[mythtv] UK Freeview "Playback"

Tom Hughes tom at compton.nu
Fri Jan 5 16:45:28 UTC 2007


In message <c08cf2fc0701050757q2bf1ddb4g760d3f41510bff84 at mail.gmail.com>
        Chris Birkinshaw <lists at youspy.me.uk> wrote:

>> TS 102 323 defines several ways of detecting start and end, including
>> EITp/f.  I have no idea how much of this the BBC are planning to
>> implement but I would certainly be interested in trying out a patch that
>> derived start and end from the EIT data.  It is always going to be
>> necessary to tune the transport a little bit in advance and that may
>> depend on having a tuner available.
>
> What you see off-air now is the full implementation - sorry guys! No RST!

Does that also mean that this business of repeats getting different
series IDs to the original showing is here to stay? That seems rather
odd...

> As for concerns about the broadcasters triggering this change
> correctly - the BBC has been doing this for some years now and it does
> not often crash. The people who monitor the central Freeview EIT
> generation system are keeping an eye out for events running over their
> scheduled stop time and can check if this is a legitimate scheduling
> adjustment or due to a malfunction in the path of the trigger from the
> broadcaster's autmation system. As Freeview Playback is about to
> launch you can probably guess that people are keeping a very close eye
> on the triggering systems. At some point in the future the majority of
> the UK PVR population will be using this EIT triggering.
>
> You are probably much more likely to miss the end of your program by
> not enabling EIT triggering than you are to miss the beginning due to
> a malfunctioning trigger... ;-)

I've missed entire programs in the past when relying on PDC, sometimes
even on the BBC. It's why I gave up using it completely on the end - I 
had given up using it on ITV (which as far as I know never actually
implemented it properly) long before.

Don't get me wrong, I'm sure the BBC at least will try reasonably hard
and probably get it right 99.9% of the time. I'm more sceptical about
some of the commercial broadcasters, especially the non-mainstream
ones that can't even manage to broadcast widescreen programming in
widescreen after umpty years of DTV.

Then again, even BBC2 has been broadcasting 14:9 letterboxed material
in a 4:3 frame on digital recently... I can only assume they've lost
the 16:9 masters somewhere and had to use a 14:9 copy. Either that or
the original This Life was actually made in 14:9 for some bizarre
reason?

Oh and I wonder whether the commercial broadcasters will do the EITp/f
transition when the program starts or when the ad break before the
program starts (and indeed the BBC with respect to trailers)? I bet
that I can guess the answer to that...

Tom

-- 
Tom Hughes (tom at compton.nu)
http://www.compton.nu/


More information about the mythtv-dev mailing list