Linux Problem with HD channels on DVB-T2

Hi - I'm hoping for some pointers on how to resolve the following problem:

I'm running TV Headend (from the Pulse Eight repository) on Xubuntu 11.10. I have two USB DVB tuners installed:

1 x Hauppauge WinTV Duet
1 x PCTV Systems DVB-T2 290e nanoStick HD

I am able to add muxes for SD channels to any of the three available tuners (2 x DiBcom 7000PC and 1 x Sony CXD2820R) and get all available channels (UK, Crystal Palace). I am also able to add the mux for HD content to the Sony CXD2820R which correctly finds the four available HD channels. However when viewing these channels using XBMC (Windows x64 11.1 build from Pulse Eight) the image is of very poor quality with 4 or 5 blocky horizontal bands. SD channels look as expected. HD content being served from files held on the same backend as is running TV Headend is also fine.

I'm not sure where to go next as everything works, just not usefully in the case of DVB-T2 HD content. I'd prefer not to have to try setting up MythTV as an alternate backend although I can see that that might help identify if the problem is OS / hardware / TV server app.

Any suggestions much appreciated.

Strangely enough I'm having almost the opposite problem but it's a TVHeadend issue.

I'm using TVHeadend along with the DVB-T2 290e Nanostick from the Crystal Palace transmitter via XBMC and the HD channels look pin sharp, unfortunately my Nanostick doesn't seem to want to pick up the SD muxes which is annoying.

Anyway, one thing I would suggest is trying to work out if it's TVHeadend or XBMC that's issue. To do this, make sure nothing else is using the TVHeadend streams, then go into the TVHeadend admin webpage and click on one of the channel links to launch that channel via VLC.

Sorry I can't be more help but if I think of anything then I'll let you know.

Thanks for the suggestion; the backend itself is headless and I've not had much luck getting streams to work remotely from the TV Headend webpage - something I should probably look to sort out. It seems my issue is client side in that it works fine on a different system I've just setup. Hardware is different but otherwise very similar (Win 7 x64 and XBMC 11.1 from Pulse Eight). At least I know where to look now.

For setting up TV Headend, I've taken to adding muxes manually as follows (for Crystal Palace transmitter):

Crystal Palace

Mux PSB1 BBCA
C23 (490.0MHz)
64QAM 8K 2/3
24.1Mb/s
DVB-T MPEG2

Mux 2
C22- (481.8MHz)
64QAM 2K 2/3
24.1Mb/s
DVB-T MPEG2

Mux A
C32- (561.8MHz)
64QAM 2K 2/3
24.1Mb/s
DVB-T MPEG2

Mux B
C28- (529.8MHz)
16QAM 2K 3/4
18.1Mb/s
DVB-T MPEG2

Mux C
C34+ (578.2MHz)
16QAM 2K 3/4
18.1Mb/s
DVB-T MPEG2

Mux D
C29- (537.8MHz)
16QAM 2K 3/4
18.1Mb/s
DVB-T MPEG2

Mux PSB3 BBCB
C31 (554.0MHz)
256QAM 32KE 2/3
40.2Mb/s
DVB-T2 MPEG4

I'm using TVHeadEnd too (and that ugly Xubuntu 11.10) .. no problems with HD or SD Channels [picture quality] - both provided over internal PCI DVB-S2 tuner .. maybe it's a USB stick problem ?

(2012-04-12 13:51)jon_boy Wrote:  Hi - I'm hoping for some pointers on how to resolve the following problem:

I'm running TV Headend (from the Pulse Eight repository) on Xubuntu 11.10. I have two USB DVB tuners installed:

1 x Hauppauge WinTV Duet
1 x PCTV Systems DVB-T2 290e nanoStick HD

I am able to add muxes for SD channels to any of the three available tuners (2 x DiBcom 7000PC and 1 x Sony CXD2820R) and get all available channels (UK, Crystal Palace). I am also able to add the mux for HD content to the Sony CXD2820R which correctly finds the four available HD channels. However when viewing these channels using XBMC (Windows x64 11.1 build from Pulse Eight) the image is of very poor quality with 4 or 5 blocky horizontal bands. SD channels look as expected. HD content being served from files held on the same backend as is running TV Headend is also fine.

I'm not sure where to go next as everything works, just not usefully in the case of DVB-T2 HD content. I'd prefer not to have to try setting up MythTV as an alternate backend although I can see that that might help identify if the problem is OS / hardware / TV server app.

Any suggestions much appreciated.

My setup is 1x NOVA-TD + 1 x 290e Nano. Linux Mint 12 (so basically Oneiric) and mythtv 0.24.2-fixes. I can confirm that using the 3.X kernel series that the 290e works out of the box. My initial install used the 2.6.x kernel series, but I updated to 3.x immediately before installing/compiling myth/xbmc, so couldn't tell you if the 290e has problems under an earlier kernel. Something worth checking if you are on an earlier revision?

One thing I did want to share with you was that after initial set-up I had one input source defined that contained both sd and hd channels. I thought mythtv would be smart enough to only assign hd recordings to the dvb-t2 tuner. Wrong! It kept trying to record HD channels on my NOVA-TD instead of the 290e....... is something similar happening in TVHeadend for you? Might be worth checking out.... I don't know really have much experience with TVH, but does it assign any scanned channels found on one tuner to the others?

Jim

EDIT: one thing that may cause you problems is if the WinTV duet is empia-based (em28xx). Because, apparently, using two em28xx based cards in the same rig is currently unsupported. Support is scheduled for the 3.2.x series. See here:

http://www.linuxtv.org/wiki/index.php/DV...SB_Devices

they note on the wiki that the latest media-build will probably contain the fixes if you don't want to wait.....

unsupported but i haven't had any problems having two em28xx cards though.

Thanks for the suggestions and confirmation that it should work. I've traced the problem to an XBMC / video driver setup issue. It turns out that the problem in my case was that I had "Allow hardware rendering (DXVBA2)" enabled. Disabling this and restarting XBMC fixed my playback issue with DVB-T2 HD content playback.