Re: SV: PCTV 292e support

[Andy Furniss <adf.lists@gmail.com>]

Russel Winder wrote:
> On Mon, 2016-01-25 at 00:48 +0000, Andy Furniss wrote:
>> Russel Winder wrote:
>>> On Sun, 2016-01-24 at 10:07 +0000, Andy Furniss wrote:
>>
>>> It finds all the physical channels, quite happily describes all
>>> the virtual channels in the T1 channels, fails to find anything
>>> in one of the T2 channels and finds unnamed channels in the
>>> other T2 channel. The device itself is fine, as it gets all T1
>>> and T2 channels on Windows. This implies something awry with it
>>> in a Linux context.
>>
>> OK, I can't reproduce this on Tacoleneston which has three T2
>> muxes.
>
> I have managed to get some proper T2 tuning. :-)
>
> Someone emailed me privately to tell me about:
>
> https://github.com/OpenELEC/dvb-firmware
>
> The 292e demod firmware in their is 8 bug fix release further on that
> the one I had. It looks like there was a crucial bug fix in there.

Ahh, that's good. I ought to get that myself, I am still using 4.0.4!

>> I am using some old git version (Jun 10), I'll try current as time
>>  allows.

FWIW I did build current git and it does work.

> I am finding locking behaviour to be very strange. Sometimes I get an
> immediate lock on a -50.0 signal, sometimes -35.0 signal fails to
> lock. I am not sure if this is just a timing/sampling thing or
> whether there is a quality of signal thing I am missing.

I've only really tested with a "real" aerial, but it did seem like
sometimes it took longer than others to lock.

> As I am focused on lightweight, I am working with non-fixed aerials
> so low signal strengths. Though for testing I have an aerial with
> powered high gain.

Random thoughts on player -

You'll need to handle AAC in LATM that switches between 2 and 5
channels. VLC falls down in this respect. Avoid FAAD as the release at
least had a bug that will cause volume issues with some content if it
has dynamic range control metadata. ffmpeg aacdec handles channel
switching and ignores DRC meta - so you get full range.

On V4l

As I leave mine plugged in a headless box I don't hit this, but I think
there's a chance that if you repeatedly plug and have fragmented memory
that it will eventually fail to allocate some buffers.