ITV HD on MythTV
ITV HD (on Freesat) is provided not as a proper channel, it is only accessible by pressing the red button whilst an HD program is being shown on ITV. I wanted to enable my MythTV box to receive this channel and searched on Google to find out if it was possible. I found many articles such as the one at iwtf.net but still could not get it working. The database query where transportid = 2315 listed on the iwtf.net article would not return any results, and many repeated channel scans didn’t yield any results.
A post on digitalspy.com mentioned that I could run the following command to watch ITV HD using mplayer via dvbstream. This worked and so I knew it should be possible to get it to work in MythTV too.
dvbstream -f 11426 -p h -s 27500 -o 3401 3402 | ffmpeg -vcodec h264 -i - -f mpegts -vcodec copy -acodec copy - | mplayer -lavdopts fast:skiploopfilter=all -vf harddup,tfields=4:t -mc 100 -autosync 100 -fps 50 -demuxer lavf -nocorrect-pts -
After some playing around I finally got it to work by adding the following entries to the dtv_multiplex and channel tables of the MythTV database:
INSERT INTO `dtv_multiplex` (`sourceid`, `transportid`, `frequency`, `inversion`, `symbolrate`, `fec`, `polarity`, `modulation`, `bandwidth`, `lp_code_rate`, `transmission_mode`, `guard_interval`, `visible`, `constellation`, `hierarchy`, `hp_code_rate`, `mod_sys`, `rolloff`, `sistandard`, `serviceversion`, `updatetimestamp`, `default_authority`) VALUES
(1, 2315, 11428000, 'a', 27500000, '2/3', 'h', 'qpsk', 'a', 'auto', 'a', 'auto', 0, 'qpsk', 'a', 'auto', 'UNDEFINED', '0.35', 'dvb', 33, '2010-02-09 19:42:03', '')
Replace MPLEXID in the insert below to the MPLEXID that was created by the insert above. You may also need to alter your sourceid as I think this should be whatever your DVB-S tuner is set to.
INSERT INTO `channel` (`chanid`, `channum`, `freqid`, `sourceid`, `callsign`, `name`, `icon`, `finetune`, `videofilters`, `xmltvid`, `recpriority`, `contrast`, `brightness`, `colour`, `hue`, `tvformat`, `visible`, `outputfilters`, `useonairguide`, `mplexid`, `serviceid`, `tmoffset`, `atsc_major_chan`, `atsc_minor_chan`, `last_record`, `default_authority`, `commmethod`) VALUES
(119, '119', NULL, 1, 'ITV HD', 'ITV HD', '', NULL, '', '', 0, 32768, 32768, 32768, 32768, 'Default', 1, '', 1, MPLEXID, 10510, 0, 0, 0, '0000-00-00 00:00:00', '', -1);
Hope this helps anyone trying to do the same. The Freesat channel plan on iwtf.net is also very useful.
Tags: HD DVB-S
February 9th, 2010 at 10:21 pm
Hi Jon,
Thanks for reading my blog and linking it here, very cool of you!
I too had the same problem as you initially, the problem it seems stems from the way mythtv does the inital scan to pull in the transponders. When doing the initial mythtv setup, if any transponder frequency other than 11428000 is put in during the initial ‘full tuned’ scan, it seems to ‘ignore’ multiplex 2315 and the select (from dtv_multiplex where mplexid = 2315) listed on my blog wont work as that multiplex isnt in the database. Im not sure why that is at all, not sure if its a bug in mythtv or if its a problem with the multiplex information fed down in the DVB stream when doing the initial scan.
Your insert will work of course, however mythtv will also ignore further channels on that multiplex unless they are added manually. Ive found the easiest way is to perform the initial mythtv ‘tuned’ at seup time to tune to the ITV HD transponder first, then the steps on my blog magically work.
Regards
Simon
February 9th, 2010 at 10:32 pm
[...] ’select from dtv_multiplex where mplexid = 2315′ (for example, see Jons tech blog at http://jonwsmith.com/techblog/?p=41). This happened for me because when I performed my first setup after installing mythtv I told the [...]