[mythtv] Re: Ticket #13: Tune to an on air channel when the current channel is unavailable.

[Mark Weaver]

Stuart Auchterlonie wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 17, 2005 at 09:32:48PM +0100, Stuart Morgan wrote:
> 
>>The solution used by Cable/Satellite (and probably Freeview) boxes seems 
>>logical - that is instead of tuning to a channel a place holder is shown 
>>announcing that the channel is currently off-air. The user would still be in 
>>Live-TV mode, with OSD etc and free to change channel. It would be less 
>>confusing than jumping to a random/different on-air channel.
>>
I would quite like to implement something along these lines in the short 
term, does anyone have any advice on how it would be sensible to do 
this?  The issue I have is that if you pick an off air channel, myth 
stops responding to input for a while, drops you back at the menu, and 
then happily stores the off-air channel in the database.  Next time you 
try and watch TV, it goes into an infinite loop when it can't get a 
stream -- you have to reset the channel in the DB + restart the backend 
to get things working again.

> 
> 
> I suspect that those screens (in the UK at least) are generated
> by MHEG pages on the channel.
> 
> What this means is that the PMT info changes from having a
> video + audio stream to a data channel with only the screens
> telling us that the channel is off air. I also suspect that there
> is information in the PMT that tells us the channel is currently
> off air, but I have no information to prove this one way or the
> other.
> 
I think that this is correct, a data channel is provided but no audio or 
video channels exist.

> Guess I'll just have to keep working on the Interactive TV stuff
> which will add support for all of this....
>
Happy to help with testing or development if you'd like an extra pair of 
hands.

Thanks,

Mark