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.

www.coreavc.com

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.

/Gibman 

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.

Enjoy! 

MediaPortal is used all over the world.

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.