UK Freesat Disruption in 2023

[sub]

If someone has an updated .ini file they want to supply, I'll include it in the next release.

[jcjefferies]

The last move is this week sometime! However BBC will then have an empty transponder 10803Mhz so will probably do some housekeeping as they also have a temporary transponder. Once 10803MHZ has been upgraded to S2 the King of Sat ini file should be OK again. They were very slow detecting the upgrade of the transponders compared with Lyngsat. The current .ini file is up to date except for the upgrade to 10803 when ever that is upgraded.

Chris

[jcjefferies]

Sub

Little seems to have happened at 28.2 in the last week or two related to the BBC changes. BBC transponder 10803Mhz is now empty but is still DVB-S. Most of BBC radio channels  are on 12421Mhz along with the remaining SD Channels which are due to be switched off at some point. It has been suggested that the BBC may want to keep the radio channels on a DVB-S transponder so could move them to 10803Mhz? However BBC do have two HD channels on a Sky transponder so may want to move them to a BBC transponder?

The vast majority of changes have now been made so you could download the current 282.ini from King of Sat. Any future BBC changes will only affect a tiny percentage of people!!

Chris

[Frayed Bentos]

If someone has an updated .ini file they want to supply, I'll include it in the next release.

The version I used was Chris 'jcjefferies' .ini from a few Weeks ago posted on another thread, which worked a treat to restore BBC4 HD which was the main channel I wanted back..

I hope you don't mind me reposting it here Chris, but it did the trick & many thanks for keeping a beady eye out..

Perhaps there might be another update on the way at some point, but unpacking the enclosed zip tuning data in the relevant folder & pointing the NPVR tuning menu in it's direction did it for me... 

[sub]

Thanks.

[TomT]

There have been a couple more changes to accommodate BBC moving regional channels to HD

Entries 5 and 6 have changed to:
5=10773,H,23000,34,S2,8PSK
6=10788,V,23000,34,S2,8PSK

I can't find any documentation as what the fourth entry . All the QPSK signals seem to be 56 and the 8PSK entries are 34 or 23. Can someone explain what this is? I used 34 in the entries I have substituted and it seems to work but I would like to know if that is correct.

I went though all the 28.2 entries to check if there were any other changes. Entries 8 and 21 could be removed as there is no longer anything broadcast on these frequencies. I haven't done this in the attached file as it means renumbering all the entries and I am lazy

There were also a couple of typos in the previously uploaded 0282-New.ini.zip file where a digit had been dropped from the frequency (entries 40 and 50) so I have also corrected that.

[jcjefferies]

That's a very old 0282.ini you are modifying dating to the very start of the changes. Wouldn't it have been easier to download the latest 0282.ini from King Of Sat as they are updated every day with the latest changes? After that you can if you want delete all the transponders you are not interested in!

[TomT]

Wouldn't it have been easier to download the latest 0282.ini from King Of Sat

Yes it would. But this is how the last two days have gone...

I've been upgrading all our computers to Windows 11. My media centre won't support it and although I know you can fudge windows to get around the hardware restrictions, it is six years old so I decided on an upgrade. I cloned the old hard drive and did an inplace upgrade so I didn't need to setup everything from scratch. I also updated NextPVR as I was still running v4 and updated Kodi to v20.

Normally I would avoid doing lots of different updates all at once but I wanted to get this all sorted and out of the way this weekend. My first problem was that I lost all my recordings and config from NextPVR. I couldn't understand this as the data was all there and I even tried restoring the database and config files from a backup. So I then went ahead setting up from scratch to find that I couldn't get quite a few of the main channels I wanted. In the past I would just do a manual scan but this hasn't made its way into v5/6 so I was a bit lost. i spent some time searching for a solution but didn't find one.

So I then spent quite a lot of time researching and trying out other back-ends for Kodi but finally came unstuck when I couldn't find one that supported Schedules Direct and I wasn't happy with the alternative EPG solutions. So I went back to trying to get NextPVR to work. This time my searching was more successful. The first thing I found was that data directory had changed to NPVR-data. I had tried restoring my config and database files to the old NPVR directory and of course, once I'd copied them to the new directory, I got all my recordings and config back. I was still missing a couple of channels and couldn't do a manual scan so it was back to searching for a solution and I found this thread.

The subject of satellite ini files isn't in the product documentation and there is no reason a casual user would know about them. Once you do know about them it is easy to fix the issue of the missing channels and I also realised I could make a custom one to remove 85% of the channels I don't want.

So, to finally answer your question, why didn't I just download the latest ini file from King of Sat? Well the simple answer is because I didn't know you could. Reading this thread, it seems that people have been editing the existing ini file and then posting it so that other people could use it and @sub could include it in the next build. So I thought I would do the same, to help others avoid some of the frustration I have had. And it has been a very frustrating couple of days.

I would also point out that it isn't very obvious that you can download the data from King of Sat (it is just a small icon in the header bar).

Anyway, to save @sub the trouble of having to go off and get it himself, I have attached today's download of 282.ini

Finally, I would still like to know what the significance of the fourth data point in the ini file is. All the QPSK signals seem to be 56 and the 8PSK entries are 34 or 23. Can someone explain what this is?

[sub]

Thanks. File updated for next build.

Finally, I would still like to know what the significance of the fourth data point in the ini file is. All the QPSK signals seem to be 56 and the 8PSK entries are 34 or 23. Can someone explain what this is?

This is the "Forward Error Correction". 5/6 is typically used with DVB. 2/3 or 3/4 are common with DVB-S2. There can be other values though.

[TomT]

Thanks. File updated for next build.

Finally, I would still like to know what the significance of the fourth data point in the ini file is. All the QPSK signals seem to be 56 and the 8PSK entries are 34 or 23. Can someone explain what this is?

This is the "Forward Error Correction". 5/6 is typically used with DVB. 2/3 or 3/4 are common with DVB-S2. There can be other values though.

Ah. I'm familiar with FEC but without the '/' it didn't click what it was. Duh!