DVB on the Mac — Forums

Mike2008 · Joined: 11 May 2006 Posts: 0

I am having the same problem many of you are having. iTele reads the card but there is the same error listed above and the same thing happens when I run the terminal. How'd you fix that?

thehigherlife · Joined: 09 Mar 2006 Posts: 13 Location: wisconsin, usa

FyKnight · Posted: 27 Jun 2006 12:52 am Post subject:

At the end of this post is an example plist and usage of tunetest. As you can see, in that post Constellation is misspelt. Don't worry about SymbolRate, all you need are Frequency, Constellation, and (probably) Inversion.

For the frequency you should be able to get your STB to at least tell you what channel it's tuned to. From that we ought to be able to figure out a frequency.

joshMV4 · Joined: 09 Dec 2005 Posts: 12

I found this thread last week, and have been working on this off an on since. I have searched here quite a bit, but couldn't find what I needed.
I have a several questions and am hoping to get this to work.

First off, I have the dvico fusionhdtv3 gold-T card in my DP 2.7GHz G5, OS 10.4.7. It works fine with regular off-air signals. I am trying to get the QAM working with unencrypted cable.

regarding item 1) in FyKnight's post. Here is an example plist file virtually identical to one I found on this forum. I created it with Apple's Property List Editor

eonicman · Joined: 21 Aug 2006 Posts: 1 Location: New York, NY USA

Exactly which .exe file from Dvico's website is necessary to get the Fusion USB to work? I've tried 2.7 to the latest and still can't get it to work. I'm using the beta MMulti and iTele. I'm in New York City on Time Warner Cable. I have an iMac G5 running the latest version of Tiger.
Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.
_________________
iMac G5 2.0 Ghz 17"
iPod w/ video 60 GB
Dvico FusionHDTV5 ATSC USB
Samsung 23 LCD HDTV

FyKnight · Posted: 30 Aug 2006 12:09 am Post subject:

joshMV4, that's fantastic! You have sucessfully tuned a cable channel. There is an error in the driver that sets it back to 8VSB every tune request if the Constellation is not re-specified. I've committed a fix.

It'd be possible to work around it in tunetest if you are up to compiling that (just omit the tuning to pid 0 immediately before filling). Otherwise you'll have to wait until I do a release - should be real soon now.

I don't know why it didn't work in iTele. Either place you put it should be fine. Let's concentrate on tunetest first.

SymbolRate isn't used which is why it makes no difference.

It's weird that it says |bandwidth 6MHz untuned| in tunetest right after you did tune a channel 'tho...

chimac · Joined: 30 Jul 2005 Posts: 18 Location: Chicago

Hey everybody -- I am just re-entering this project (which I mentioned first here: http://www.defyne.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=604),

and I noticed some progress here on the 3303! I have a dual G5 and DVICO 5 Lite. So I downloaded all these recent alphas and I wonder, FyKnight, if "while you're at it" you couldn't do what it takes to make the Lite work too? Please??

Here is the output of tunetest:

tunetest v0.3.1
Getting device index 0...
got dvb-cable [unknown] device
activating it
MMInputDevice::activate: error 0xE00002BC reason 2185
got error 0x00000889

And the system log:

kernel[0]: MMInputClient initWithTask
kernel[0]: MMInputClient start: started successfully
kernel[0]: MMInputClient dataKind
kernel[0]: MMInputClient tuningSpace
kernel[0]: MMInputClient activate
/Library/StartupItems/udmarket/MacOS/udmarket: device message: 00002B03 of type 0xE0000101
kernel[0]: BrooktreeBT8X8DMABuffer: allocating a buffer for 254 lines each of 3008 bytes
/Library/StartupItems/udmarket/MacOS/udmarket: device message: 00002B03 of type 0xE0000110
kernel[0]: BrooktreeBT8X8DMABuffer: allocated 187 pages of wired memory at virt 0x45415000
kernel[0]: BrooktreeBT8X8DMABuffer: created risc prog of length 4088
kernel[0]: DVICOFusionHDTVLite::deactivate: deactivated
kernel[0]: DVICOFusionHDTVLite::activate: could not activate. ok 1 gotone 0
kernel[0]: MMInputClient activate: MMInput activation failed: 0x00000000
kernel[0]: MMInputClient clientDied
kernel[0]: MMInputClient clientClose
kernel[0]: MMInputClient deactivate
kernel[0]: MMInputClient deactivate: succeeded
kernel[0]: MMInputClient stop
kernel[0]: MMInputClient free

So, while my card is still a paperweight, I think this is progress! (e.g., it never recognized the device before...)

-chimac

BigDawgTE · Joined: 21 Nov 2006 Posts: 1

How does one "make up a new location for iTele to scan?" How would you edit locationTunerParams.plist to autotune QAM? I know you add the constellation key, but how do you deal w/channel names (don't multiple stations tune on the same frequency?) I think barns already asked this, but I don't see where it was answered.

FyKnight · Posted: 21 Nov 2006 05:16 pm Post subject:

Yes you just duplicate an existing dictionary in there. Don't worry about the channel names too much - leave them as numbers. They will be replaced with the actual channel names from the stream if present. (iTele probably needs to do some more parsing here 'tho.)

If there are multiple stations ('programs' in MPEG2-speak) on the same frequency, iTele will show them as channel name: program name.

physicsguy · Joined: 23 Apr 2005 Posts: 26

JoshMV4: I found it deadly to use Frequency instead of FrequencyHz in the tunetest plist file. After I fixed that, everything worked fine, including fill.

In implementing the scan in iTele, you have to be sure to overlap your scan with some known qam freqs. I looked at what my EyeTV 500 found and then decided to leave "Korea and North America" freq list as is but I set the scanrange at 3Mhz and the scanstep at 1Mhz (and added Constellation 256 as a number of course). This was all set in "locationTunerParams.plist" located in iTele/Contents/Resources. There other ways, I'm sure (like editing the center freqs of the list). But I managed to find dozens of qam channels this way. Note that 3Mhz is enough to cause most of the edges of the freq list bands to touch, so I have a pretty continuous range, albeit at 1Mhz stepping.

My iTele hardware is the DVICO Fusion Gold T3 PCI card. iTele 0.6.4 and MMINPUT drivers 0.8.5.

My question now is, how do I know I found all the qam channels? I guess I can reduce the scanstep until it quits finding any more channels.

An interesting aside: The Fusion card tunes faster than the EyeTV 500. Sometimes, it takes the latter (with El Gato's EyeTV 2.3) a few seconds to find and lock onto a previously found channel when one tunes to it. The Fusion card is much faster.

Hope that helps. Thanks for all the email help, FYKnight! - Paul
_________________
Paul

FyKnight · Posted: 23 Nov 2006 09:29 am Post subject:

Good work physicsguy! Can you send me your /Library/Preferences/org.defyne.iTele.plist so I can determine a better rule for the frequencies you've found, and then add a new location to iTele. Thanks!

chimac · Joined: 30 Jul 2005 Posts: 18 Location: Chicago

joshMV4 · Joined: 09 Dec 2005 Posts: 12

tji · Joined: 26 Apr 2005 Posts: 5 Location: Mountain View, CA

I have DVico receiver cards in my MythTV backend, but I don't have any Macs with PCI slots (only Minis and Laptops), so I cannot test this.

But, another ATSC option that is becoming very popular is the HDHomerun device. It's a network based dual tuner ATSC/QAM receiver. Obviously, doing it over the network would allow access from any Macs, including laptops and Minis used as HTPCs. They are at http://www.hdhomerun.com/ and they have downloadable code for controlling their device, which already works with VLC.