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Author Topic: TV tuner  (Read 6602 times)

Alex B

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TV tuner
« on: July 06, 2006, 09:02:34 am »
Did you change the TV tuner component in MC12?

I cannot make it work. It scans through the channels and after that it lists 345 analog cable channels. None of the found channels seem to work. Each time I change a channel MC restarts the tuner (displays a "starting TV" dialog).

In MC11.1 I have about 15 available channels.

The TV card model is Hercules Smart TV Stereo (it uses a bt878 chip and a Philips tuner).

Media Center Registered 12.0.31 -- C:\Soft\MC12\

Microsoft Windows XP  Workstation 5.1 Service Pack 1 (Build 2600)
Intel Pentium 4 2781 MHz MMX / Memory: Total - 1048 MB, Free - 429 MB

Internet Explorer: 6.0.2800.1106 / ComCtl32.dll: 5.82.2800 / Shlwapi.dll: 6.0.2800 / Shell32.dll: 6.0.2800 / wnaspi32.dll: 4.71 (0002) , ASPI for Win32         DLL, Copyright © 1989-2002 Adaptec, Inc. / Aspi32.sys: 4.71 (0002)

Ripping /   Drive F:   Mode:ModeSecure  Type:Auto  Speed:Max
  Drive G:   Mode:Normal  Type:Auto  Speed:Max
  Drive H:   Mode:ModeSecure  Type:Auto  Speed:Max
  Digital playback: Yes /  Use YADB: Yes /  Get cover art: No /  Calc replay gain: Yes /  Copy volume: 32767
  Eject after ripping: Yes /  Play sound after ripping: No 

Burning /  Drive F: TSSTcorp CD/DVDW SH-W162C   Addr: 0:1:0  Speed:4  MaxSpeed:4  BurnProof:Yes
  Drive H: HL-DT-ST RW/DVD GCC-4480B   Addr: 1:1:0  Speed:48  MaxSpeed:48  BurnProof:Yes
  Test mode: No /  Eject after writing: Yes /  Direct decoding: Yes /  Write CD-Text: Yes
  Use playback settings: No /
MC 11.1 is installed in C:\Soft\MC\
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Yaobing

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Re: TV tuner
« Reply #1 on: July 06, 2006, 11:21:49 pm »
Quote from: Alex B on July 06, 2006, 09:02:34 am
Did you change the TV tuner component in MC12?

TV control has not been changed. If it works in MC11, it should work in MC12.

Quote
I cannot make it work. It scans through the channels and after that it lists 345 analog cable channels. None of the found channels seem to work. Each time I change a channel MC restarts the tuner (displays a "starting TV" dialog).

In MC11.1 I have about 15 available channels.

The TV card model is Hercules Smart TV Stereo (it uses a bt878 chip and a Philips tuner).

Do you use antenna or cable? Have you made the selection in Options?


I can confirm the 'displays a "Starting TV" dialog' part. I will take a look of it tomorrow.
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Alex B

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Re: TV tuner
« Reply #2 on: July 07, 2006, 07:37:57 am »
Cable.

I selected "Cable" & "Country: Finland"  before the channel scan.
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Yaobing

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Re: TV tuner
« Reply #3 on: July 07, 2006, 08:37:58 am »
What do you get when you try to play a channel? Blank screen? Noise? Error messages?
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Alex B

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Re: TV tuner
« Reply #4 on: July 07, 2006, 09:04:18 am »
Actually, it seems that the found channels list (345) may have the ~15 real channels included.

For example, the channel # 195 happens to work. The other channels that I have tried so far displayed noise since there is no broadcast.

It is practically impossible to go through the list, because MC restarts the tuner on each channel change. A restart seems to take about 45 seconds.

Starting TV on MC11.1 takes "only" about 20 seconds.
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Yaobing

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Re: TV tuner
« Reply #5 on: July 07, 2006, 10:36:26 am »
The "TV restarts on channel change" problem will be fixed in the next build.

Are you saying scanning resulted in many unavailable channels whereas MC11.1 only gave you 15 real channels? There is little change in TV control itself to lead to such behavior. Did you accidentally checked "Aggressive scan"?

Please try clear the TV channel data from your library, and do a reset on TV. Rescan.
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Alex B

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Re: TV tuner
« Reply #6 on: July 07, 2006, 11:12:09 am »
I tried both scan options, first the standard mode and then the aggressive mode. The results were identical. A reset didn't help.

MC 11.1 gave me about 25 channels, but about 10 of them were scrambled pay channels, which are useless with a TV card. I have not recently tried to rescan the channels with MC11.1, so I cannot say if MC11.1 works properly with my TV card at the moment. I may try this sometime later.


BTW, these analog TV channels are going to be history in Finland within a year or so. All broadcasters are moving to digital only.
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glynor

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Re: TV tuner
« Reply #7 on: July 09, 2006, 01:07:15 am »
Quote from: Alex B on July 07, 2006, 11:12:09 am
BTW, these analog TV channels are going to be history in Finland within a year or so. All broadcasters are moving to digital only.

That should mean some nice cash for the Finnish (is that the right way to say it?) government.

I feel  :-\ on digital broadcast.  I mean... I live in rural Maine, and with analog channels, I can at least kind-of see NBC (with the right kind of eyes, and when the planets align properly).  With a digital station that wouldn't happen...

The all-digital "drop-dead" date keeps slipping and slipping here in the states though, so I'm not going to get all upset over it yet.
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Alex B

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Re: TV tuner
« Reply #8 on: July 09, 2006, 07:09:33 am »
Finnish is correct.

Quote
Finn·ish (fĭn'ĭsh)
adj.
Of or relating to Finland or its people, language, or culture.

The offcial closedown date of analogue broadcasts is August 31, 2007. Wikipedia has some info about the situation in Finland: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_digital_television_deployments_by_country#Finland. Here's how the official terrestrial network provider informs people: http://www.digitv.fi/default.asp?path=9

I have found that currently a typical digital broadcast uses too high video compression. Fast moving scenes have often visible pixelation and other compression artifacts. Sometimes I'd actually prefer the more pleasant analog artifacts instead.
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Alex B

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Re: TV tuner
« Reply #9 on: July 09, 2006, 05:03:56 pm »
Yaobing,

I tried MC11.1 scan too. Something must have changed from the last time I did a scan in MC11. After scanning also MC11.1 listed 345 new channels.

I ended up tweaking the registry. I exported the MC11.1 TV settings, edited the file and replaced the MC12 TV settings. MC12 works like MC11.1 now.

The unedited MC11.1 and MC12 "TV settings" reg files are in this zip package.
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Yaobing

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Re: TV tuner
« Reply #10 on: July 10, 2006, 03:57:52 pm »
Alex,

Thanks for the reg files. I could not find any significant difference between the two files. I would guess it would also work without importing the reg settings from MC11.1, except the large number of invalid channels.

Could you cable TV provder changed something that caused 345 channels to be scanned?
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Alex B

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Re: TV tuner
« Reply #11 on: July 10, 2006, 04:19:20 pm »
Quote from: Yaobing on July 10, 2006, 03:57:52 pm
Thanks for the reg files. I could not find any significant difference between the two files. I would guess it would also work without importing the reg settings from MC11.1, except the large number of invalid channels.

Correct, the 15 valid channels were included in the found channels.

Quote
Could you cable TV provder changed something that caused 345 channels to be scanned?

Possibly. Could the digital broadcasting system somehow cause "false positives"? It uses the same cable network and wall-mounted antenna sockets.
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Yaobing

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Re: TV tuner
« Reply #12 on: July 10, 2006, 05:09:46 pm »
Quote from: Alex B on July 10, 2006, 04:19:20 pm
Could the digital broadcasting system somehow cause "false positives"? It uses the same cable network and wall-mounted antenna sockets.

I do not know. My cable subscription is a package of analog and digital channels. My TV tuners would not pick up any digital channels.

DirectShow is supposed to tell what are the minimum and maximum channel numbers. So for USA we will not go beyond 158 for analog cable (69 for antenna).

Maybe some DirectShow registry settings got changed on your machine.
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Alex B

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Re: TV tuner
« Reply #13 on: October 06, 2006, 05:27:13 pm »
I tried TV again today.

It looks like MC12 has lost the channels that I copied from MC11.1 by tweaking Windows registry. A new channel scan found 345 channels from the 15 available and starting TV took 40 seconds. It is not working any better than in July.

DScaler can start the same tuner in three seconds. It can scan and find the 15 real channels normally.
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Yaobing

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Re: TV tuner
« Reply #14 on: October 06, 2006, 05:58:56 pm »
I fixed a few bad coding that could lead to crashes and other bad behavior when there is no HDTV device on the computer. That would have fixed a few problems that were seen in MC12, but not in MC11.1. Since you said you had the same problem in MC11.1, the fix would not have made any difference. Your 345 channel problem is still a puzzle.
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Yaobing

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Re: TV tuner
« Reply #15 on: October 06, 2006, 06:11:50 pm »
Have you played with Frequency overrides? Take a look of this registry key, if it exists:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\TV System Services\TVAutoTune\TS358-1

where 358 in TS358-1 represents tuning space, but we use country code for tuning space of the corresponding country. 1 in TS458-1 represents "cable".
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Jaguu

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TV Tuner
« Reply #16 on: October 07, 2006, 08:06:05 am »
Hi Yaobing,

In the TV right-click menu both the menus "Set display" and "Channels" display the Channels submenu. Set display is wrong. This happens on my MC12 version. Please correct this!

Is it possible to have some way of storing existing channel names so they survive a rescan? I have 46 channels and it is really cumbersome to re-enter every channel name after every rescan. Unfortunately very often channels change frequency for whatever reason and make a rescan necessary (for instance BBC Prime is no longer working, just get a grey surface).

For the MC11/M12 migration I just copied the channel registry entries from the MC11 registry to MC12 registry. It would be nice that such a migration would take care of migrating the channels! Maybe channel definition table should go into the MC library as well!

Also have the "Restart TV tuner" after ever channel change, but you say you are going to fix that!

Also, the sort channel feature is not really intuitive. Only after some very close reading of the help file I understood how to do it. One would expect it on the display of the channel list selection menu!
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Alex B

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Re: TV tuner
« Reply #17 on: October 07, 2006, 11:06:41 am »
Quote from: Yaobing on October 06, 2006, 06:11:50 pm
Have you played with Frequency overrides? Take a look of this registry key, if it exists:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\TV System Services\TVAutoTune\TS358-1

where 358 in TS358-1 represents tuning space, but we use country code for tuning space of the corresponding country. 1 in TS458-1 represents "cable".

Here's what I have:

Quote
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\TV System Services]

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\TV System Services\TVAutoTune]

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\TV System Services\TVAutoTune\TS0-0]
"AutoTune"=hex:07,00,00,00,f4,ad,48,0b

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\TV System Services\TVAutoTune\TS0-1]
"AutoTune"=hex:48,00,00,00,f4,ad,48,0b,5b,00,00,00,b4,bc,5e,0d,6a,00,00,00,48,\
  1f,07,0f,9d,00,00,00,98,42,b6,19,aa,00,00,00,74,ba,91,1c,ae,00,00,00,74,cc,\
  0b,1d,b6,00,00,00,74,f0,ff,1d,b9,00,00,00,74,02,7a,1e,bc,00,00,00,74,14,f4,\
  1e,bf,00,00,00,74,26,6e,1f,c3,00,00,00,74,38,e8,1f,c6,00,00,00,74,4a,62,20,\
  cb,00,00,00,74,5c,dc,20,e4,00,00,00,2c,e9,f3,23,2b,01,00,00,ac,96,f0,2b
"5"=dword:0b47b9d0

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\TV System Services\TVAutoTune\TS358-0]

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\TV System Services\TVAutoTune\TS358-1]

TS358-0 and -1 are empty.


Once again, I copied all TV settings from the MC11.1 registry entries. I have the correct channels now, but each channel change restarts the tuner and tuner startup is very slow as I already said.
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Yaobing

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Re: TV tuner
« Reply #18 on: October 07, 2006, 10:51:06 pm »
Quote from: Alex B on October 07, 2006, 11:06:41 am
Here's what I have:

TS358-0 and -1 are empty.


Once again, I copied all TV settings from the MC11.1 registry entries. I have the correct channels now, but each channel change restarts the tuner and tuner startup is very slow as I already said.

I was thinking maybe some program changed the frequency override table on your machine. That does not seem to be the case.

I fixed the restart-on-channel-change some time ago, at least it does not happen on my computer any more.
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Yaobing

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Re: TV tuner
« Reply #19 on: October 09, 2006, 10:01:58 am »
Alex,

I found the following on my computer. Not sure if it is related to Finland. If Microsoft put the info there, it might be relevant. Try saving it to a .reg file and merge it to your registry (backup your original registry entries first).

Code: [Select]
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\TV System Services\TVAutoTune\TS358-1]
"1"=dword:02e03c90
"2"=dword:02f71ff0
"3"=dword:034b0c50
"4"=dword:03b5dc10
"5"=dword:0420abd0
"6"=dword:048b7b90
"7"=dword:04f64b50
"8"=dword:05611b10
"9"=dword:05cbead0
"10"=dword:0645fcd0
"11"=dword:06b0cc90
"12"=dword:071b9c50
"13"=dword:07866c10
"14"=dword:07f13bd0
"15"=dword:085c0b90
"16"=dword:08c6db50
"17"=dword:0931ab10
"18"=dword:099c7ad0
"19"=dword:0a074a90
"20"=dword:0a721a50
"21"=dword:0adcea10
"22"=dword:0b47b9d0
"23"=dword:0bb28990
"24"=dword:0c1d5950
"25"=dword:0c882910
"26"=dword:0cf2f8d0
"27"=dword:0d5dc890
"28"=dword:0dc89850
"29"=dword:0e336810
"30"=dword:0e9e37d0
"31"=dword:0f090790
"32"=dword:0f73d750
"33"=dword:0fdea710
"34"=dword:104976d0
"35"=dword:10b44690
"36"=dword:111f1650
"37"=dword:1189e610
"38"=dword:12133a50
"39"=dword:128d4c50
"40"=dword:13075e50
"41"=dword:13817050
"42"=dword:13fb8250
"43"=dword:14759450
"44"=dword:14efa650
"45"=dword:1569b850
"46"=dword:15e3ca50
"47"=dword:165ddc50
"48"=dword:16d7ee50
"49"=dword:17520050
"50"=dword:17cc1250
"51"=dword:18462450
"52"=dword:18c03650
"53"=dword:193a4850
"54"=dword:19b45a50
"55"=dword:1a2e6c50
"56"=dword:1aa87e50
"57"=dword:1b229050
"58"=dword:1b9ca250
"59"=dword:1c16b450
"60"=dword:1c90c650
"61"=dword:1d0ad850
"62"=dword:1d84ea50
"63"=dword:1dfefc50
"64"=dword:1e790e50
"65"=dword:1ef32050
"66"=dword:1f6d3250
"67"=dword:1fe74450
"68"=dword:20615650
"69"=dword:20db6850
"70"=dword:21557a50
"71"=dword:21cf8c50
"72"=dword:22499e50
"73"=dword:22c3b050
"74"=dword:233dc250
"75"=dword:23b7d450
"76"=dword:2431e650
"77"=dword:24abf850
"78"=dword:25260a50
"79"=dword:25a01c50
"80"=dword:261a2e50
"81"=dword:26944050
"82"=dword:270e5250
"83"=dword:27886450
"84"=dword:28027650
"85"=dword:287c8850
"86"=dword:28f69a50
"87"=dword:2970ac50
"88"=dword:29eabe50
"89"=dword:2a64d050
"90"=dword:2adee250
"91"=dword:2b58f450
"92"=dword:2bd30650
"93"=dword:2c4d1850
"94"=dword:2cc72a50
"95"=dword:2d413c50
"96"=dword:2dbb4e50
"97"=dword:2e356050
"98"=dword:2eaf7250
"99"=dword:2f298450
"100"=dword:2fa39650
"101"=dword:301da850
"102"=dword:3097ba50
"103"=dword:3111cc50
"104"=dword:318bde50
"105"=dword:3205f050
"106"=dword:32800250
"107"=dword:32fa1450


Yaobing
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Yaobing

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Re: TV Tuner
« Reply #20 on: October 11, 2006, 01:30:19 pm »
Quote from: Jaguu on October 07, 2006, 08:06:05 am
In the TV right-click menu both the menus "Set display" and "Channels" display the Channels submenu. Set display is wrong. This happens on my MC12 version. Please correct this!

I do not see anything wrong here. For TV playback, Set Display shows channels. There is some redundancy, but that is by design. For different playback types Set Display shows different content. For example for image playback, it shows Previous Image, Next Image etc.

Above Set Display there is another menu item called "Display" which contains choice of "TV" and "Web". Is that what you had in mind?


Quote
Is it possible to have some way of storing existing channel names so they survive a rescan? I have 46 channels and it is really cumbersome to re-enter every channel name after every rescan. Unfortunately very often channels change frequency for whatever reason and make a rescan necessary (for instance BBC Prime is no longer working, just get a grey surface).

What kind of frequency change? Does it change to a totally different entry in the frequency table? If it stays with the same entry (same "Channel number"), then you should not need to rescan.

For now the only way to save the station names is to export the registry key in a file.

Quote
Also have the "Restart TV tuner" after ever channel change, but you say you are going to fix that!

That should have been fixed months ago. Does it still not work for you?

Quote
Also, the sort channel feature is not really intuitive. Only after some very close reading of the help file I understood how to do it. One would expect it on the display of the channel list selection menu!


Clicking the column header to sort is the standard way.
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