Posted by Kat Crichton Thu, 09 Apr 2009 08:58:00 GMT
Seems I was a little hasty in demanding the head of light entertainment on a spike.
It turns out that the solution to the retuning of MythTV after the Rowridge frequency changes is to delete and recreate the entire Capture Card using mythtv-setup. I have done this and now all my channels work as they used to.
There must be some metadata that is incorrect for the new channel locations.
Posted by Kat Crichton Thu, 26 Mar 2009 21:53:00 GMT
Looks like a lot of people have complained about losing channels. Apparently so far about 1% of the 500,000 households have called the helpline.
Friends of mine have had similar issues. One lives close to me and lost the same set of ITV related channels. Another lives near Salisbury (further from the transmitter) and has lost all channels except CBeebies!
I imagine a lot of people (like us) haven’t complained yet, in the hope that service will get better by the weekend. We need to get as many people as possible calling in, as they don’t seem to think there’s a real problem!
Here are my current channel settings, as requested by Ade, in case anyone wants to check their MythTV settings.
Posted by Kat Crichton Wed, 25 Mar 2009 23:26:00 GMT
Notification of the changing of frequencies for Freeview channels broadcast from the Rowridge transmitter on the Isle of Wight came through a few weeks back.
I think I've picked up all the usual channels, but initial results in Poole are poor...
Not working:
All the other channels (at least those that are broadcasting at midnight) seem to be alright. I could have quite happily done without "Premier Christian Radio" or "Teletext 1-2-1 Dating", but all the ITV channels?!
Hopefully they'll sort this out soon and restore the good reception I've been enjoying for the last few years.
Posted by Kat Crichton Thu, 09 Aug 2007 15:39:59 GMT
I've realised that I can connect my STB to the through port on my DVB-C card, and it still receives an excellent signal. I conclude that my cabling is sufficient.
DVBShop say that the Linux drivers don't actually report signal strength correctly. I don't know if that means that they somehow diminish the actual signal. It seems unlikely, but I'm no expert.
I suppose I'll have to pull the card out again and put it in a Windows machine to see if the signal is significantly better.
Posted by Kat Crichton Sun, 15 Jul 2007 13:11:00 GMT
I've been trying to get my TechnoTrend C-1500 DVB-C card to connect to Virgin Media and tune in the FTA channels.
Linux detected the card and configured it automatically. The TechnoTrend card has been available for some time now, so support is good.
It took a while to work out the correct numbers to give to the tuner program, but I eventually found out how to boot into the Engineering menu of the Samsung SMT-2100C STB, which contains the current settings. I used DVB-Tools on Linux to scan the channels. Here is the config file for scandvb:
# Virgin Cable (UK) # freq sr fec mod C 666750000 6952000 NONE QAM64
This worked well, detecting 344 channels, 94 of which were unencrypted (Freeview channels and radio).
My main problem now is signal strength - I'm getting 0-1%, which is just not enough to watch most of the channels. I think the quality and shielding of the cable I've used (TV aerial RF) is much less than Virgin's and I'm connecting to the end of a fairly long extension. I'll try to get a better one this week and give it another go on a machine nearer the Cable access point.
Posted by Kat Crichton Fri, 25 May 2007 00:25:00 GMT
Yay, my Cable TV card has arrived! It has an add-on CI reader, into which I can plug a module that will read the smart card used to decrypt paid-for Virgin Media TV channels.
It may be some time 'till I get it up and running with MythTV, but I'll post when I do.
Posted by Kat Crichton Sun, 20 May 2007 08:49:00 GMT
Until recently I've been using an open source diagram creation program called Dia. It's an adequate (if a little clunky) alternative to Microsoft Visio. You drag and drop different shaped blocks and join them together using stretchy arrows, all of which can be customised to look as you wish.
However, as a programmer, I want to lay out a set of relationships and let the software work out the best way to represent them.
Enter Graphviz, a set of open source tools for doing just that.
I used the DOT language to describe my MythTV set-up as a collection of elements connected together with wires, IR and Bluetooth. It also allows you to group similar elements together and even create subgraphs.
It really does an excellent job of laying out a readable diagram and I'm itching to find some way to use it in production.
Posted by Kat Crichton Tue, 16 May 2006 18:56:00 GMT
Well, I've managed to get MythTV working fine with Fedora Core 5. XMAME isn't quite working in conjunction with it, because of a feature of the last version of Metacity window manager that caused the fullscreen window to not have keyboard focus. I think this is reverted in version 2.14.3 which I'm downloading right now.
Haven't yet got an iTunes server running on the box. I've read about the Multi-Threaded DAAP Daemon which seems to be a better DAAP server than the one I recommended previously. I'll update my little tutorial if I start using that instead.
Fedora Core 5 seems to be pretty good. Not 100% sure about the new bubbly look, but if it continues to offend my sensibilities I really should try and create my own desktop skin. Mind you most of the time it sits quietly behind MythTV, so It's not such a big deal.
Posted by Kat Crichton Thu, 20 Apr 2006 11:20:00 GMT
Easter Sunday started with a power cut. Unfortunately it wasn't as clean cut as that sounds - it was more a prolonged power dwindle. The lights flickered at about half voltage as I ran around the house switching off the all the computers.
The fault appeared to be just outside our neighbours' house and took most of the day for the electric company to fix. As usual we spent the time playing board games and enjoying the enforced low-tech entertainment.
The pain occurred when the power came back on (no not through electrocution). I found that my MythTV box (recently upgraded to Fedora Core 5) wouldn't boot. The fluctuating electrical supply seems to have managed to strategically uninstall large chunks of Linux. Most of Gnome desktop was missing along with the login screen and many of the installed packages.
I guess the JFS spotted the problems on the first boot and tidied itself up, as there don't appear to be any disk problems - just missing files!
Anyway, I think it's going to be easier to reinstall from scratch than to try and work out which files are missing from each installed package.
I guess that's my next weekend planned out then :(
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