Local Media Importing and OTA

TaleCaster is a comprehensive solution for managing your media. That's our description and we're sticking to it. That means TaleCaster is and always has been designed to work with CD drives, DVD drives, libraries, import, transcoding, and OTA recording using DVB-T.

One of the major improvement goals for 2023 has been to make this less painful. Currently, you have to manually import your media - basically by dumping it into /talecaster/downloads/$TYPE and telling the appropriate application to find new stuff. This of course, will continue to work, so if you've already got automated importing you don't have to change anything.

What we aim to improve is to make it more seamless to import your media, without having to learn a bunch of shell scripting and crazy TV tuner stuff.

Audio Import Support

We take our music very seriously. Consequently, we've had no end of problems getting the music importer the way we want it. There are four key metrics we're validating against:

1. Consistent 1:1 with source material (meaning exact copy for CD/SACD)
2. Consistent and accurate automatic identification of source material (this continues to be a nightmare)
3. Automatic addition of releases from Discogs and BandCamp to MusicBrainz (the sole source for Lidarr)
4. Near zero user interaction. Put CD in drive, talecaster import audio sr0, and 30-60 minutes later it's all done. Or download tracks from BandCamp to downloads/music, talecaster import audio, and done.

Technical Problems

One of the key pieces critical to accurate copying of CDs and SACDs is getting the drive itself stable. Drive quality has honestly gone off a cliff, and trying to copy an audio CD in a newly produced "48x" BD-RW at anything over "4x" invariably results in a jittery mess with more crackle and pop than an LP. Most drives must be throttled down to a maximum 4x to even get something usable, and often 1x to get accuracy.

Another problem is API limitations and straight lack of API in some cases.

DVD/BluRay Import Support

At this time, we are only starting to make progress on this due to issues with finding legally compliant test hardware. Intended operation is to have talecaster import dvd sr0, but we are still a fair distance from this.

OTA Tuner Support

Development is ongoing, which is limited by available hardware and just garbage UHF/VHF where the test systems are located, as well as challenges in finding a reliable schedule feed. Current operation requires the DVB-T be attached to the host running the containers, and run in the host OS.

New Design

We are working on a new container which will only need to be passed the OTA device, but do not have an ETA as this is very complicated. Particularly as we need to integrate support for external OTA devices (e.g. HDHomeRun CONNECT Duo) alongside local EQAM and CAM (e.g. TBS 6290se, NetUP Dual Universal CI) and DVB (e.g. Hauppage WinTV HVR-955Q, HVR-5525.)

Current Problems

We just do not have hardware for many of these devices, meaning we have no way to test or validate. Signal quality is poor so our ability to validate OTA is limited. We also have no headend sources or providers for testing EQAM or CAM (aka CableCard.)

eBook Imports

For eBook imports, we are mostly working on a solution to automatically scan the import directory. All of the relevant metadata is generally present in eBooks. Most progress here is dependent on Readarr development, since eBook management is actually extremely complicated.