I just implemented a patch mcraenz has submitted to the sourceforge patches page. He has given a quite good description so i just quote him
"In New Zealand (I suspect other countries too) we have a DVB-S service that
has no CAM so we have to use analog+blaster+STB; which is fine, however
what we have found is that the EPG is not encrypted and since many of us
have a DVB-S card pointing at the same sat for our FTA stuff we scan in the
encrypted channels, combine them with the STB analog channels, set the
analog card with higher priority than the DVB-S card and enjoy reliable EPG
data from the sat while watching the channel via analog from the STB.
This works very well however it poses a problem with scheduling /
conflicts; since the channel must be mapped to both analog and DVB-S TVE3
naturally assumes that it can play the channel from DVB-S which is not the
case."
I did only a small addition to his patch.
You can also toggle the "EPG only" flag by double clicking on the right (card) column in the channel->card mapping.
Recently Version 1.6.5.0 of CoreAVC has been released.
I have been testing it yesterday evening and it works very well. If you have used 1.6.0.0 then you will notice some nice improvements.
http://www.coreavc.com
Changelog CoreAVC H.264 Video Codec - Version 1.6.5.0
(20080129)
- Add: Ignore past display order frame when
invalid
- Add: Disable deblocking option for slower computers
- Add:
Support for MV out of specs (fix artifacts for buggy files)
- Fix: Green
frames display with incomplete frames
- Fix: Some minor improvements with
DVB Viewer
- Fix: Deinterlacing fixes with internal bob
- Fix: Settings
dialog glitchs
- Fix: Renamed Weave deinterlacing to "None (Weave)" to avoid
confusion
- Fix: Others internal fixes
As some of you probably know i am currently trying to find a good way
to fix the pcr/pts/dts patching in TsWriter, if some of these values
suddenly "jump".
While trying to completely understand what IS going on and what SHOULD
be going on, i wrote some test programs which deal with
decoding/encoding of pcr,pts,dts...
As a side effect of these testing i discovered that one these small
apps could be used to cut ts files with only small additions.
So i made them and added the classes to the VideoEditor plugin which is now able to cut .ts files
Although we stated out not to introduce new features i nevertheless decided to put this code in SVN because:
- it can't break anything existing. It's only executed if you choose to cut a .ts file which was not working at all before
- it was nearly finished and helped to understand how to fix some other bugs - so, no extra work.
I think that was quite missing in VideoEditor since most users who use TVEngine3 record in .ts format, so now you are able to cut those recordings too directly from inside MP
MediaPortal TV Server offers some nice features for series handling. One of those features is called episode management.
This feature was dissabled for quite some time because a bug caused that users lost recorded shows. Now this issue has been fixed and the feature is enabled again.
It allows you to keep always the latest x episodes of a series you scheduled for recording on your hard disk (of course this feature does not work with recordings of type "once").
Example scenario: let's say you want to record "The Simpsons" which airs every weekday in the evening. You first set up an appropriate schedule (type "weekdays") and set the number of episodes to keep to "3". The first episode is recorded on Monday, the 2nd on Tuesday and the 3rd on Wednesday. This means you have 3 files on your hdd on Thursday morning. In the evening the 4th spisode airs and as you selected to keep 3 episodes, Monday's episode will get deleted before the recording starts. On Thursday evening you still have 3 files on your disk (Tuesday's, Wednesday's and Thursday's episodes).
This feature is very handy if you have a small hard disk and you don't want to keep all old episodes. Unfortunately it was activated by default and people not knowing about episode management lost recordings. With today's SVN episode management is fixed and will now only delete files if it is set up to do so.
Please notice:
recordings (series) that were scheduled with a TV Server
version from before 2008-01-03 might get deleted due to the old behavior. Read more to see how to prevent that by updating your schedules!
We have added a nice little feature to the MediaPortal TestTool.
On WindowsXP it is now able to capture all created direct show graphs and create a jpg image of it.
This means that if you encounter some video/audio issues when playing media in MediaPortal, then you no longer have to download graphedit or DSGraphEdit to connect to the graph and find out which filters are used.
Since MediaPortal 0.2.3.0 you only have to start MediaPortal with the MediaPortal Debug shortcut from your start menu and play the media file which causes troubles.
After that the TestTool automatically creates a zip file which contains all logs and the jpg's of the created graphs.
This zip can then be attached to your support thread in the forums, so other team members and community members can have a look and help you with your problem.
As said befor, this works nicely in WindowsXP. In Windows VISTA it does not work out of the box. The reason is that Microsoft has (re-)moved some resources.
If you have the VISTA SDK (1185.7MB) installed, then the TestTool is also able to create jpg's of the directshow graphs (we are not allowed to re-distribute the required VISTA SDK files with MediaPortal).
We hope that you enjoy (and use) this new feature.
If you are using coreavc for TV and/or movies in MediaPortal, then you should download the latest update which fixes a playback problem with some dvb-s2 channels.
I have been testing the latest 1.6 version for quite some time now and have not noticed any problems with it.
This is a question which i hear and read nearly every day.
The amount of available TV-Cards is simply overwhelming. But the quality of hardware, firmware, drivers and the support is "variable".
I had many different cards, from many different manufacturers over the years.
If you aks me today "Do you know a top-notch TV-Card ?" , then i would tell you to have a look at the products from Digital Everywhere.
Hardware, firmware, drivers and especialy the communication between the team and Digital Everywhere is just great.
Recently they released their new Floppy-DTV-S2 and the FireDTV-S2 cards which are already supported by the MediaPortal TV-Server and work like a charm.
If you do not want to mess around with dozens of different driver versions to get your tv-card half working, then have a look at the products from Digital Everywhere.
Recently we have implemented heartbeat handshake/communication between the tvplugin and the TV server.
The purpose of this new feature is to avoid having locked tuner cards due to clients crashing. Before this feature, the server had no idea that the client was suddenly gone. The Tvserver was happily timeshifting away as if the client was still alive. This would effectively lead into a tuner-lock.
Now imagine this. If the wife now decies to tune into a channel on that locked tuner card on another multiseat client, then she would get the "no cards available" error.
A workaround to free up the timeshifting was to simply restart the tvservice, this would ofcourse kick off dead and inactive clients.
There could be many reasons as to why a client could become dead.
One of the more obvious ones could be a simple crash of mediaportal.
Now that heartbeat is fully implemented, this is no more (hopefully).
The client transmits a heartbeat each 5 sec. no matter what context TV is in.
The server allows for a 30sec timeout period before deciding to kick the client.
A seperate thread on the server runs through list of active users, checking if heartbeats have arrived or not.
If no heartbeat has ever been registered on a specific user, then the server is ignoring this particular user - giving it full imunity.
So VLC clients that doesn't send heartbeats and similar are not kicked ever.
The same goes for the scheduler, epg users etc. They are more "fake" service oriented users used in the tv service.
All is logged to the servers tv.log
And in the client's mediaportal.log (debug logging enabled)
So if any issues arise, those logs should tell the tale of what has happened.
A note to the devs when debugging tvplugin;
If you find yourself being kicked when debugging tvplugin, this could be that your are simply standing in a breakpoint, thus preventing the client from emitting heartbeats in time.
A temp. solution is to disable heartbeat on the client (in tvhome.sendheart()). this would give you immunity.
As some of
you might know, most digital European television broadcasts use the Digital
Video Broadcast standard (DVB), this includes cable TV (DVB-C), satellite TV
(DVB-S) and terrestrial TV (DVB-T).
In the good
old days of analog broadcasts, subtitles (in those countries where they are
used) where transmitted as part of the video image (and hence there was of
course no way to turn them off, or allow multiple languages). Such subtitles
are called ‘embedded’ or ‘burned-in’ subtitles.
DVB offers
3 additional ways to provide subtitles to the viewer:
The first
is bitmap subtitles. In this case a separate image is transmitted for each
subtitle language, allowing the viewer to select which (if any) subtitles to
overlay on the video image.
The second
is teletext subtitles (these are also sometimes available on analogue
broadcasts). In this case some teletext pages are marked as containing
subtitles, containing the subtitle text to be rendered.
The third
is code-based subtitles, which are text subtitles similar to the teletext
subtitles, but without the dependence on the old teletext standard.
Bitmap
subtitles are not supported by all old set-top boxes, and therefore it is
mostly used on broadcasts where people are buying new boxes anyway (High
definition channels and DVB-T).
For most
other channels either teletext subtitles or embedded subtitles are used. We are
not aware of code-based subtitles being in use.
MediaPortal
currently has some limited support for teletext subtitles by way of using the
Teletext module found in MyTV and no support for bitmap subtitles (embedded
subtitles are of course supported as they don’t actually need any support :)
However, thanks to tourettes we are now on our
way to having a DVB subtitle DirectShow filter, which when it is finished will
support both bitmap subtitles and teletext subtitles. We aim to create it in such a way
that the user won’t have to worry about the difference between the two types of
subtitles, and it will additionally automatically select the correct subtitle
stream based on language preference. Subtitles will be available for both live
and recorded TV. The recording format must be Transport Stream in order to
preserve subtitles in recordings and timeshift buffer. As you might have
guessed the filter is therefore only available with TVE3.
You can
track the current status of the work-in-progress as well as find information on
how to help test the filter in this thread :
The
developers involved on this are tourettes who have been doing most of the work,
and me (Ziphnor) working on the teletext part (and a bit on the rendering
part).
This was one of those small things which realy annoyed you after some time.
The start of MediaPortal Configuration can take some time and during this time even i wondered sometimes.... "Hmm.... did it crash now, or what?"
Now Broceliande was so kind an "fixed" that annoying thing by adding a splashscreen.
So if you grab todays svn build, then you will see this:
Now you actualy "see" that it is doing something. However, after the splashscreen dissapears, there is still a short delay until the configuration util shows up. This is caused by the time which is needed to draw the windows forms. And there is nothing we can do about that.
And some users have specific needs for the Channelnames.
North- and South-America Sat users are used to the Channelnumers (based on SID).
In combination with the seperation between the displayed name and the real channel name, it is now possible to re-name the channel with the SID, add the SID as prefix to the displayname or you can leave the channelnamelike it is and display the channelnumber in the miniepg on the clientside if you want too.