EPG problems with USB DVB using BDA drivers

[alanjrobertson]

Hi!

First of all - I'm very impressed with GB-PVR. Having been playing about with it most of today and greatly enjoying it!

I've done my best to read over all the relevant support threads I can find but there's still one issue in particular that's causing me problems.

First of all, my setup:
AMD Athlon 64 3400+
1GB RAM
Freecom USB DVB-T (using Yakumo BDA drivers)
(also have a Hauppage MediaMVP - very pleased with transcoding once I sorted the framerate issue & network shares now working too )

I've installed the Freecom USB stick using the BDA drivers and have got it to tune in fine (apart from issue 2 below).

The issues are:

1) EPG - I can't get the OTA DVB EPG to work AT ALL. I know some folks got it working partially, just with some bits missing (and were advised to set the program not to do a complete refresh of the EPG) but I can't get it to load the EPG at all. It scan's the muxes, finds the channels and then when it goes to load the EPG it starts working it's way through the muxes (as expected). I find that by the time it gets to the 5th or 6th mux my CPU usage (for config.exe) jumps to 85-99% and it basically seems to just hang at that point. No EPG info seems to be saved at all. I can easily access channels on that mux via Live TV so it's not a reception issue. I tried deleting the tuner and re-adding it but the same thing happens. I've also found that if I just right-click on the tray icon and go update EPG it doesn't even give the same messages re. scanning each mux. I've attached log files.

2) Channels - GB-PVR seems to ignore channels that aren't currently broadcasting. This is a particular issue in the UK where ones like CBBC/BBC3 and CBeebies/BBC4 timeshare and therefore only half are every broadcasting at once. I've checked with TSReaderLite though and the other channel (that's off-air) is still listed in the mux along with a 7-day listing of its programmes. As a side-issue - I also find that some (but not all) of the channels seem to be duplicated - e.g., BBC ONE, BBC ONE (1), five, five (1), etc.)

3) Channel icons - I've read the page on the wiki but I can't really work out how to get these added - any help much appreciated!

Thanks again for any help.

Cheers

Alan

[sub]

1) EPG - I can't get the OTA DVB EPG to work AT ALL. I know some folks got it working partially, just with some bits missing (and were advised to set the program not to do a complete refresh of the EPG) but I can't get it to load the EPG at all. It scan's the muxes, finds the channels and then when it goes to load the EPG it starts working it's way through the muxes (as expected). I find that by the time it gets to the 5th or 6th mux my CPU usage (for config.exe) jumps to 85-99% and it basically seems to just hang at that point. No EPG info seems to be saved at all. I can easily access channels on that mux via Live TV so it's not a reception issue. I tried deleting the tuner and re-adding it but the same thing happens. I've also found that if I just right-click on the tray icon and go update EPG it doesn't even give the same messages re. scanning each mux. I've attached log files.

You could *TEMPORARILY* create the following registry setting HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Devnz\LogPSIProcessing=1 (DWORD), then do an Update EPG again. It'll cause the creation of a c:\psi.log file. Zip and attach this file.

2) Channels - GB-PVR seems to ignore channels that aren't currently broadcasting. This is a particular issue in the UK where ones like CBBC/BBC3 and CBeebies/BBC4 timeshare and therefore only half are every broadcasting at once. I've checked with TSReaderLite though and the other channel (that's off-air) is still listed in the mux along with a 7-day listing of its programmes.

Yes, this is well known. I'll fix it in a future release. You can still add the channels by doing the initial mapping twice, at appropriate times when they are broadcasting.

[djtaylor]

Take my advice, don't waste time with the broadcast EPG. What you describe is pretty much the same as I had and I got fed up waiting for it to scan to find that it still wasn't full.

Change to xmltv, use the GUI here http://www.birtles.org.uk/xmltv/, choose your channels, then import the EPG, then map the channels in the tuner.

Where there are those such as BBC3, BBC4, Cbeebies and CBBC, you just import all of those in the EPG and if you scanned during the day you map as follows:-

CBeebies = CBeebies
BBC4 = CBeebies
CBBC = CBBC
BBC3 = CBBC

If you scanned channels during the evening then reverse the above as the channels swap over.

This way you get to list all the channels in the EPG and the EPG updates very quickly.

Channel Icons, bung them in the gbpvr\media folder but you have to rename the filename to match the EPG name.

David.

[alanjrobertson]

@sub - EPG scanning and logging as I type . Thanks for the good news re. channels - I was hoping a rescan later in the day would do the trick, but nice to know it'll be fixed.

@david - where did you get your channel icons from? I tried using the channelicon program listed in the wiki but it just seems to crash on download (I think it's because the site has changed from satlogo.com to lyngsat-logo.com). Would take quite a while to download them otherwise.

Cheers

Alan

[djtaylor]

I just found a zip file with them in the forums somewhere. That's the most frustrating thing at times, all the information is buried in the forums, you have to search and search and digest but after two weeks of it myself, I feel i've pretty much got the hang of it with just a few snags to address.

I've attached the list of icons that I have, I also picked up the latest 4 ITV icons that released on the 16th Jan. Just rename any that don't get picked up to match your channel list.

David.

[alanjrobertson]

@sub - psi.log file attached.

The first time round I killed the process once it started to use 99% of CPU, but the psi.log file then seemed to drop markedly in size - from megabytes down to a couple of hundred kb. Upon looking at the file sizes whilst it scans I see that the psi.log restarts after each mux. I've included one file from the result of the 3rd mux scanning.

I also kept the task manager running - CPU usage at about 8% most of the time (config.exe just using 3%) for the first four muxes (41, 47, 44, 51). It jumped up to 99% during mux 4 (UHF Chan 55) at 21:28 (not sure if time is logged in these). I've added the config.exe log too - you can see how things seem to slow down towards the end of it, with more and more messages displaying the same thing as it countsdown the time left on that mux.

Alan

[alanjrobertson]

I just found a zip file with them in the forums somewhere. That's the most frustrating thing at times, all the information is buried in the forums, you have to search and search and digest but after two weeks of it myself, I feel i've pretty much got the hang of it with just a few snags to address.

I've attached the list of icons that I have, I also picked up the latest 4 ITV icons that released on the 16th Jan. Just rename any that don't get picked up to match your channel list.

David.

Thanks for those David. I actually found them earlier on today on the forum but couldn't get any of the zip files to open - I also found that the file I downloaded was bigger (797kb as opposed to 545). I tried putting it into WinRAR and it was able to open it - found a file inside called ChannelLogos (no extension) - extracted that and added a zip suffix and it seemed to open! - no idea why that happened though! Cheers for the updated ITV ones too!

PS - thanks for the XMLTV/RT tip - I've had a play about with it, but there seems to be a lot of picking channels off the list, downloading, then importing to GB-PVR and matching up with channels there - the numbering seemed to go off at that point too! Ideally I'd prefer just to get the DVB version working, but if not I'll certainly try it again.

[djtaylor]

PS - thanks for the XMLTV/RT tip - I've had a play about with it, but there seems to be a lot of picking channels off the list, downloading, then importing to GB-PVR and matching up with channels there - the numbering seemed to go off at that point too! Ideally I'd prefer just to get the DVB version working, but if not I'll certainly try it again.

It seems that way at first but once you get the hang of it, just choose the channels you want in the GUI, then do the download, it saves a file then configure gbpvr to read the file.

Finally just do the channel mapping in gbpvr. Once I got my head around it, it's much quicker and more reliable than the EPG which I have seen just plain wrong in the guide. I nearly missed a programme because it wasn't in the broadcast EPG but was in digiguide and the RT listings.

David.

[alanjrobertson]

I'll certainly give it a go if the DVB side of things doesn't work out. I've got a Humax PVR9200 as my main machine for recording things though so it's not too critical.

I've attached some additional & renamed icons for Freeview in Scotland (prefer the ITV1 logo so left it as that rather than going for the Scottish TV one ).

Cheers

Alan

Edit - updated channel logos to my resized ones (see http://forums.nextpvr.com/showthread.php...#post85880)

[sub]

It seemed to be getting upset with a bit of garbage in the data. Another user had this same error a few weeks back. I've added some logic to ensure these shows are skipped in the next release.

20/01/2006 21:22:24.201 ERROR [129] DVB EPG error reading xml: '', hexadecimal value 0x06, is an invalid character. Line 2361, position 130.

Other than that, it seemed to be correctly seeing the show listings in the PSI info.