Storeton main relay
 

In view of its association with WH, have there been any changes made to
the DVB transmission format as part of the previous weeks work on WH?

I'm asking because, as of yesterday evening, the recording software I
use on both my main desktop PC and a laptop has taken to quitting with
an error message anytime it tunes into a TV station for anywhere from 5
to 45 seconds.

The desktop uses a Jetway rebranded KWorld PCI card and the laptop uses
a Peak rebranded Freecom DVB type 2 usb stick although both use the same
Jetway supplied DTVR software as the recording app (the Peak software
was total and utter crap).

The Toppy seems unaffected by whatever changes might have taken place
and if I reboot the desktop into a Knoppix Live CD session, Kaffeine
(the media app) works just nicely with the KWorld card (which I know is
8K capable as is the USB stick).

As far as I was aware, the WH changes were purely antenna/transmitter
preparations to allow a smooth changeover to higher power on the muxes
once the analogue service is ceased. However, despite scanning both
systems for trojans and "viruses" and failing to find anything, I still
have a nagging thought that both machines may have acquired something
nasty since they're both on the same lan.

Initially assuming the problem was some fatal change in the
transmission format which was crashing the DTVR app, I've installed the
GBPVR program on the desktop PC but even this seems unstable and
amazingly unaware of the completely BDA compliant KWorld card which has
been around for the past 4 or 5 years.

The initial crashes of GBPVR I could put down to my attempts to create
a KWorld card profile in the BDA.ini file, but when I tried the USB
stick which is one that it already has an entry for, and saw similar
behaviour, I'm not so impressed (but this just might be another
indication of a trojan on the system).

In short, has anything changed at the storeton relay yesterday or is it
just me?

--
Regards, John.

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Storeton main relay
 

Johnny B Good wrote:

In short, has anything changed at the storeton relay yesterday or is it
just me?


The Storeton relay will also from November carry the three Welsh PSB muxes as
a relay of Moel-y-Parc, in addition to the existing six muxes (three English
PSB, three COM) as a 'daughter site' of Winter Hill.

The English muxes will be beamed (as they are now) towards Liverpool, the
Welsh ones towards Flintshire. It's possible that the three Welsh muxes are on
test, they are assigned UHF Chs 53, 57, 60, and your kit has latched onto them ?


--
Mark
Please replace invalid and invalid with gmx and net to reply.

www.paras.org.uk

Storeton main relay
 

"Mark Carver" wrote in message
...
Johnny B Good wrote:
The Storeton relay will also from November carry the three Welsh PSB muxes
as a relay of Moel-y-Parc,

Will it receive them as RBL from Moel?

Bill

Storeton main relay
 

The message
from Mark Carver contains these words:

Johnny B Good wrote:

In short, has anything changed at the storeton relay yesterday or is it
just me?


The Storeton relay will also from November carry the three Welsh PSB
muxes as
a relay of Moel-y-Parc, in addition to the existing six muxes (three
English
PSB, three COM) as a 'daughter site' of Winter Hill.

The English muxes will be beamed (as they are now) towards Liverpool, the
Welsh ones towards Flintshire. It's possible that the three Welsh
muxes are on
test, they are assigned UHF Chs 53, 57, 60, and your kit has latched
onto them ?

Thanks for that info, Mark. On the face of it, the welsh mux tests
don't seem too likely a cause (but, of course, one can't discount
anything at this stage) since there's no such thing as automatic
retuning with the DTVR software and I've not bothered with a rescan for
years until now. Also, I should think I'm well behind the beam for those
welsh muxes.

I've since rolled the boot volume back to the 24 August image (thus
neatly depolluting the system of the .NET and GBPVR rubbishware at a
stroke, as well as any nasty trojans that might have infected my win2k
setup) and the problem persists.

The only software that (now) works better than the Jetway supplied DTVR
program is the latest version of the "Digital TV" software that came
supplied with the Artec T1 USB DVB-T tuner which hearks back even
earlier.

At the time (and for a year or two) it was very buggy and didn't do
on-the-fly conversion from TS to PS when streaming to disk. The lack of
on-the-fly TS to PS conversion is less of an issue now (I have to use
the MPEG Streamclip utlity anyway to clean up the dirty PS recordings
made by DTVR so not quite the issue it once was).

I'm pretty sure I've had the Artec program working with the Jetway card
in the past so I'm tempted to give it another shot. At least it actually
extracts the 7 day EPG from the MUX data streams (unlike the DTVR
program which relies entirely on an internet connection method which
I've never gotten to work- I use the bleb.org listings to manually
schedule recordings).

I've got antennas up for both WH and Storeton but I don't want to mess
around with retuning all the DVB-T receivers (swapping antennas over is
the least of my concerns- the two feeds go into the attic where I can
plug either one of them into the four way distribution amp - can't
remember the make, but it has one of those damnably bright blue LEDs).

In view of the fact that the Linux Live CD test demonstrated trouble
free reception, I'm tempted to try out a Myth TV install on the laptop.
However, before I go that route, I'll test out the Artec software first.

The only thing in common between the two effected machines is the DTVR
software (and the Storeton relay) since the tuner hardware is totally
different. However, since there might well be an issue over those welsh
muxes, I suppose I should swap antennas over (when there aren't any
recordings scheduled on the Toppy, otherwise I'll get hell from the
missus), and test the existing software setup.

I'll report back on that test, just got to check what's scheduled or
being currently recorded on the Toppy before I do anything that'll upset
the missus.

--
Regards, John.

Please remove the "ohggcyht" before replying.
The address has been munged to reject Spam-bots.

Storeton main relay
 

On Tue, 15 Sep 2009 20:24:44 +0100, Mark Carver wrote:

the Welsh ones towards Flintshire.

Have new transmitting antennas pointing westwards across Afon Dyfrdwy already
been affixed to the mast at Storeton?

Storeton main relay
 

"Johnny B Good" wrote in message
.. .
The message
from Mark Carver contains these words:

Johnny B Good wrote:

In short, has anything changed at the storeton relay yesterday or is
it
just me?


The Storeton relay will also from November carry the three Welsh PSB
muxes as
a relay of Moel-y-Parc

Good move using Storeton. All the viewers along the N Wales coast have HP Gp
CD or wideband aerials looking towards Winter Hill, because no-one wants the
Welsh versions of the channels.

Bill

Storeton main relay
 

The message
from Johnny B Good contains these words:

====big snip====

I'll report back on that test, just got to check what's scheduled or
being currently recorded on the Toppy before I do anything that'll upset
the missus.

As promised, here is my report.

I got exactly the same result using the WH antenna, so it's nothing
specific to Storeton. I even put 20db of attenuation into the feed line
to guarantee no detectable signal from the Storeton relay to interfere
with the test.

Unfortunately, even when using the Artec tuner to persuade the other
software to install, I was unable to get it to work. Rather worryingly,
the problem seems to be within the PC itself. The only reason I'm
discounting a hardware issue is simply on account I've got pretty much
the same symptoms on the laptop which leads me to believe both machines
have been infected with a _very_ subtle trojan.

I was so concerned over the failure to get the Artec tuner to work that
I dug out a small form factor PC, also with win2k installed, to test the
software. As it happened, the software was already installed from the
last time I used it to resolve a pre-Toppy scheduling conflict and all I
had to do was to do a channel scan.

That little PC also has the DTVR software installed but it won't play
with the Artec Tuner. I'm going to have to pull the KWorld Tuner card
from my desktop PC to test the DTVR software in the SFF box which I made
a point of _not_ connecting to my LAN.

It's getting rather late (even by my standards) so the rest of this
investigation will have to wait until tomorrow (or, in fact. later today
;-)

--
Regards, John.

Please remove the "ohggcyht" before replying.
The address has been munged to reject Spam-bots.

Storeton main relay
 

Could it be a n update of some sort to some software?
Brian

--
Brian Gaff -
Note:- In order to reduce spam, any email without 'Brian Gaff'
in the display name may be lost.
Blind user, so no pictures please!
"Johnny B Good" wrote in message
.. .
The message
from Johnny B Good contains these
words:

====big snip====

I'll report back on that test, just got to check what's scheduled or
being currently recorded on the Toppy before I do anything that'll upset
the missus.

As promised, here is my report.

I got exactly the same result using the WH antenna, so it's nothing
specific to Storeton. I even put 20db of attenuation into the feed line
to guarantee no detectable signal from the Storeton relay to interfere
with the test.

Unfortunately, even when using the Artec tuner to persuade the other
software to install, I was unable to get it to work. Rather worryingly,
the problem seems to be within the PC itself. The only reason I'm
discounting a hardware issue is simply on account I've got pretty much
the same symptoms on the laptop which leads me to believe both machines
have been infected with a _very_ subtle trojan.

I was so concerned over the failure to get the Artec tuner to work that
I dug out a small form factor PC, also with win2k installed, to test the
software. As it happened, the software was already installed from the
last time I used it to resolve a pre-Toppy scheduling conflict and all I
had to do was to do a channel scan.

That little PC also has the DTVR software installed but it won't play
with the Artec Tuner. I'm going to have to pull the KWorld Tuner card
from my desktop PC to test the DTVR software in the SFF box which I made
a point of _not_ connecting to my LAN.

It's getting rather late (even by my standards) so the rest of this
investigation will have to wait until tomorrow (or, in fact. later today
;-)

--
Regards, John.

Please remove the "ohggcyht" before replying.
The address has been munged to reject Spam-bots.

Storeton main relay
 

The message
from "Brian Gaff" contains these words:

Could it be a n update of some sort to some software?
Brian

Second reply to your query:

Contrary to my theory that a trojan might have afflicted both the
desktop _and_ the laptop to interfere with a vital process in the DTVR
application being used (albeit with totally different DVB-T tuner
hardware), it does indeed appear to be some subtle change to the
structure of the data streams in each multiplex.

After extensive testing with various adapters and software on the
Mini-Q box under the win2k OS and seeing pretty much the same symptom in
all cases, I finally restored a winXP image to test under that OS and
still got the same symptom.

Although I've only tested with one adapter and the DTVR software so
far, I expect to see the same problems with the other adapters and
associated software. However, I still need to do further testing to
confirm this hypothesis.

One thing that might work out better under winXP would be software such
as GBPVR. Also, I do have another adapter which I haven't tried since it
lacked driver support in win2k. This might prove a workaround to the
current problem.

Even if I can't find a solution using windows based software, there's
still the Linux based PVR solutions to try (encouragingly, the PCI card
I was using in my desktop was recognised ok by the Kaffeine mediaplayer
and worked perfectly under a Knoppix Live CD session).

Anyway, more feedback later.

--
Regards, John.

Please remove the "ohggcyht" before replying.
The address has been munged to reject Spam-bots.

Storeton main relay
 

On Fri, 18 Sep 2009 05:18:26 +0100, Johnny B Good
wrote:

The message
from "Brian Gaff" contains these words:

Could it be a n update of some sort to some software?
Brian

Second reply to your query:

Contrary to my theory that a trojan might have afflicted both the
desktop _and_ the laptop to interfere with a vital process in the DTVR
application being used (albeit with totally different DVB-T tuner
hardware), it does indeed appear to be some subtle change to the
structure of the data streams in each multiplex.

After extensive testing with various adapters and software on the
Mini-Q box under the win2k OS and seeing pretty much the same symptom in
all cases, I finally restored a winXP image to test under that OS and
still got the same symptom.

Although I've only tested with one adapter and the DTVR software so
far, I expect to see the same problems with the other adapters and
associated software. However, I still need to do further testing to
confirm this hypothesis.

One thing that might work out better under winXP would be software such
as GBPVR. Also, I do have another adapter which I haven't tried since it
lacked driver support in win2k. This might prove a workaround to the
current problem.

Even if I can't find a solution using windows based software, there's
still the Linux based PVR solutions to try (encouragingly, the PCI card
I was using in my desktop was recognised ok by the Kaffeine mediaplayer
and worked perfectly under a Knoppix Live CD session).

Anyway, more feedback later.


I also have a computer based TV setup using a couple of 'DigitalNow'
USB 2.0 tuners, my O/S is Windows XP Pro SP3 and I also use the
Storeton transmitter.

Just recently my main program DNTVLive! has developed a tendency to
react slowly when changing channels, in the past it used to take about
1 to 2 seconds to change channels, now it is taking up to 10 seconds
and at times I get a Windows message that the program is not
responding. Although if I ignore the message the program continues
working fine.

By comparison using 'DVBViewer' or 'MyTheatre' changing channels takes
1 to 2 seconds so the fault is not with the Storeton incoming signal.

My software DNTVLive! is Australian and a few people there have also
been experiencing a long delay when changing channels, the theory is
that a recent Windows update is causing the problem in respect of my
software.

Agzee