Remote access to ATSC machine needed

[sub]

To be quite honest, I'm sick to death of hearing about ATSC recently, and I'm seriously considering changing it's official status to "not supported by me, but might work if you're lucky".

I'm not in a country that uses ATSC, so not a feature I can easily develop and test. It's luckily been 'kind of' working through its similarities with DVB. Annoyingly, it seems to work well for some users and not at all for others.

I've decided to have one last look at improving the reliability of ATSC, but will need to have someone provide remote access to a machine that has one of the compatible ATSC capture devices so I can do some analysis. If you've got fast broadband, and either VNC or RemoteDesktop, and can help out, please PM me the connection details. Thanks in advance...

[sub]

The problem seems to relate to a component called the Microsoft 'BDA MPEG2 Transport Information Filter' which is responsible for finding the correct PIDs (streams) for the specified major/minor numbers. It seem that some times it just cant or doesnt do it. What I'm testing is an approach that doesnt rely on this component. I currently only use this component for ATSC. With this test I'm moving to an approach that is more like what I do with DVB, and doesnt depend on this component.

[sub]

If you're an ATSC user, and have had problems recording, and would like to test it, you can download the patch from http://www.gbpvr.com/atsc-scan5.zip. Read below carefully:

NOTE: These patches discussed in this thread only apply to v0.98.8. Newer versions include this same functionality in the original install.

EDIT: patch file has been updated to reflect various patches included in this thread. At the URL above is the only files you need.

There is a quite significant change to how your capture source needs to be setup now. You have to scan for the channels rather than entering the old T:48,32,2 type of info.

The best way to test this patch is to delete your existing capture source and recreate it. After entering the EPG information, click the 'Update EPG' button to force it to save the capture source, and pull in the EPG. Next hit the 'map digital channels to epg channels' button. It'll proceed to scan for channels.

At the end of this process, on the left of the screen you'll see the EPG channel list. If you click in the third column of the channels you want to map, you'll be presented with a list of the digital channels found. Select the channel that it maps to. Do this for each of the digital channels you receive. Then 'OK' out of the config app.

After doing all this, try going and doing some recordings to see if you get better results than in the past.

Please post any feedback, and include the logs if you have problems.

[unsword]

Downloaded the update and followed the instructions for setting up the channel mapping - that's actually a huge improvement over having to manually figure out the tuning and entering it.

Now the bad news - all recordings failed, logs attached

[lonegeek]

Hmmm , It doesnt appear to be picking up any channels...

[bigbus01]

Same here, no channels mapped. I did see the signal strength pick up a number of them but they didn't map.

bigbus

[bigbus01]

One problem with this type of channel setup, I have an antenna rotator and a number of the channels I pickup are very particular to angle (some are far away and in different directions). Setting them up manually in GBPVR worked better than with my ATI (HDTV Wonder) software since it set up channels by their signal strength, every time you rotate the antenna, you get a different lineup.

Bigbus

[unsword]

Had you selected Recording Source as BDA plugin first ?

[bigbus01]

I had my ATI HDTV Wonder set up and it had been working fine for recording and watching. Over the last couple of days, it stopped recording (6 kB files created) but I could still watch. I just tried the patch here in this thread and it didn't pick up any channels.

I just tried a reinstall (repair and then resetup channels) and now I am back in business again. I can record and watch. Something must have gotten corrupted a few days ago.

Bigbus

[daphatty]

Sorry sub, I am in San Francisco on holiday and I won't be back in D.C. until Monday night (tuesday afternoon for you.)