BBC HD Trial

[Mark SS]

Not Sage related but thought it might interest any other london users. I've managed to get the BBC HD freeview trial working using a DVBViewer and CoreAVC decoder with a Cinergy 2400i card. Its not particularly stable, tending to crash within the first 10 seconds of playing but if it passes that point it works fine.

Have watched both of todays world cup games and the pq is a world apart compared to standard freeview.

[pschweig]

wow

I'm amazed that a standard freeview card can pick up the hd signal. Sadly they don't tend to trial these sort of things in York.

edit - didn't read first post properly

[Mahoney]

What is the frequency? Is this something I could use Anders' SBDARecorder to get? Thanks!

[Mark SS]

Originally Posted by Mahoney

What is the frequency? Is this something I could use Anders' SBDARecorder to get? Thanks!

Unfortunately I can't think of anyway to get this into Sage, unless Anders did some work on SBDARecorder. I did scan the frequency but nothing showed up.

The instructions I posted on www.avforums.com are as follows, in case anyone wants to give this a go. Note the comments regarding stability, the features in both DVBViewer and CoreAVC are pretty green at this stage.

1) Buy, download and install CoreAVC from http://coreavc.corecodec.org
2) Buy, wait for email, download DVBViewer GE
3) Unzip to a directory of your choosing, run the batch file in /Filters
4) Start DVBViewer, goto ChannelList, Scan, ensure Terrestrial is selected and enter 554000 in both freq boxes and scan, found should report 1, save
6) Still on channel list, select channels, highlight BBC HD1 and click edit
7) Ensure Bandwidth is 8, VideoType H.264, click update
8) Open Channel/Favourites, select BBCHD1 in the previous channel list window and drag across to favourites, save
9) Settings/General, untick 'use only 1 CPU' if you have dual, ensure 'Enable H.264' is enabled
10) Settings/Directshow, Set preferred decoder for MPEG 2, CoreAVC for H.264, AC3 to AC3Filter, Renderer to Unchanged, Apply, Ok
11) Important: Close the application. This ensures the settings will stick, if you don't do this and the application crashes you'll have to reset everything.
12) Restart DVBViewer, be prepared for some crashes (kill from task manager if it freezes). Keep trying as eventually it should work.
13) Channels/BBC HD1, audio and video should start
14) Once playing go to View/Filters/CoreAVC and select 'Skip all deblocking' and 'DirectShow Interlacing'. Again close down to ensure settings skip.

On average I seem to have to restart twice before the application runs without crashing. Channel changes also cause crashes on occasions and from the windows crash report the problem appears to be CoreAVC, not DVB Viewer.

Repeat scan procedure with 522000 to get ITV, C4 and Five HD trials.

[birty]

Originally Posted by pschweig

I'm amazed that a standard freeview card can pick up the hd signal.

A freeview card is simply a data receiver. Any DVB-T brodcast can be picked up by them. The HD broadcasts conform to the DVB-T specification (it was designed with future HD in mind). The only major difference between HD and SD broadcasts is the codec used. As a PC decodes in software the codec can easily be changed. A SD STB cannot recieve HD as it uses a hardware decoder which cannot decode anything other than MPEG-2

[Mahoney]

Thanks Mark. I might have a play tonight or tomorrow with getting SBDARecorder to talk to it.

[Mark SS]

I've attached the two graphs that are running when DVBViewer is showing the HD trial, in case they might be of some use. Wouldn't allow me to save the grf files unfortunately.

[Mahoney]

Cheers. Time to start getting my hands dirty with this stuff. Be good preparation for trying to get a DVB-S2 card working with H.264...

[Mark SS]

Originally Posted by Mahoney

Be good preparation for trying to get a DVB-S2 card working with H.264...

Get that working and Sage would probably have an influx of converts from MCE! Have you found a DVB-S2 card with Dragon/T-Rex support available anywhere yet? Everywhere I've looked seems to suggest "Coming soon".

[Mark SS]

Originally Posted by Mahoney

Thanks Mark. I might have a play tonight or tomorrow with getting SBDARecorder to talk to it.

Tried again and it does eventually detect all of the HD trials, just takes a few attempts. You can then preview the stream and it plays the audio but of course the video doesn't play as its being treated as Mpeg2 and sent to the Nividia decoder (can connect to graph to see whats happening).

I can't see anyway of constructing a graph that would do this using the DVBViewer filters as the 'DVBSource' filter you can see in the render.gif I posted has no source. You might have better luck investigating PowerDVD7 which others have used to view the trials. I'll see if anyone using it can grab their graphs as might provide some pointers.

[Mahoney]

If SBDARecorder can record the stream to hard drive, can't Sage play it provided you choose a decoder that can cope with H.264?