No picture in Live TV on many channels

[acidfiend2003]

I posted over in the hardware forum, but here might be better as I now suspect a software bug in GB-PVR.

I've got a Hauppage WinTV-NOVA-T-USB-2 for watching UK Freeview channels. In the (awful) supplied software I get a full list of channels and can happily watch pretty much all of them. I tried ShowShifter and Media Portal and also got a similar channel list and could watch them all. So I'm pretty confident that the Nova T is working just fine with our aerial and the reception is good.

Unfortunately, Showshifter and Media Portal don't work with my laptop's TV-Out and although WinTV2000 does, it is slow and has no integrated EPG. I really, really want to use GB-PVR as it seems to have everything I need, but the performance with my tuner is very poor. GB-PVR detects fewer channels than the others, and with many of them I get sound but no picture.

Anyone have any suggestions?

Regards
Dave

[sub]

Some UK users have more luck by editing config.xml and setting <BDAScanType>2</BDAScanType>

[acidfiend2003]

Thanks for the reply. I actually made some progress after yet another half a days fiddling....

First of all I decided to leave WinTV2000 and Media Portal installed. The BDA Mux Checker now reports that I have the Cyberlink MPEG Muxer installed which is something that wasn't there before. I doubt this is part of Media Portal so I'll probably delete that if GBPVR remains stable over the next week.

I also changed my MPEG decoders to the ones supplied with the Nova (Intervideo non-CSS for Hauppauge) because the Nero Digital ones that are default on my laptop weren't listed as being compatible with GBPVR elsewhere on this forum.

Then I switched to VMR7 as I had problems with VMR9 in WinTV2000. Finally, as recommended elsewhere in this forum I set the Deinterlace to Encoder pass-through.

Result: I can now watch and record in Live TV, which is great. I don't have a full channel list though yet, I think I need to tweak my list of channels in Radio Times XML TV and then rescan and reassign :-(

What will the likely effect of changing config.xml be? what problem is aimed at solving?

Regards
Dave

PS - anyone got a complete list of all the free-to-air digital channels available from the UK Crystal Palace transmitter?

[sub]

First of all I decided to leave WinTV2000 and Media Portal installed. The BDA Mux Checker now reports that I have the Cyberlink MPEG Muxer installed which is something that wasn't there before. I doubt this is part of Media Portal so I'll probably delete that if GBPVR remains stable over the next week.

I do remember someone in the past pointing out that Media Portal were illegally including the Cyberlink mux without paying the licensing fee.

What will the likely effect of changing config.xml be? what problem is aimed at solving?

Just try it an see. Some UK Nova-T users seem to have a problem finding some of their channels until they change this setting. It causes GB-PVR to use a slightly different approach to scanning for channels.

[acidfiend2003]

I do remember someone in the past pointing out that Media Portal were illegally including the Cyberlink mux without paying the licensing fee.

I think they might be right. I just removed Media Portal and the mux has gone?? I was assuming WinTV2000 has installed it but clearly not...

Just try it an see. Some UK Nova-T users seem to have a problem finding some of their channels until they change this setting. It causes GB-PVR to use a slightly different approach to scanning for channels.

I shall give it a go now then.

Regards
Dave

[acidfiend2003]

I changed config.xml, but it didn't help. Instead I got the message "no channels found". After changing it back, I did another rescan and lost another batch of channels

So now I have no Sky3, Sky News, E4+1, UK TV History or FTN - these were all working just fine earlier today :mad:

[sub]

Ok then, it was worth shot. I dont know why its not finding these channels for you.

[acidfiend2003]

It is *very* confusing for me too. I just rescanned (again!) and it found all the channels again. Don't yet know if they're all watchable but it is promising.

Now that I've got them all working, is there a file I should take a backup of just in case..?

Regards
Dave

[acidfiend2003]

I dont know why its not finding these channels for you

I think one of the reasons why it finds some, and not others, depends rather a lot on something called Top Up TV, which I didn't know about.

I asked a little while back for a list of free-to-air channels, and just in case anyone else is looking go here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeview#TV_channels

There are also 10 timeshared premium channels (Top Up TV):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_Up_TV

...and I think that's what was confusing me. Depending on the time of day of my scan I'd get different results. It's also very hard to tell in the channel scan which are radio stations and which are TV stations. So now I know what I should be getting and at what times they air, I can probably build a final channel list <phew>

Regards
Dave

[sub]

Yes, this has been discussed many times in the past. From your earlier posts though, it didnt sound like this was your problem. Yours sounded more random, so I assumed it was more related to difficulties with scanning, which some suffer from.

I've started making changes in the new release (v0.95.11), which will help when I implement support for the timeshared channels in the future. Maybe in the v0.96 release.

The work around it map most of your channels in the morning, then in the evening mapping the remaining missing ones, then you're away.