DVB Enhancer for SageTV

[willplaice]

just gonna bounce this.... anyone got a stable driver for win2k3, and some advice on what card reader to get for my sub. card ?

ta

[Bacon2002]

Hi,

Any news.

If this gets finished it will be a brilliant addition to SageTV.

Please, please.....

Ta,

David

[bjkiller]

Originally Posted by Bacon2002

If this gets finished it will be a brilliant addition to SageTV.

I use dvbe4sage for more than year!

[Bacon2002]

Hi,

I have used it a fair bit earlier this year and found it to be really good.

Do you know where I could get the latest binaries?

Thanks,

David

[Whitey]

Originally Posted by bjkiller

I use dvbe4sage for more than year!

I think Bacon2002 ment it's not yet 100% with Sky UK.

BTW do you have your big dish yet for astra 28deg?

Whitey

[willplaice]

Whitey, could you share your current setup ? esp. the drivers you are using for the cards ?

(I'm going for a clean install)

thanks, Will

[Whitey]

Originally Posted by willplaice

Whitey, could you share your current setup ? esp. the drivers you are using for the cards ?

(I'm going for a clean install)

thanks, Will

I'm using WHS with 3 cards:

FireDTV-S2 driver 5.0.1
FireDTV-S driver 4.8.0
TT-3200 driver 5.0.0.12

Whitey

[willplaice]

many thanks... don't spose you could pm me that version ? i can't find it to download ?

also what are you using for SKY integration ? could that go in a PM ?

huge thanks, Will

[MrFusion]

Ahhh finally -- for some reason it took me ages to find this forum, so have pm'ed and emailed mpogr. Sorry about that!

I'll post the request here so that it's public.

Please please please, beg, grovel, please implement DVB-T support!!

The SageTV implementation is terrible! Can't record back-to-back shows with one tuner if you have padding, can't use one tuner to pull multiple PS off one TS, slow channel changes (even when going from one PS to another on one TS!), etc.

I hope, were DVB-T support implemented, that I could set up several physical tuners each with multiple virtual tuners -- say a couple per PS per TS; and that this would address the SageTV shorcomings.

Am I dreaming???

Many thanks indeed!!!

[Bacon2002]

Hi,

This all seems a bit cryptic to me, basically does anyone have a copy of the latest version?

The last version I have is from sometime in May this year.

Also does anyone know if DVB4Sage still in development?

Thanks,

David

[Whitey]

Originally Posted by Bacon2002

Hi,

This all seems a bit cryptic to me, basically does anyone have a copy of the latest version?

The last version I have is from sometime in May this year.

Also does anyone know if DVB4Sage still in development?

Thanks,

David

I don't think anything has changed since May regarding Sky UK support. It's still in development but Michael has had other things to deal with. Last time I spoke with him he was waiting for a sky feed to do more testing


Whitey

[mpogr]

Guys,

Sorry for the lack of response lately, I've been quite busy at work and had some personal disturbances (flu, road accident). I've made some changes to the codebase since May, primarily for the reasons unrelated to crashes with Sky UK (which I've been unable to reproduce in my setup BTW).
The problem is that I started making some architectural changes (e.g. supporting multiple satellite providers within a single instance of DVBE4SAGE), but didn't have a chance to finish them. I'll try to see if I'm able to produce a working build and if yes, will upload it to SourceForge as a new release.

Best regards,

Michael.

[Bacon2002]

Michael,

Sorry to hear about your "personal disturbances", I trust you are OK now though.

Great news about progress on DVBE4SAGE.

I'll keep an eye on SourceForge for a new release.

Cheers,

David

[mpogr]

Guys,

I've been able to put some time recently on DVBE4SAGE and I'm aiming for a new release soon. My primary focus was improving stability and supportability. Here is a partial list of the recent changes:

• Service mode is now fully supported. The service executable needs to be installed (by running DVBE4SAGESVC.EXE /INSTALL) prior to use. This both creates DVBE4SAGE service and makes SageTV service dependent on it, so they are started in the correct order upon computer startup.

• Offline recording capability. You can create a full transponder dump (make sure you have enough disk space, as these tend to be huge, hundreds of megs per minute!) and also ECM cache dump. If you send these over to me, I'll be able to fully reconstruct your recording process on my computer, without your SAT feed and your subscription card. This should help me greatly with troubleshooting different providers issues without having access to their feed/cards. Also, I might be able to reconstruct the way the "remote" channel numbers are mapped to SIDs for these providers, so I could implement tuning by "remote" number the way I already did for YES Israel. Guys from the UK: unless you hit a specific problem with a specific channel, please, don't send such dumps to me, I've already got a working one for channel mapping invenstigation.

• ECM cache. While primarily intended for supporting the feature above (offline recording), it has value of its own, as it reduces the number of accesses to the card in some scenarios.

• A lot of fixes aimed at improving stability and reducing (hopefully fully eliminating) decoding misses that sometimes occured in the past.

• Correct PROVID forwarding to the plugins (was hardcoded at 0 before) - thanks to bjkiller.

• Support for tuner inclusion in addition to exclusion (if the inclusion keyword is used, every tuner NOT in the list is automatically excluded), as well as both inclusion and exclusion by tuner MAC address (works only for Twinhan and TechnoTrend based cards) - again, many thanks to bjkiller.

• Full transponder scan on startup. This is useful for providers who don't broadcast their full STD on every transponder, but rather partial one. So far, this feature has been found useful only for 9E Platforma HD provider, but there might be other providers who could benefit from this, namely, different FTA providers in Italy, UK, Australia and New Zealand.

• A lot of improvements in diagnostic printouts: tuner ordinal number before any relevant diagnostic message, full INI file dump in the beginning, SVN revision stamp in the DLL/EXE version and the log files.

Things not implemented yet:

• Multiple provider support on the same DVBE4SAGE instance. This is an important feature for countries with significant FTA broadcasters who use different SID numbering from the commercial ones (e.g. in Italy and New Zealand). I'm getting closer to this, still trying to understand what degree of configuration needs to be implemented in order to properly support these. As a temporary workaround, you can try running a separate instance of DVBE4SAGE (not possible in the service mode!) for serving these FTA providers. This now will work if they broadcast useable and correct NIT and SDT information, even if the SDT is only partial (see my comment above). If you find this working for you or if you need further instructions, please, let me know.

• DVB-T/C and ATSC support. I've got really close to this now, after implementing the offline mode, probably will add DVB-T soon.

• Correct PMT handling. Right now some of you (Sky UK and Italy) need to specify DontFixPMT in your INI files because of the way these are handled. This prevents an important feature (PreferredAudioLanguage flag) from working correctly. Once PMT handling is fixed, this flag will work for all providers. I'm aslo planning adding other PMT-dependent flags (e.g. PreferredAudioFormat or PrefferedSubtitleLanguage) once PMTs are handled correctly.

• Built-in EPG dump. Some of you (and I as well) use different pieces of software for dumping EPG from the DVB stream, which is annoying, since it might collide with DVBE4SAGE. Basically, DVBE4SAGE "sees" all the EPG info as it works, so it will be quite easy to integrate EPG dumping into it.

That's all for now. If you want to grab the latest version, please, PM me with your email address and I'll send it to you.

Best regards,

Michael.

[Bacon2002]

Michael,

Great news,

I'll hopefully get a chance to try this out over the next few days.

Happy new year,

David

[mpogr]

Guys,

Because of the horrible lagginess of SourceForge, I decided to move my project to Google Code. Its current home is here. I've also updated the issue tracker with the known issues. You're welcome to contribute too.

If anyone wants to participate in the project development (not just coding, but also documentation, QA etc.), please, let me know, and I'll add you to the project staff.

Regarding the upcoming release, so far I've been getting positive feedbacks. Things look working quite well for the people on the following providers: Yes Israel, Platforma HD, Sky UK, Sky NZ and Foxtel Aussie. However, I'm still missing longevity data for providers other than Yes and Platforma. Those using versions older than 193 please contact me for an update. I'll put the latest SVN build in the downloads section soon.

Best regards,

Michael.

[mpogr]

Hi all,

I have just added support for tuning by "remote" channel number for Foxtel Australia and Sky UK. This became possible after users of these providers provided me with their transponder dump. I believe adding this kind of support to other providers shouldn't be difficult. I hope you got the message
This version can be downloaded from here (build 206).

Sky UK support is a bit tricky because of the variety of regional channels. First of all, there is an option under [Advanced] section to specify the specifc bouquet from which the channel information should be taken. These are the recommended values (though not all the possible ones):
BSkyB Bouquet 1 - DTH England ----> this is the default
BSkyB Bouquet 2 - DTH Scotland
BSkyB Bouquet 3 - DTH Wales
BSkyB Bouquet 4 - DTH Other ----> I believe this one should be used in Ireland

In addition to that, there is another complexity: some channels, namely 103/104/105 are broadcasted on many different SIDs to different areas, though they all share the same "remote" number. The problem is that all these SIDs appear in the bouquet. Right now the first SID in the bouquet will take over, which can, potentially, create problems. I'd like to encourage the UK users to test this functionality and provide their feedback for this feature.

Best regards,

Michael.

[Whitey]

Thanks Michael, I will test right away. I'm guessing If I select England, I will get London BBC and ITV?

Cheers

Whitey

[mpogr]

Whitey,

You will, but I'd like to stress the issue of multiple SIDs for ITV/Channel 4/Five. The bouquet maps several different SIDs (10060, 10080, 10090, 10100 etc.) to channel 103 (ITV), so the first in the bouquet will take over. This might not necessairly work for everyone. This is exactly what I'd like you to test.

[Whitey]

Ok, do I have to add a line in the .ini to select the region?

Thanks

Whitey