Strange and Annoying Problems w/GB-PVR

[Ted the Penguin]

I think what happened was that they tried to satisfy everybody instead of doing what made sense.

hey, that sounds thoroughly American. we must do everything in our power not to piss anyone off (ok anyone with enough money and lobbyists), I dont care if it means that our solution is back-asswards and will be outdated before its released

[Braklet]

Yeah, a lot of things about the ATSC spec make no sense. I think what happened was that they tried to satisfy everybody instead of doing what made sense. Sadly, we're stuck with it for a while yet.

ATSC PSIP (which is where the major.minor thing comes from) isn't a bad system. It actually makes perfect sense when you realize that the system provides for multiplexing digital channels within a single RF allocation. Most of the digital broadcasters around here take advantage of it and frankly I wish they'd ALL provide separate HD and SD digital streams.

The confusion arises because most of the time they use their NTSC channel allocation as PSIP major #.

Systems that use a simple integer field to uniquely identify all channels can't handle multiplexing very well.

That said, I believe you're asking for trouble if you assign all ATSC major.minors to a single channel in GB-PVRs database. You'll end up with multiple EPG entries mapped to a common tuning string, which means you're locking out all but one minor channel.

I ran into trouble with EPG/digital channel mapping and since I adopted this scheme, all trouble has vanished:

1. Pick a channel range in the thousands that isn't used by any tuning source (my DishNetwork feed uses some 4 digit channels so I had to be careful here). I use 1nnn to identify all ATSC channels.

2. Use the hundreds/tens fields to identify the PSIP major channels, and the single digit field to identify the PSIP minor channels. Thus:

ATSC 2.1 = GB-PVR 1021
ATSC 5.3 = GB-PVR 1053
ATSC 50.2 = GB-PVR 1502