Hi All - I'm new to the beta team but have been testing for Yaobing the DVB-T stuff since Christmas and he as done a great job
. FYI - I'm in Sydney Australia and using a DVICO DVB-T Plus tuner as part of a HTPC setup with MC in Theater View connected by DVI & S/PDIF to a Yami V2600 then to a Hitachi Plasma using HDMI.
I've just had a quick play with the latest version and updated my latest notes from the TV Forum:
1) Scanning Support - Only did 2 scans but the first one still missed a group of channels (this time all of the Nine Network) - but I did not have logging on this time - second time it got them all. Will test more later. All channels were found in the first 35% and by then the "stop scan" button does not do anything - had to wait till it got to 100%
2) Tuning - Much Much quicker - Under 10 Sec for first channel, under 5 Sec for a new channel in another group, and only a sec or so for a new channel in the same group and this is now on par with "Nero Home" but not as responsive as the DVICO SW.
3) AC3/DD: Same status on the lack of AC3/DD audio feeds.
3). TimeShift works fine (on the non HD AC3 channels) but has a 10 sec delay/black screen before it starts.
4) Recording to dvr-ms file ONLY works if TimeShift is on but also suffers another 10 sec delay/black scrren before it starts (if TimeShift is OFF it give a blue screen the first time, then records the blue screen to an AVI file the second time manual recording is selected). Interestingly these dvr-ms files are 704x480 (is this some NTSC size) yet the DVICO SW saves the stream as a full 720x576 (did not test the HD ones given I can not save HD files in MC yet but in DVICO it saves them as 1440x1080)
While the DVB-T (and digitial TV support in general) is developing rapidly, I'd personnel suggest that the focus should be in order of priority:
1) Stable & Reliable Scan & Tunning - Looks like it is almost there!
2) Manual Recording - need to fix the "must have time shift on" bug.
3) Remote Control - will post more but for example to run this from TheaterView you really need to add the REC button to start and the STOP button to stop the manual recoding.
4) Schedule Recoding - need to be able to schedule future recordings
5) AC3/DD support - I can live with this one for now as I've got access to the similcast SD channels with analoge sound.
6) EPG Support - I don't really care but I know alot of people do but this one is hard as it needs customisaion for each country
7) External Tuner Integration - Way down the track but......Using the Video/Audio in and IR Blasters, some HTPC software can "map" channels from an external turner (eg Cable / Sat box) enabling full timeshift / record and a one interface for controlling channels sources for a tuner card AND the Cable box.
Thanks
Nathan