Playing back of BBC 4 HD with Lav Video Decoders

[sub]

The second is NPVR/Lame response to this bad data.. i've seen NPVR/Lame crashing with this sort of data. Did you see that behaviour?

I just had another go with the file now.

I don't see any crashes. It obviously looks like a terrible mess trying to play it (but it does on other players too).

Skipping a minute at a time didn't work well, because the timeline was badly damaged, so it thinks the file is like 16000 hours long, so skipping for 60 seconds the file pointer doesn't really move (since 60 seconds of 16000 hours is like nothing). HOWEVER, if I click on the timeline, it skips fine. In fact, if I click anywhere past the first 20% or so, it actually plays nicely, without any corruption - so likely you had other things (like weather) effecting things further near the beginning of the recording.

At the end of the day, it's only worth putting so much effort into playing garbage. In general though, it actually did ok here on this file other than the timeline.

[Bobins]

I was lucky in that my aerial still has a strong signal after the changes. There are still more changes to come which will move BBC4 HD to a lower frequency however a poor aerial/cable is still a poor aerial/cable.

One of the biggest issues is people split the signal using a passive splitter so the aerial feeds a TV as well as the NPVR rig. This introduces a lot of attenuation of the signal. TVs handle this better because the tuners are generally better than those found in PC based cards or USB adapters.


If you're splitting your signal, a small amplified splitter would usually help.


In the end as Sub said, if the signal is bad and full of errors, you're not going to fair well whichever software is used to play the recorded file.

[robbyp]

Thanks Sub, I was just wondering if you could make it crash. I've seen instances with other files from BBC4 where NPVR just stops, and you have to close it and restart. Maybe this one does not do this. If I find another one which does do this behaviour i will send you the file.

I still see the behaviour where a file does not play. Then you go back, try and play it again, and it works. Once I've seen another one of these I'll post it to you.

As regards the antenna setup, I have two HD tuners in the PC. I'm going to experiment by assigning BBC4 to one of them only, then to the other, and see if that makes any difference. They are from different manufactures and may have different performance.

The signal is coming in from a roof top amplifier and then split into two feeds by another amplifier splitter.

Will post back with more results

Thanks for all your help Sub & Bobins.

[robbyp]

I tried to reply to you @Sub but it rejected it with your inbox being full ;-)

[sub]

I tried to reply to you @Sub but it rejected it with your inbox being full ;-)

It was full very temporarily yesterday, but I bumped up the limit, so messages should get to me now.