tv field for a long time
But I'll try to answer your questions one by one.
1. No I was doing this on DM500 or 70xx I was doing this on 5620 but it doesn't really matter
2. I was using one of Hydra's images but it also works on gemini images (as far as I remember)
3. The simple command line I type is "ggrab -host 192.168.0.24 -p 0x7d 0x87" where the IP address is your dreambox's address the first PID 0x7d is the video pid the second is the audio pid you can get this PID's through the web interface or through the about menu then 'vts_xx_x.vob' files get created in your home directory if you're starting ggrab in 'su' mode then they will be created in /root folder.
So this is it.
P.S. I still don't know the answers on how to make sstream listen and catch the commands as you start recording through your remote control.

Good Luck.
 

skinkone

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I've tried I believe unsuccessfully to get ggrab installed. Since my Linux knowledge is limited to copying and pasting commands into the Terminal, I'm unable to think out of the box.

I have a DM500 hooked up to Ubuntu 8.04. The DM sees Ubuntu's hard disk through NFS (victory!). I can record using the Timer function with the DVR option, but the recording has missing frames and is too annoying to be considered watchable (not sure if this is due to what I hear is the poor network performance of the DM500).

I was able to get Ngrab working on a Windows PC and the quality was fantastic. I'm trying to find the equivalent of Ngrab on Ubuntu, and it seems like the only solution is Ggrab. I downloaded an archieve from _www.menzebach.de/ggrab/ but I have little idea of how to install it and execute it.

Is there someone knowledgeable enough to write a how-to on this topic?
 

compufunk

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The Linux version of Ggrab on the site you linked to needs to be compiled before you can run it. Unfortunately the readme file which comes with the tar ball is not in English so, if there are any paramaters that need to be set during compiliation, you wont know what they are.
(You could always run it through a translator like Google Translate _http://translate.google.com/)

Try searching for Ggrab or Ngrab for Debian. Ubuntu is based on dabian, so Debain packages are normally fine with Ubuntu.
 

orzem

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Once you have the tar.gz archive on your pc, extract everything and check if you can find these two files: ggrab and sserver. These two files shoud be executable. If they are not there, open a terminal window and type make. Compilation should begin. Now you should have them. If you want to start recording from pc, you have to use ggrab. If you want to start recording using the remote control of your dreambox you should start the sserver program. I used to like best the second option: I set my DM5620 with the neutrino image, and in the recording options I set server, with ip address of my pc. It was easy, but unfortunately the DVB tuner has gone bad and I do not use that receiver any longer. I could obtain perfect recordings only by turnig off video while recording. Good luck.
 
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