Hi,
Been a while since I've used VDR. Have it setup after scanning using the scan program, however something is strange.
There are multiple versions of some channels, such as BBC One/Two/News, Channel 4 etc. Some of these either have video and no EPG, have video and EPG, or have EPG and no video... Obviously what I'm looking for is the video & the EPG - this works for BBC One, but when I tune to the BBC Two which has the EPG visible, I receive no signal found message.
If any UK users have a cluestick on how to fix this, please let me know.
It seems like VDR is updating the channels.conf but not merging the information, because a fresh scan using dvbutils does not show multiple versions for the same channel.
Any help appreciated..
Al 03/11/10 21:31, En/na Alasdair Campbell ha escrit:
Hi,
Been a while since I've used VDR. Have it setup after scanning using the scan program, however something is strange.
There are multiple versions of some channels, such as BBC One/Two/News, Channel 4 etc. Some of these either have video and no EPG, have video and EPG, or have EPG and no video... Obviously what I'm looking for is the video& the EPG - this works for BBC One, but when I tune to the BBC Two which has the EPG visible, I receive no signal found message.
Terrestrial or satellite? I'm not really sure, but the issue should be the same in both cases: the service id should be sufficient to identify a channel, regardless of the transponder, but since some broadcasters reuse the same id in more than one transponder, vdr uses both the transponder and the service id to differentiate channels. The result is that when a channel changes transponder (like the uk channels recently did), vdr would probably find a new channel instead of replacing the tuning data of the existing one.
If any UK users have a cluestick on how to fix this, please let me know.
Well, I think there should be a better way, but the only current option is to let vdr update all channels and manually delete the old, non working ones.
Bye
On 3 November 2010 20:48, Luca Olivetti luca@ventoso.org wrote:
Al 03/11/10 21:31, En/na Alasdair Campbell ha escrit:
There are multiple versions of some channels, such as BBC One/Two/News, Channel 4 etc. Some of these either have video and no EPG, have video and EPG, or have EPG and no video... Obviously what I'm looking for is the video& the EPG - this works for BBC One, but when I tune to the BBC Two which has the EPG visible, I receive no signal found message.
Terrestrial or satellite?
Sorry forgot to say - it's Terrestrial.
I'm not really sure, but the issue should be the same in both cases: the service id should be sufficient to identify a channel, regardless of the transponder, but since some broadcasters reuse the same id in more than one transponder, vdr uses both the transponder and the service id to differentiate channels. The result is that when a channel changes transponder (like the uk channels recently did), vdr would probably find a new channel instead of replacing the tuning data of the existing one.
Ah so, the initial tuning file I'm using from dvbutils is out of date, and VDR finds the new transponders instantly?
Well, I think there should be a better way, but the only current option is to let vdr update all channels and manually delete the old, non working ones.
I've left VDR set at "Add New Transponders" which presumably is the most promiscuous mode, and will see what it comes up with over the next hour or so.
Thanks for the reply!
Bye
Luca
vdr mailing list vdr@linuxtv.org http://www.linuxtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/vdr
On 4 November 2010 06:31, Alasdair Campbell alcoheca@gmail.com wrote:
Been a while since I've used VDR. Have it setup after scanning using the scan program, however something is strange.
There are multiple versions of some channels, such as BBC One/Two/News, Channel 4 etc. Some of these either have video and no EPG, have video and EPG, or have EPG and no video... Obviously what I'm looking for is the video & the EPG - this works for BBC One, but when I tune to the BBC Two which has the EPG visible, I receive no signal found message.
From memory, I think the frequencies in channels.conf ends up being
166khz off the actual frequency. I remember having to tweak the channels.conf file manually, then turn off automatic updates. Can you post your file here?
On 3 November 2010 23:18, Torgeir Veimo torgeir@netenviron.com wrote:
From memory, I think the frequencies in channels.conf ends up being 166khz off the actual frequency. I remember having to tweak the channels.conf file manually, then turn off automatic updates. Can you post your file here?
After leaving it for a few hours this is what I have, note BBC ONE at the very bottom, the EPG is available here but no video stream, same with BBC TWO elsewhere.
channels.conf attached (hope attachments are allowed on this list!)
On 4 November 2010 09:24, Alasdair Campbell alcoheca@gmail.com wrote:
After leaving it for a few hours this is what I have, note BBC ONE at the very bottom, the EPG is available here but no video stream, same with BBC TWO elsewhere.
Here's my last working one, from two and a half year ago. Notice the frequencies are different;
BBC ONE;BBC:506000:C34D34M16B8T2G32Y0:T:27500:600:601=eng,602=eng:0:0:4164:9018:4100:0 BBC TWO;BBC:506000:C34D34M16B8T2G32Y0:T:27500:610:611=eng,612=eng:0:0:4228:9018:4100:0 ITV1;ITV:482000:B8:T:27500:520:521=eng,522=eng:0:0:8261:9018:8197:0 Channel 4;Channel 4 TV:482000:B8:T:27500:560+8190:561=eng,562=eng:0:0:8384:9018:8197:0 Five;five:562000:B8:T:27500:6017:6018=eng,6019=eng:0:0:12866:9018:12290:0 ITV2;ITV:482000:B8:T:27500:530:531=eng,532=eng:0:0:8325:9018:8197:0 ITV3;ITV:482000:B8:T:27500:540:541=eng,542=eng:0:0:8294:9018:8197:0 E4;Channel 4 TV:482000:B8:T:27500:570+8190:571=eng,572=eng:0:0:8448:9018:8197:0 More 4;Channel 4 TV:482000:B8:T:27500:590+8190:591=eng,592=eng:0:0:8442:9018:8197:0 Five Life;five:562000:B8:T:27500:6673:6674=eng,6675=eng:0:0:12928:9018:12290:0 Five US;five:562000:B8:T:27500:6689:6690=eng,6691=eng:0:0:12992:9018:12290:0 Film4;Channel 4 TV:538000:B8:T:27500:0:0:0:0:27136:9018:24576:0 BBC THREE;BSkyB:10773:h:S28.2E:22000:5200:5201=eng,5202=NAR:5203:0:6319:2:2045:0 BBC FOUR;BSkyB:10773:h:S28.2E:22000:5300:5301=eng,5302=NAR:5303:0:6316:2:2045:0 ITV4;ITV:482000:B8:T:27500:600:601=eng,602=eng:0:0:8353:9018:8197:0 UKTV History;UKTV:538000:B8:T:27500:301:302=eng,304=eng:0:0:25792:9018:24576:0
On Wednesday 03 Nov 2010, Torgeir Veimo wrote:
On 4 November 2010 09:24, Alasdair Campbell alcoheca@gmail.com wrote:
After leaving it for a few hours this is what I have, note BBC ONE at the very bottom, the EPG is available here but no video stream, same with BBC TWO elsewhere.
Here's my last working one, from two and a half year ago. Notice the frequencies are different;
BBC ONE;BBC:506000:C34D34M16B8T2G32Y0:T:27500:600:601=eng,602=eng:0:0:4164 :9018:4100:0 BBC TWO;BBC:506000:C34D34M16B8T2G32Y0:T:27500:610:611=eng,612=eng:0:0:4228 :9018:4100:0 ITV1;ITV:482000:B8:T:27500:520:521=eng,522=eng:0:0:8261:9018:8197:0 Channel 4;Channel 4 TV:482000:B8:T:27500:560+8190:561=eng,562=eng:0:0:8384:9018:8197:0 Five;five:562000:B8:T:27500:6017:6018=eng,6019=eng:0:0:12866:9018:12290 :0 ITV2;ITV:482000:B8:T:27500:530:531=eng,532=eng:0:0:8325:9018:8197:0 ITV3;ITV:482000:B8:T:27500:540:541=eng,542=eng:0:0:8294:9018:8197:0 E4;Channel 4 TV:482000:B8:T:27500:570+8190:571=eng,572=eng:0:0:8448:9018:8197:0 More 4;Channel 4 TV:482000:B8:T:27500:590+8190:591=eng,592=eng:0:0:8442:9018:8197:0 Five Life;five:562000:B8:T:27500:6673:6674=eng,6675=eng:0:0:12928:9018:1229 0:0 Five US;five:562000:B8:T:27500:6689:6690=eng,6691=eng:0:0:12992:9018:12290: 0 Film4;Channel 4 TV:538000:B8:T:27500:0:0:0:0:27136:9018:24576:0 BBC THREE;BSkyB:10773:h:S28.2E:22000:5200:5201=eng,5202=NAR:5203:0:6319:2: 2045:0 BBC FOUR;BSkyB:10773:h:S28.2E:22000:5300:5301=eng,5302=NAR:5303:0:6316:2:2 045:0 ITV4;ITV:482000:B8:T:27500:600:601=eng,602=eng:0:0:8353:9018:8197:0 UKTV History;UKTV:538000:B8:T:27500:301:302=eng,304=eng:0:0:25792:9018:2457 6:0
One thing that can be a pain is having to manually reorder the channel list when new channels are added or they change what their assigned channel number is. Or new channels appear right at the end of the channel list (which still includes out-dated channels!).
It would be nice if vdr had an option to set channel numbers based on the values that are encoded into the streams. I don't know enough about DVB standards to know where to find those numbers (LCN, Logical Channel Numbers, I think) but I do seem to remember someone on here a couple of years back mentioning a script which would reorder the channel listing to the "correct" numbering.
Actually, I think that "scan" has an option to add the LCNs to a generated channels.conf. A bit of digging finds:
"The channel numbers can be found in the NIT table as the user-defined descriptor 0x83 and each channel number has a corresponding Service ID which is included in the descriptor"
Now...would it be as simple as extracting the LCN and then calling cChannel->SetNumber() for the relevant channel? Does a new channels.conf then get written (at some point) including the relevant :@number entries so that it all works?
I might have a go to see if I can get this working but it won't be for a while due to other commitments.
I realise that a lot of people don't worry about channel numbers but it sort of makes sense to me, at least for DVB-T where there are significantly fewer channels than on DVB-S, for example. It's also the way that "proper" STBs do it and most people (at least in the UK) would expect their normal channel numbers.
Cheers,
Laz
On 04/11/10 09:36, Laz wrote:
One thing that can be a pain is having to manually reorder the channel list when new channels are added or they change what their assigned channel number is. Or new channels appear right at the end of the channel list (which still includes out-dated channels!).
It would be nice if vdr had an option to set channel numbers based on the values that are encoded into the streams. I don't know enough about DVB standards to know where to find those numbers (LCN, Logical Channel Numbers, I think) but I do seem to remember someone on here a couple of years back mentioning a script which would reorder the channel listing to the "correct" numbering.
That may have been me.
Actually, I think that "scan" has an option to add the LCNs to a generated channels.conf. A bit of digging finds:
Yes, it can get the LCNs and generate a VDR-compatible channels.conf. I used to use that as and when needed but I had problems because although VDR recognised the format it didn't always recognise when a channel it had scanned was the same as one already in the file generated by scan and generate duplicates. Something to do with frequency rounding I think. And for some reason I couldn't get VDR to not try to update channels.conf.
I've written my own scanningtool, which handles Freesat LCNs too, which are supplied in the BAT instead of the NIT. This needs a bit of kludging because I don't understand how the regions are handled by STBs so I have to use manual overrides ("BBC 1 South" = 101 etc) and a bit of shuffling. Then I've got another script which combines my Freesat and Freeview listings, making sure the LCNs don't clash. It also merges the new data with an existing channels.conf so it can deal with channels like BBC THREE/FOUR time sharing with CBeebies/CBBC etc. Really VDR shouldn't scan and store PIDs, but get them when tuning. The PMT and PAT are repeated very frequently so the extra time looking up PIDs is negligible. But this seems a failing of every DVB application I've seen :-(. Is this time sharing relatively rare outside the UK? I'd be surprised if Klaus and other developers had faced this problem at home and decided to basically ignore it as they have done.
"The channel numbers can be found in the NIT table as the user-defined descriptor 0x83 and each channel number has a corresponding Service ID which is included in the descriptor"
Now...would it be as simple as extracting the LCN and then calling cChannel->SetNumber() for the relevant channel? Does a new channels.conf then get written (at some point) including the relevant :@number entries so that it all works?
The trouble is there isn't a single standard for providing LCNs (eg BSkyB has its own scheme too), and Klaus etc may be reluctant to incorporate code specific to certain services in one country, so at best this would be a 3rd party patch and VDR already has too many of them.
I might have a go to see if I can get this working but it won't be for a while due to other commitments.
I realise that a lot of people don't worry about channel numbers but it sort of makes sense to me, at least for DVB-T where there are significantly fewer channels than on DVB-S, for example. It's also the way that "proper" STBs do it and most people (at least in the UK) would expect their normal channel numbers.
Yes, and they can be useful for DVB-S too, because you generally only regularly watch a small subset and remember the numbers of most of them. I also find it easier to use a printed TV guide than the EPG to plan my viewing, and they publish the numbers.
TBH this is one of the only reasons I stick with VDR instead of mythtv, because I know a way to make the former use LCNs, but I don't know how with the latter.
Hey Tony,
On 4 November 2010 12:59, Tony Houghton h@realh.co.uk wrote:
I've written my own scanningtool, which handles Freesat LCNs too, which are supplied in the BAT instead of the NIT. This needs a bit of kludging because I don't understand how the regions are handled by STBs so I have to use manual overrides ("BBC 1 South" = 101 etc) and a bit of shuffling. Then I've got another script which combines my Freesat and Freeview listings, making sure the LCNs don't clash. It also merges the new data with an existing channels.conf so it can deal with channels like BBC THREE/FOUR time sharing with CBeebies/CBBC etc. Really VDR shouldn't scan and store PIDs, but get them when tuning.
Any chance you could put the source to this scanning tool on github or something similar for others to play with?
Cheers, Dom
On 09/11/10 12:27, Dominic Evans wrote:
On 4 November 2010 12:59, Tony Houghtonh@realh.co.uk wrote:
I've written my own scanningtool, which handles Freesat LCNs too, which are supplied in the BAT instead of the NIT. This needs a bit of kludging because I don't understand how the regions are handled by STBs so I have to use manual overrides ("BBC 1 South" = 101 etc) and a bit of shuffling. Then I've got another script which combines my Freesat and Freeview listings, making sure the LCNs don't clash. It also merges the new data with an existing channels.conf so it can deal with channels like BBC THREE/FOUR time sharing with CBeebies/CBBC etc. Really VDR shouldn't scan and store PIDs, but get them when tuning.
Any chance you could put the source to this scanning tool on github or something similar for others to play with?
It's part of boxstard which is available by git from git://boxstar.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/boxstar/boxstard. You'll need scons and headers etc for libsqlite3 (the tool you need is a spin- off from a bigger project) and glib to compile it. Then look at the scan tool in the tools subdirectory (scan --help).
Is anyone interested in the other script I mentioned to merge Freeview and Freesat channels files?
On 09/11/10 15:22, Dominic Evans wrote:
Is anyone interested in the other script I mentioned to merge Freeview and Freesat channels files?
Yes, that too please :-)
I've uploaded it to http://www.realh.co.uk/scan2vdr.txt. It's actually a python script, but I changed it to .txt to make sure the server doesn't get confused and try to run it. You'll probably need to change the SCAN_BIN and OLD_CHANS variables near the top of the file, and the scan command arguments in Scan2Vdr.__init__() on lines 129-134.
It can also be altered to read the new scan data from files instead of running the scans itself. IIRC all you should need to do is remove the references to dvbt_threads and dvbs_threads from Scan2Vdr.__init__() and unquote and edit the lines beginning with fp.
It creates a new channels.conf in the current directory.
On Wednesday 03 November 2010 23:24:54 Alasdair Campbell wrote:
On 3 November 2010 23:18, Torgeir Veimo torgeir@netenviron.com wrote:
From memory, I think the frequencies in channels.conf ends up being 166khz off the actual frequency. I remember having to tweak the channels.conf file manually, then turn off automatic updates. Can you post your file here?
After leaving it for a few hours this is what I have, note BBC ONE at the very bottom, the EPG is available here but no video stream, same with BBC TWO elsewhere.
channels.conf attached (hope attachments are allowed on this list!)
The first instance of 'BBC ONE' uses QAM64 modulation with 8k carriers, the second QAM16 and 2k. Assuming you've gone through DSO the first one is correct. Maybe vdr's channel scanning is getting confused by having two nearly- identical entries in channels.conf.
Dave
Alasdair Campbell wrote:
Been a while since I've used VDR. Have it setup after scanning using the scan program, however something is strange.
There are multiple versions of some channels, such as BBC One/Two/News, Channel 4 etc. Some of these either have video and no EPG, have video and EPG, or have EPG and no video... Obviously what I'm looking for is the video & the EPG - this works for BBC One, but when I tune to the BBC Two which has the EPG visible, I receive no signal found message.
would this have anything to do with the recent addition of new HD channels? a DVB-T only receiver could tune to the channel but not demodulate the DVB-T2 signal.
Simon
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Alasdair Campbell -
Dave -
Dominic Evans -
Laz -
Luca Olivetti -
Simon -
Tony Houghton -
Torgeir Veimo