Adding official support for Argentina (and most of South America)

[FaberfoX]

Hi! I've been lurking for a while, using NPVR on and off for a couple of years and I was wondering what is needed to add official support for my country and most others in South America that also use this same standard (ISDB-Tb, the b referring to the modifications introduced by Brazil).
Right now, it almost works out of the box, I had to select Taiwan on my tuner to get the proper frequencies scanned, and not much more.
As this variant of ISDB-T uses H264 video + HE-AAC audio, I get no audio on NPVR while it works on XBMC. Also, from what I could figure, EPG is GMT timed, so all the info is off by (in my case) 3 hours. Finally, I'm no sure what encoding is present on the EPG data, but accented characters are wrong, looking at codepages on wikipedia it seems like it's using ISO6937 instead of ISO8859-1.
My tuner is a Mygica S870, it uses a Dibcom 8000 chip and I'm with the default BDA driver.
Please let me know what if any other info you need from me, I can post logs, freq tables and I could even set up a remotely accessible VM for you guys to work on.

Thanks!

[sub]

Hi! I've been lurking for a while, using NPVR on and off for a couple of years and I was wondering what is needed to add official support for my country and most others in South America that also use this same standard (ISDB-Tb, the b referring to the modifications introduced by Brazil).
Right now, it almost works out of the box, I had to select Taiwan on my tuner to get the proper frequencies scanned, and not much more.

I'll make a copy of the Taiwan file and rename it for Brazil, so it appears for the next release.

As this variant of ISDB-T uses H264 video + HE-AAC audio, I get no audio on NPVR while it works on XBMC.

This is probably just down to your HE-AAC decoder. What decoder are you using? Lots of other countries are successfully using H.264 + HE-AAC.

Also, from what I could figure, EPG is GMT timed, so all the info is off by (in my case) 3 hours.

NextPVR is expecting the EPG data to be UTC based (ie GMT). Are your broadcasts using local times for the EPG? I wouldn't think so. They should be using UTC. If so - it should be a matter of making sure your PC is configured for the correct timezone (and set to automatically adjust for daylight savings.

Finally, I'm no sure what encoding is present on the EPG data, but accented characters are wrong, looking at codepages on wikipedia it seems like it's using ISO6937 instead of ISO8859-1.

This probably a reasonably easy fix. You'd need to supply a short example recording though (using something like dropbox), so I can look at the data.

[FaberfoX]

I'll make a copy of the Taiwan file and rename it for Brazil, so it appears for the next release.

I'm not sure about Brazil, but at least here in Argentina, DTV services are only allowed in the UHF band, so you might want to add Argentina with just those frequencies.

This is probably just down to your HE-AAC decoder. What decoder are you using? Lots of other countries are successfully using H.264 + HE-AAC.

I have no decoders installed, as I'm mainly interested in xbmc as a frontend, I'll install one and report back but I assume it will work

NextPVR is expecting the EPG data to be UTC based (ie GMT). Are your broadcasts using local times for the EPG? I wouldn't think so. They should be using UTC. If so - it should be a matter of making sure your PC is configured for the correct timezone (and set to automatically adjust for daylight savings.

I'm almost sure they're broadcasting local times, as this issue also happens using tvheadend and ProgDVB and on both of them the time shift is the same (-3 hours, we're GMT-3).

This probably a reasonably easy fix. You'd need to supply a short example recording though (using something like dropbox), so I can look at the data.

This is an example from the EPG:
Con el objeto de realizar un censo nacional de mujeres, eva perðn convoca a jðvenes militantes peronistas que recorren el paŦs para establecer un esclarecedor retrato de la realidad argentina En estreno para la televisiðn...

The correct bold characters should be ó and í (243 and 237 on ISO8859-1, the ones shown are those same from ISO6937). If EPG data is present on a .ts recording, I'll go ahead and upload a small recording.

Thanks once more!

[sub]

I have no decoders installed, as I'm mainly interested in xbmc as a frontend, I'll install one and report back but I assume it will work

The LAV decoder from https://github.com/Nevcairiel/LAVFilters/releases should do the job.

I'm almost sure they're broadcasting local times, as this issue also happens using tvheadend and ProgDVB and on both of them the time shift is the same (-3 hours, we're GMT-3).


This is an example from the EPG:
Con el objeto de realizar un censo nacional de mujeres, eva perðn convoca a jðvenes militantes peronistas que recorren el paŦs para establecer un esclarecedor retrato de la realidad argentina En estreno para la televisiðn...

The correct bold characters should be ó and í (243 and 237 on ISO8859-1, the ones shown are those same from ISO6937). If EPG data is present on a .ts recording, I'll go ahead and upload a small recording.

Yep, a recording should show these. I'm away from home for a couple of weeks though, so not entirely sure when I'll be able to take a close look at the file.