[mythtv-users] UK DVB woes / Dealing with duplicate channels

[Nick Morrott]

Happy (almost) New Year everyone ;-)


Trying to get my mythtv box ready for the new year after a month of pain -
but my DVB card is causing me some major woe ...

i) The first problem is that the DVB card (Nova-T) will not display anything
during Live TV playback (configured as sourceid 1). My other card (a PVR350)
is configured to provide programs on both the analogue antenna (sourceid 2)
and the composite input (as NTL boxes don't seem to be able to output
S-Video ;-( ) which is sourceid 3. When pressing 'c' to change inputs LiveTV
just swaps between the two inputs on the 350. I can also display PiP which
also just shows these two inputs (I can tell due to the names of the input
displayed).

Card setup for the Nova-T has the start channel set to '1', which is the
chanid and channum of BBC1 on the NovaT. All channels and their dvb-related
settings have been imported using zap2myth after I had removed channels I
didn't want. When viewing the channel table in the database, there are
channels assigned to all 3 sourceids as I would expect and mythfilldatabase
ran without any errors when first populating program info:

Last mythfilldatabase run started on 2004-12-31 08:51 and ended on
2004-12-31 08:51. Successful.
There's guide data until 2005-01-13 01:15 (13 days).


When checking the mythbackend logs, I get what seem to be good things when a
scheduled recording starts:

2004-12-31 09:29:23 Started recording "BBC World News" on channel: 40 on
cardid: 1, sourceid 1
2004-12-31 09:29:23 scheduler: Last message repeated 1 times
2004-12-31 09:29:23 scheduler: Schedule Change
2004-12-31 09:29:23 DVB#0 Successfully tuned to channel 40.
2004-12-31 09:29:24 Changing from None to RecordingOnly
2004-12-31 09:29:24 DVB#0 Recorder: Card opened successfully.
Audiostream: Layer: 2  BRate: 192 kb/s  Freq: 48.0 kHz
Videostream: ASPECT: 16:9  Size = 720x576  FRate: 25 fps  BRate: 6.50 Mbit/s
2004-12-31 09:29:39 MainServer::HandleAnnounce Playback

The recording file is populated normally and plays correctly, so it appears
it is only live TV which is causing trouble for the DVB card. Could any UK
DVBers lend a hand or offer suggestions please?


ii) The duplicate channels in the mythweb listings seems odd, especially
when it seems that mythfilldatabase runs for hours getting the same things
over and over for each input (I have the DVB card getting all BBC/ITV
channels, the analogue antenna getting BBC1/2, ITV1, CH4 and CH5, and then
manually add the channels for the NTL digital cable box for the comp input
on the 350 which will be controlled via an IR blaster).

When I view the listings in mythweb, I have duplicated and perfect copies
for all channels which exist on more than one input, which does not seem to
be how it should be *at least to me*. After religiously making sure that the
XMLTV IDs for all channels were correct, it appears in the database that
listings are not keyed on the XMLTV ID, but the Channel ID. This seems to
mean that if two cards share some or all of the same channels they are
always duplicated in the database and mythfilldatabase takes twice as long
to run. Is this how it should be?


iii) Using ivtv-0.2.0-rc3c to drive X on the 350's output results in the
overscan problem where the edges of the fullscreen mythfrontend are cut-off.
However, altering the x and y displacement of the GUI has no effect (but
resizing does) so I am constantly missing the left hand side of the display.


iv) Could anyone please let me know of any UK homebrewers who are savvy with
building ir receivers/transmitters and would consider putting one together
for me (for beer/money etc). Having got a bit carried away and having bought
a lovely Sky+ Navigator remote only to find the PVR350 will not work with
it, it would appear I will need a serial based combined Rx/Tx to be able to
use the remote and be able to control a cable box.

Thanks everyone, most of the major hurdles have been cleared but these few
problems are really frustrating me!

Cheers,

Nick



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