[mythtvnz] Feedback requested on an article on Digital TV

[Steven Ellis]

AlanP wrote:
> At 11:27 a.m. 7/10/2006, you wrote:
>> PS. If anyone has any good MythTV related news let me know and I'll try
>> and keep the site up-to-date.
>
> I don't know about news, but I think I'd like a few articles on
> various things.
>
> Number one being, of course, the TIMELINE for the FreeView thing.
> We've been promised things, but there are no hard and fast dates, only
> month-estimates. I'd also like a few technical details (all V, or H?
> Multiple frequencies? Signal rates?). That's just me.
Optus D1 launches in 1 week which will start to set the time lines for
implementation.

Current word is some services by March 2007, but no word on what they
will comprise or if it will be DVB-S or DVB-T. Current assumption is
DVB-S first which is kinda odd as BCL have already got several DVB-T
equipped sites.

TVNZ appears to think it can speak for all of the FreeView consortium
and is busy bullying equipment providers. A recent comment is that they
don't want PVR type units that can record digitally, and intend on
enforcing a digital copy protection system to prevent them from being
used. Only a rumour that I'm still trying to confirm. It appears that
MythTV doesn't notice this signal and still allows programs to be
recorded, isn't that a shame.

I'm working on a separate article on the specifics of FreeView, and I'm
open to input and direction for it.
>
> Number two would be how well various versions of Myth hold up to B1's
> errors. My R5C1 Knoppmyth does not like errors at all in it's DVB-S,
> and AFAIK there isn't a .20 release of Knoppmyth. How well does
> Redhat/Gentoo/Debian Myth .20 setups hold up to these errors? My
> Sempron2600 grinds and chugs trying to deal with them on .19-fixes.
There is a 0.20 update for Knoppmyth R5D1, but there are some risks in
using it.

The myPVR baseline is moving to 0.20 soon. Testing is going well but
there are some issues

1. Internal DVD Player isn't as good as xine (nearly but not yet)
2. Some XvMC performance issues
3. Migration of an existing 0.19 environment cleanly to 0.20
4. H246 playback need performance tuning and isn't SMP enabled

MythTV 0.19 and 0.20 work really well with my current DVB-T setup. No
crashes or strange errors for the most part. The major storms last
weekend caused a load of errors that screwed up the signal and crashed
the frontend (too many MPEG errors) but not the backend.

Have you looked at the driver updates and firmware updates for the cards
you are using to try and correct the issue?

>
> As for HDTV, I really don't want it since it's only viewable in this
> house on computer monitors, which don't have comfy sofas in front of
> them and are only 19", tops.
HDTV signal on an normal TV is still way better than SDTV. Plus we can
expect well over 50% of the channels to go anamorphic wide-screen (based
on UK/US/Europe). If you don't have a wide-screen set then you may as
well get a HDTV capable one.

Steve

-- 
Steven Ellis - Technical Director
OpenMedia Limited
email   - steven@openmedia.co.nz
sales   - sales@openmedia.co.nz
support - support@openmedia.co.nz
website - http://www.openmedia.co.nz