[mythtv] Freesat channel numbering

[Stuart Auchterlonie]

On 13/07/14 16:02, Steve Hill wrote:
>
> I've been reverse engineering the Freesat DVB-S data carousels in order
> to automatically set the channel numbers on my MythTV box.  I thought
> this might be of interest to other people, so:
>
> The code is available through Subversion:
>    http://subversion.nexusuk.org/projects/freesat-channels/
>
> Shut down mythbackend before running the code, since it needs access to
> the DVB card.  You'll need dvbtune and dvbsnoop installed too.
>
>
> Freesat does regionalisation on two levels - firstly the channels are
> split into (currently) 12 bouquets:
>   - England SD
>   - England HD
>   - England G2
>   - Wales SD
>   - Wales HD
>   - Wales G2
>   - Scotland SD
>   - Scotland HD
>   - Scotland G2
>   - Northern Ireland SD
>   - Northern Ireland HD
>   - Northern Ireland G2
>
> Within the bouquets there is some further regionalisation through
> proprietary tables of region IDs.
>

What we need to do is add the Bouquet handling to mythtv channel
scanner, and then we can do this automatically. Theoretically it
shouldn't be that difficult.

Regards
Stuart

>
> Some gotchas I haven't figured out yet:
>
> Some channels just don't seem to be listed in the Freesat data at all -
> for example, Channel 4 and the radio stations all seem to be missing.
> Maybe they're encoded elsewhere that I haven't spotted yet...
>
> Some channels are labeled with region ID 0, and I haven't figured out
> what this means.  Multiple channels seem to end up assigned to the same
> channel number in region 0, and the channels often don't seem to make a
> lot of sense - e.g. in the Wales SD bouquet, BBC One London, BBC One
> West Midlands and BBC One South all get assigned to channel 101 in
> region 0.  BBC One Wales doesn't seem to be listed at all.
>
> If anyone has a real Freesat receiver (especially in Wales, Scotland or
> Northern Ireland), I would be interested to know what regional channels
> get assigned to numbers 101 and 108.
>
>
> There's some further information on the reverse engineering on my blog
> here: http://blog.nexusuk.org/2014/07/decoding-freesat-part-2.html
> If anyone knows anything relevant about the Freesat data I would be very
> interested - information seems quite thin on the ground on the internet.
>
>