I am looking for expressions of interest for testing a new plug-in.

I have put together a BDA plug-in for Web Scheduler, this DLL plug-in is a replacement for the TwinHan version, it replaces the CaptureEngine.dll with a new version that drives the BDA driver that Spectrum has written.

It is still early in development, the basic framework is in place and it does work, I have been testing it for a few days now. it still needs some error condition checking and retry facilities added but it can be used to capture.

This new plug-in does NOT capture to MPEG files, it captures to Transport Stream files.

What does this mean?

It will mean you can capture to a Transport Stream that has all available elemental streams that the transponder is transmitting in it, this is effectively a Transport Stream Dump, the complete transport stream is saved to disk.

now a full Transport Stream capture is not always what you want to do so there is an option to use the Demux filter to just output the elemental streams you want, this will allow a more traditional capture with just the audio and video streams you are interested in being saved in the captured file. This captured file is NOT an MPEG it is a transport stream with just an audio and video stream.

Now this sounds like it should work and it does for some applications but a Transport Stream with just audio and video is not really a valid transport stream and some app will not play it.

I can successfully play back captured streams in Media Player Classic and Womble MPEG2VCR and Graphedit but not in PowerDVD 5.

The captured Streams can be fixed using ProjectX and remuxed to play in any MPEG compatible player.

OK so why this long winded post, I am looking for guineapigs oops I mean testers to try this out, this will mean you will need to install the Spectrum BDA driver which in turn means that NONE of the current software will work on your system.

There are two things to test, 1 The sample app I uploaded and 2 Web Scheduler with the new plug-in.

This software is very experimental and MAY NOT WORK at first so if you rely on your system to capture you favourite shows etc then it may be a good idea not to try this out just yet. For people that want to play just post a response here.

Hi Shaun,
I'm up for trying it. I find it fairly easy to switch between the twinhan drivers and spectrum's drivers. I am testing mainly on win2k, but I will start on WinXp some time this week.
Luke

Shaun, I would be interested if I had my VisionPlus in my computer, but I don't have it in my computer right now.

I am going to try and get it back (mainly for school work, damn CIT (Canberra TAFE) Making us do homework in the break ).

Yep, interested.

Keen to test TS based capture to work around the playback issues that I currently have with MPEG streams that are full of errors due to impulse noise amongst other things.

BJ

Ok, for the brave hearted few who have the balls to give this a try :-) here are some simple steps.

ONE
Install the Spectrum BDA driver, check the following thread for more info.

http://robdvd.radfiles.net/viewtopic.php?t=441

This is a loing thread and you probably do not need to read it all, so for the short version see the following page:

http://home.swiftdsl.com.au/~spectrum

TWO
Once you have the driver installed make use you can use Graphedit to build a filtergraph and view some TV, read the above link for how to do this, if you have problem start a new thread as I would like to keep this thread for talk about the WS plug-in.

THREE
Now try the BDA sample that is available from the following address:

http://www.digtv.ws/files/dvb/BDA/

Just run the debug or release build of the exe, it may take some time to finished building the Graph, I am looking into this.

Just select Build DVB-T graph and then run the graph, like I said it may take some time to do this. I think it is hard coded to channel nine frequency at the moment so should work everywhere.

FOUR
If you get here then you are nearly there, just download and extract the BDA test version of WS 2.2 from the following directory:

http://www.digtv.ws/files/dvb/BDA/

You will also need the dump.ax filter, just copy it to your temp directory and then register it using regsvr32

The channel scan does not work so you may have to add the channels manually.

Add a schedule and see what happens, DO NOT run the version as a service, it makes it hard to get the output, if you have problems keep the command line output so I can see what is going on.

As always have Fun :-)

I am really surprised there are not more people interested in this, this solution of using the BDA drivers that Spectrum has produced would solve a lot of the issues that the TwinHan SDK has, Multiple cards, ABC glitches, etc

I suppose people are only interested in easy fixes, it is hard to get people interested in testing stuff like this, oh well.

I have been testing this now for the last few days and from what I can tell it is working very well. If my tests continue to be as positive as I have seen so far then I will probably eventually drop support for the TwinHan SDK all together and just use the BDA driver.

I'll have a crack, I've never used WebScheduler though.

I'm very interested in this BDA development. As soon as Digitalwatch works with the BDA drivers, I'd switch to them. At the moment, there is no apps for viewing live TV with the BDA drivers which is a major drawback for now. We have Webscheduler to record with under BDA but nothing to watch live TV with.

I'm totally fed up with the SDK. I want to be able to schedule HD recordings and be able to record long periods of ABC without having to use TSreader to overcome the 4GB split in VisionDTV. I can't see Twinhan making any progress with the SDK anytime soon. There has been more progress from yourself and Spectrum in the last week than there has been from Twinhan in over 3 months

null_pointer, I think you will find that a lot of people are very interested in this. If you need more testers than I will be happy to do this for you (and me!)

I for one am really pleased that spectrum and yourself have put in such a great effort in getting away from the proprietary drivers. Hopefully some time in the not too distant future we will be able to mix and match our hardware and software for what suits us.

There is a stumbling block for me and others, who only have one card. Until there is some vaguely usable live viewing software that works with the drivers, testing is going to mean continuously switching between the Twinhan and Spectrum's BDA. This does not need to be all singing and dancing, but at least basic channel changing.

I am surprised that the vendors themselves (well maybe not twinham!!) have not embraced the BDA route. I can only guess they still see a large market outside the win2k/xp environment or they believe the proprietary link between their hardware and software to provide some market benefit.



Here's hoping all goes well, I would love to ditch the Twinhan drivers as they seem to have caused you guys nothing but grief from the beginning. I would have bought a second card six months or more ago if there was support.

It would be great to know however if the BDA sample will be extended, or DW will be altered to support these drivers. I am quite happy to be a guinea pig for both. (said quietly with missus in other room!).

It's certainly times like this I wish I had learnt C. But I quite happy to help in other areas, doco etc.

On another note, it would be nice if Digital Now came clean on what is happening with the VP card.

Cheers and thanks for your efforts (all of you)
Darren

Shaun,

I am in the same boat as the others - the drivers look very nice, but at this stage I would probably only test them if a) there was a tv viewing app (i.e. digitalwatch) that supported BDA drivers or if i got a second tuner card and had a play around with it.

On that note - how do things run if you have two cards in a system, one running Twinhan drivers, and the other Spectrum drivers?

I guess the other option is to buy a second card (which I had intended to do once the SDK supported multi cards) and put it in my other machine, though I don't know how I would get an aerial to it.........

I was just thinking the exact same thing. Having only just got the BDA drivers up and running i'm a bit scared to try it

OK, thanks for your feedback, it looks like the stumbling block to people using the BDA drivers is a viewing app, thats understandable as it is one of the main things you would want to do with a tuner card, watch live TV that is :-)

Success,

I did have some issues with using the bda sample. The sound was very jumpy. I think this may be due to the ligos audio decoder which seems to be my default directshow audio decoder.

As for WS, initially I did not put in the apid or vpid and one minute recoding of Nine (191625) was about 30mb. Nothing I tried would open this file (mpc, mpegvcr). I then added nine with the sydney sd channel info (a720, v519) and the file was 6.6mb. MPC still did not like the file, but mpegvcr seemed happy enough. Viewing this on another machine seemed very clean with no issues.

Do you have plans of creating native mpeg files direct from the capture, or leaving them as these partial transport streams ?

I also noticed the ip sink filter in the graphedit of the BDA sample. Is this part of the sample or some more testing that you are doing ?

Cheers
Darren

Ok this works fine. I just "upgraded" the drivers on my first card from BDA to TwinHan and ran up UltraDTV and GraphEdit side by side they both obtained a card and i was able to watch two channels simultaneously. Interestingly the BDA sourced graph was ~1 second ahead of the TwinHan sourced graph on the same channel.

Yes, not all apps will view these TS files, I have found Womble and Media Player Classic work but stopped looking there, so there may be other apps that also work.



At the moment I want to see how compatible these "partial transport streams" are, if they prove to be usable etc than they will do as is.



The IP sink filter is a standard MS filter, it can deliver IP data directly to WinSock for local and remote delivery. From my understanding currently our system does not transmit IP data in the TS streams though. The sample just inserts these filters to show how to do it.

Doesn't suprise me Joey that the BDA Graph is ~1 second ahead.

I have found that the VisonPlus is ~1 second behind compared to the FusionHDTV. I have also found that sometimes the FusionHDTV is ~1mx to ~1s second behind my Dad's STB (It changes a bit sometimes).

Shuan, I haven't tested this yet as I haven't got my VP back into my computer yet.

Joey,

So can you use digitalwatch and webscheduler at the same time then?

Yes I would imagine so. I understandably don't use either As long as Shaun's BDA plugin is working for WebScheduler you should be all set.

Bastard! :wink:

How's UltraDTV coming along? Are you going to support the BDA drivers as well?

I'm tempted to go and buy a second card to test this all out. That new card coming from Renura does look interesting though. Decisions, decisions........

It's still coming along, I have done a lot of work implementing popup control bars in the video view. The media control bar (now with slider seeking and position and duration counters), an AudioVideo control bar (volume, mute, brightness contrast etc). These can now be configured to popup by moving the mouse to the sides of the video view. Alpha blended Now and Next overlay. The mouse cursor now autohides after 5 seconds inactivity and returns when you jiggle it.

I will update the website real soon now ~

As far as the BDA support goes. It has always been my longer term plan to support BDA and as an updated SDK from TwinHan looks unlikely to arrive this month, I will probably do some work to support BDA. There are still some major issues to deal with in using BDA such as recording PS streams, extracting Now and Next info, Teletext etc. We will see what happens next month I guess :roll:

Regards
Joey

Has anyone tried using DigiTV (which you can use without the hardware) to play the single program TS that is produced when recording a single logical channel? It might just work too.

Doh!, wish i'd known that WS at present (and no doubt DW) and the BDA thingy was all happing/going to happen. I think i would have got a second VP card and not Dvico, hmmmm.

Null, i'll be able to do some testing on the weekend. I still use my VP card in my HTPC for recordings, Dvico mainly for viewings. I think i'll put the VP in my "test" P4 machine and try the drivers and new WS version and see how it goes. If it works i guess i can use the Dvico ONLY for live viewing and WS for recording with the VP card, which then will be recording only until DW supports the BDA drivers. Will see how it goes in the test system first.

The FusionHTDV software with the Dvico does not output to .mpg files either (however this will change next version or so apparently), it outputs .tp files, so i guess it should have no problems playing the new WS captures??? Is there anyway Zoomplayer can? Even with a custom filter graph? (I haven't managed yet). Will you be adding output to .mpg once the initial "base" app is running well with these drivers?

Im thinking this may work, u may be able to confirm. If one had TWO VP cards in the same machine BUT set up Card 1 to use the TwinHan drivers and Card 2 to use the BDA drivers would not both cards work at the same time? Ie DW would see Card 1 and use it, the new WS card 2 and use that?

Alright guys, after deliberating for about 2 seconds I went out and bought a second card (what can I say, I'm an impulse buyer!). Then, after a few hours of trying to remember how to put connections on coax cable (and ruining a few in the process) I got the two cards installed in one machine, one using the Twinham drivers, and the other using Spectrum's BDA drivers.

My summary (before the long story) - I think we can now claim multi card support! Well done spectrum and null_pointer!!!!!!!

Now how it all went. Driver installation was a breeze, ran through all the steps that spectrum and Shaun outlined to go through, and all was good. Stopped the WS service from my previous install, fired up start-server.bat from the the latest download, and opened up WS. Automatic channel scanning doesn't work, as has already been stated, so I got all the info from DigitalWatch. First capture worked fine (as did all subsequent captures). I have captured from all five channels without any grief at all. They were only short captures though to ensure that all channels were working - I would have to do further testing to ensure that entire shows were captured correctly. All of the captured files opened up fine in Media Player Classic version 6482. The picture with the Spectrum driver/new board seemed to be clearer than the Twinhan driver/old board - is this possible at all (I guess what I am asking is could the driver be affecting PQ? Could have also been my eyes playing tricks on me, I was viewing after midnight!!!)

Now the real kicker - WS plays nicely with DW!!! My first question was - I wonder if I can have WS and DW running at the same time? Answer - hell yes! So then I thought - I wonder if I can watch a channel in DW while the same channel is being recorded, with the answer being a resounding yes! Finally I thought - I wonder if this will work with daniel's myHTPC plugin, and again, the answer was yes! 3/3!

I think this is a huge step forward as far as functionality of the VP goes. Even though we are in the early stages, I'm pretty excited about this (if you hadn't already guessed ) and what else it will allow. One thing I have already thought of - it would be really nice if DW was able to send a record command to WS, so that if you were watching a show and wanted to record it you could hit the record button in DW, which would then send a record command to WS. Theoretically, this would not effect the live TV viewing (via DW) at all.

Again, great work spectrum and Shaun. Keep the great work up!!!

Elroy.

As a side note, it seems Twinhan have revised the board. The PCB is now red (my first one is blue) and they have different caps on them.

Ahhh so it is acheivable, thort that would work. DAMN which i had got a VP card instead of the Dvico now Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

Who did u get the 2nd VP card from as DigitalNow no long sells/lists them.

Null, im seriously contempating getting a 2nd VP card now, but this will be based on the following, let us know if you think it will be acheivable once all this new stuff is sorted:

1. WS to work with 2 cards at once?
2. WS eventually to output .mpg files?
3. WS to work OK one 1 card while DW works with the 2nd card (once DW works with the new drivers, (i'll ask nate if he plans on implementing this)).

No "promises" needed

If you have the elecard mpeg/2 filter suite installed, it includes a TS splitter. Any DS based player, zoomplayer included, can then play the .ts / .tp files directly.

Ok, lets not get to far ahead of ourself just yet, yes I have WS working with the BDA driver and it looks like the BDA driver can do some things the TwinHan driver can not (multiple cards, Wake from S3 etc). Having said this the main stumbling block is still what do you do with the transport stream once you get it from the capture filter?

At the moment the Microsoft Demuxer is being used to demux the Transport stream and then mix the two streams (Audio and video) you are interested in back into a single stream, to do this you just create one output pin and then map the stream pids you are interested in to this pin.

From what I can tell this should create a transport stream with transport packets etc and it does, there is some strange stuff happening though, while you can do this the MSDN docs say this will produce a non complient transport stream:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/di...xoutputpins.asp



So while this does work and you can play the captured file in Media Player Classic and ProjectX can read it and Womble can read it, it looks like this is a fluke and the stream is not really valid so this approch is probably flawed.

OK, so what now, what we need is a filter that can mux back together the video and audio streams to make a Program stream that can be dumped to disk. There is a filter that can do this, it is from Cyberlink, it is called MpgMux.ax the problem is that only the most recent version of this filter works the way we want it to (version 4.X). This is the only filter that I have found so far that does the muxing correctly. This filter is currently not available publicly.

So to cut a long story short we are getting closer to having an open BDA solution but there is still one last stumbling block, what we need is a free MPEG2 directshow mux filter or someone that knows enough about mpeg2 muxing to create one.

The other option for now is to just capture the complete Transport Stream to disk and then work out what to do with it later, demux play etc etc, this is an option as well.

So while we are getting closer we are still not there yet.

Automatic channel scanning looks to be a little complex - at least it seems that way as I haven't seen any code to do this.

I do have an idea in my head as to how you might go about running a scan, if anyone is interested I could post to the board my ideas now or update my web site sometime tonight.

Spectrum

I've tried some test recordings and everything seems OK, but tsreader lite says 'Reached the end of the transport stream file'. any ideas?
The java window is saying
"
Times.obj saved.
Allowing 45 seconds for wakeup
Setting wakeup time (2004 4 22 9 59 15)
win32-DLL : Setting Wake up Time (y2004 m4 d22 h9 m59 s15)
Capture Thread Exiting
Times.obj saved.
Allowing 45 seconds for wakeup
Setting wakeup time (2004 4 22 9 59 15)
win32-DLL : Setting Wake up Time (y2004 m4 d22 h9 m59 s15)
win32-DLL : Found a free card and using it: card ID=1
Found card at ID 1 will now try to use it
Timer Thread: Starting task
Times.obj saved.
Times.obj saved.
Allowing 45 seconds for wakeup
Allowing 45 seconds for wakeup
Setting wakeup time (2004 4 22 9 59 15)
win32-DLL : Setting Wake up Time (y2004 m4 d22 h9 m59 s15)
Setting wakeup time (2004 4 22 9 59 15)
win32-DLL : Setting Wake up Time (y2004 m4 d22 h9 m59 s15)
(2004-04-22 09-32) test 2 9 Nine.mpg
win32-DLL : Trying to Lock Channel F=191625 B=7 on card 1
Capture DLL lockChannel(191625) = 0 attempt:1
win32-DLL : Trying to Start Capture of Pid v = 519 a = 720 on card 1
win32-DLL-BDA : Setting streams stream1 = 519 stream2 = 720
win32-DLL-BDA : Signal Strength 85
win32-DLL : Trying to clean up card 1
Times.obj saved.
Allowing 45 seconds for wakeup
Setting wakeup time (2004 4 22 9 59 15)
win32-DLL : Setting Wake up Time (y2004 m4 d22 h9 m59 s15)
Capture Thread Exiting

"

so I think that it is receiving ok.

Check out the PSI filter from the DirectX DirectShow SDK, this parses the Mpeg2 sections and tables to give you the program IDs and PIDs that are available etc.

What are your thoughts?

sthawk,

Read my post above about the TS streams that are being captured.

Have you tried ProjectX or Media Player Classic?

I suspect my thoughts are more convoluted.

I was thinking along the lines of using the TIF filter
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/di...ationfilter.asp
using its IGuideData interface
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/di...tainterface.asp
and its ITuneRequestInfo interface
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/di...fointerface.asp

This would be used in conjunction with the BDA Network Provider filter
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/di...orkprovider.asp
using its IFrequencyMap interface
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/di...apinterface.asp
and its IScanningTuner interface
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/di...erinterface.asp

I could start another thread so as not to pollute this one.

Spectrum

I got it from trinix computers, a store over here in Perth. Do a google search it you want another, it seems every man and his dog is selling them these days! I can understand why renura stopped selling them now.

Shaun,

I am a complete newbie when it comes to the programming side of things, so you'll have to excuse my ignorance. Is this the sort of thing we need - http://www.dvb2000.org/pands/TSDemuxRemuxFilter.htm?

What about the Elecard mpeg2 demux filter? It's free, and is DirectShow based. I can't find a download site for it however (can't even connect to www.elecard.com )

Its the sort of thing however if you are going to pay for a TS to PS remuxer then you might as well get one that will also convert from a PVA to DVD MPEG2 PS at the same time.

This software is licensed per installation and might require a hardware dongle. Site-/Lab-/Network-Licenses are available on request. :roll:




www.elecard.com is up for me. if not try www.moonlight.co.il however I don't think any of their current filters are free ? They have a little freeware xmuxer app but that doesn't mean the filters are free for other use ~

Spectrum,

Yes a new thread may be a good idea, for some reason threads seem to grow very large on this forum :-)

Elroy,

Yep, that is exactly what we need, I will email then to see how much it costs etc, free would be good but I dont think so :-)

I realise that the first one I linked to isn't free, but I wanted to make sure that is the sort of thing we need. Like I said, I don't have a clue as to what we actually need - I'm just trying to help out, do a little more research, and hopefully I might be able to uncover something you guys might not have.

I still can't get to the elecard website. Do a search for elecard mpeg2 demultiplexer in google though. It comes up with things like this - http://divxstation.com/softwareId.asp?sId=213 and http://www.vidlizard.com/mpeg2-decoder.html, which indicates that elecard have an mpeg ss/ps/ts demultiplexer, and I have read elsewhere that it is free. I just can't download the bloody thing!!! :evil:

Shaun,

One other thing I had thought of (and could be totally off base here btw), but wouldn't MPC contain an mpeg-2 demux filter? If it does, you might be able to get one from the author of it, as it is distributed under the GPL license. Just a thought.

Linky - http://sourceforge.net/projects/guliverkli/. Version release notes are here - http://www.afterdawn.com/software/version_...yer_classic.cfm. Might mean more to you than me.

Hopefully this is of some help.

Pinging www.elecard.com [207.150.192.12] with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 207.150.192.12: bytes=32 time=350ms TTL=51

Pinging www.moonlight.co.il [207.150.192.12] with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 207.150.192.12: bytes=32 time=311ms TTL=51

They have whole suites of encoding and decoding filters. However afaik their decoder's do NOT support Australian HDTV yet (and by inference their encoders too I would imagine)

It's a muxer we need NOT a demuxer.

:oops: :oops: Ok, sorry Joey, will keep looking.

www.elecard.com is having some problems with their network/server, I can get to it from my home network but not my work network.

Thanks for the help in looking Elroy, it makes a difference as I do not have time to search etc.

Shaun,

What about this mate - http://matroska.org/downloads/windows.html? Scroll down to matroska muxer. A little more info is here (but not much) - http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?thre...roska+AND+muxer.

I really got to do some work now.

That's a far better candidate Elroy. Will have to do some testing...

Spectrum

That will most likely produce a Matroska output file and not mpeg. It'd be mpeg contained within Matroska which is pretty worthless to those who want to make DVDs.

TS is a far better option than Matroska.

Yep reading thru their site. Matroska is a container format for multiple media types. Not an mpeg stream as such.

It might be ok for people wanting to convert to divx/xvid. Still i agree that a PS/TS solution is what we really need.

I just found another one called remuxTS, which sounds like a viable candidate. However, all the info I can find is not in english (it's actually mostly japanese, some yugoslavian ). Has anyway heard of this one before?

It seems as though there are more demux than remux filters out there.....

Ah ha! Found a download site for remuxTS. http://www.yamabe.org/. At the toolbar at the top there is some scroll arrows. Click down until you see the freesoft link. A new page opens up with a remuxTS link. Click that, it'll scroll down the page, there is a download link for remuxTS. It says next to it mpeg2-ts remux, which is what we want. It might be a program though, rather than a filter, I'm not sure (cos most of it is in japanese).

Sorry in advance if I am leading you all on wild goose chases, I'm just trying to help out.

Alright, found another. http://www.networkmultimedia.org/NMM/Docs/..._8h-source.html. Is GPL, has source code, no download. I *think* it might be for linux, again not 100% sure. Could possibly be re-written for Windows if need be?

null_pointer,

I have done some further testing with this. I recorded a show for about an hour to see how a longer recording would go. It recorded the whole stream, but playback in MPC was a liitle sketchy. If I jumped forward a bit, the video would play for a bit, stop, and then the sound would play until it caught up with the video, and then both would play in sync. I haven't watched the whole thing through yet to see if there are any a/v sync issues as the recording gets longer.

I guess this highlights the need for a remux filter?

Cheers,

Elroy.

EDIT: BTW, pinnacle have a remux filter. I've got Studio 8, and found they make one while doing my google searches before. If I can help out with this at all, then I would be glad to.