menuMENU    UK Free TV logo Archive (2002-)

 

 

Click to see updates

All posts by js

Below are all of js's postings, with the most recent are at the bottom of the page.


Chris.SE: Responsibility for the Freeview EPG lies with Digital UK.

It has nothing to do with Arqiva as it's not a transmission fault.

The same errors are present in the com7 EIT, which has to be exactly the same everywhere for the SFN on UHF55 to work.

It seems likely that the same buggy software is being used by certain services to process their EPG data.



link to this comment
NL flag

Chris.SE: You say you don't see these errors.

I would be grateful if you would check for this error:

Adele Roberts is on BBC Radio 1 weekdays at 04:00 and nearly always has "Adele's got you," at the start of the programme description.

If the Freeview EPG shows "Adeles got you," with no apostrophe then you are seeing these errors.

If the Freeview EPG shows "Adele's got you," with the apostrophe then I will accept that the errors may be Winter Hill only.


link to this comment
US flag
J
All free TV channels in the UK
Monday 1 July 2019 4:08PM

Freesat Diffs:

FreeSports HD has appeared in the Freesat test region:

Comparing files List Freesat 28-06-2019 18 01.txt and List Freesat 01-07-2019 11 01.txt


************************ CHANGED ************************

SERVICE NAME TYPE EPGID SID TSID ONID FREQ.P ENC EIT PROVIDER BOUQUETS LCN

Renamed
KEEPITCOUNTRY 1 12003 50331 2065 2 11082H 0 1 Freesat 111111111111 516
Spotlight TV 1 12003 50331 2065 2 11082H 0 1 Freesat 111111111111 516



************************ NEW ************************

SERVICE NAME TYPE EPGID SID TSID ONID FREQ.P ENC EIT PROVIDER BOUQUETS LCN
FreeSports HD 25 07017 52575 2116 2 11427V 0 0 Freesat 00001EEE1EEE 254

link to this comment
US flag
J
All free TV channels in the UK
Wednesday 18 September 2019 9:18PM

Freesat Diffs:

First with this amazing news - faster even than the clever lovinthetelly on digitalspy.

New, in the top secret Freesat test region:

811 IDEAL WORLD
814 CREATE&CRAFT

in glorious High Def!

The SD version are 812 Ideal World and 813 Create & Craft, so it's easy to compare the resolutions.

Take a sneak peek using postcode AM1.

Comparing files List Freesat 18-09-2019 11 01.txt and List Freesat 18-09-2019 18 01.txt


************************ DELETED ************************

SERVICE NAME TYPE EPGID SID TSID ONID FREQ.P ENC EIT PROVIDER BOUQUETS LCN
Mod Test 25 20091 53797 2113 2 11387H 0 0 Freesat 000010001000 1961
Mod Test 2 25 20092 1234 2117 2 10890V 0 0 Freesat 000010001000 1962



************************ NEW ************************

SERVICE NAME TYPE EPGID SID TSID ONID FREQ.P ENC EIT PROVIDER BOUQUETS LCN
CREATE&CRAFT 25 04032 50245 2103 2 11671H 0 0 Freesat 00001EEE1EEE 814
IDEAL WORLD 25 10019 50240 2103 2 11671H 0 0 Freesat 00001EEE1EEE 811


link to this comment
US flag
J
Winter Hill (Bolton, England) transmitter
Thursday 19 September 2019 8:13AM

Chris.SE: Sorry about the late reply.

Yes, these bad codes will be generally discarded by the receiver software leaving mostly grammatical errors due to the resultant missing quotes, dashes, hyphens and apostrophes.

As you know, the reason I am aware of the errors and no one else seems to be is I am fairly unique in having written EPG software for my own personal use.

In fact, I initially failed to spot the errors as I had included such a discard routine in my EPG program.

I became aware of them when they appeared in the output of the Huffman decoder, which I expect to be pristine UTF-8 and thus not needing to be processed.

The culprits are always much the same - never from ITV or Channel4 services.

The following is part of an automated dump from my program.

Note the Sony errors appear thrice because EPG for the three local multiplexes is sent from Winter Hill.

Invalid Character Codes in the EIT off North West multiplex BBC A. Date: 2019/09/18 01:20:19

There are 1239 events with invalid codes in the current EIT.

The Culprits:
Format:
service_name, number of events containing errors

BBC ONE W Mid, 22
BBC ONE N West, 22
BBC TWO, 23
BBC NEWS, 4
BBC FOUR, 1
CBBC, 26
CBeebies, 39
BBC Parliament, 4
BBC R5L, 2
BBC 6 Music, 4
BBC Radio 4 Ex, 48
BBC R1X, 1
BBC Asian Net., 2
BBC World Sv., 48
BBC Manchester, 1
BBC Stoke, 1
BBC Lancashire, 1
BBC Radio 1, 5
BBC Radio 2, 5
BBC Radio 3, 10
BBC Radio 4, 16
BBC RB 1, 7
BBC ONE Yorks, 21
BBC ONE Wales, 21
BBC TWO Wales, 24
Blaze, 6
ADULT Studio 66, 32
Planet Knowledge, 17
Sports Channel Network, 41
Sony Movies Action, 1
Ketchup TV, 14
BBC TWO HD, 23
BBC ONE HD, 21
CBBC HD, 26
RNIB Connect, 3
TBN UK, 13
YourTV, 6
Sony Movies, 14
POP, 116
Al Jazeera Eng, 4
Sony Channel +1, 31
POP Max, 134
Tiny Pop, 62
Sony Movies +1, 4
Sony Channel, 39
Tiny Pop, 62
Sony Movies +1, 4
Sony Channel, 39
Tiny Pop, 62
Sony Movies +1, 4
Sony Channel, 39
BBC NEWS HD, 4
CBeebies HD, 39
BBC FOUR HD, 1
PBS America, 20

link to this comment
GB flag
J
Winter Hill (Bolton, England) transmitter
Thursday 19 September 2019 9:53AM

A new stream has appeared sometime during the last two months in the Winter Hill BBC A and BBC B multiplexes with a Packet IDentifier (PID) value of 21 or hex 0x15.

From ETSI TS 101 191 V1.4.1 (2004-06):

"The present document specifies a mega-frame, including a Mega-frame Initialization Packet (MIP), which may be used for synchronization of Single Frequency Networks (SFN) as well as for the optional control of other important parameters in an SFN."

"The PID value for the Mega-frame initialization Packet (MIP) shall be 0 15."


A PID 21 stream has been present in the Winter Hill D3&4 multiplex for many years but is not present in the com7 and com8 multiplexes.


link to this comment
US flag
J
Winter Hill (Bolton, England) transmitter
Friday 20 September 2019 7:16AM

I had hoped digitalbitrate.com might show the new stream but apparently not.

0 - - DigitalBitRate

They have the Winter Hill BBC B on "738.166Mhz", which it isn't, it's on uhf 54- or 737.833MHz and they pay no respect to Hertz.

They have a section under the heading "This Mux has Ghost PIDs : total bitrate of these PIDs"

They inform us:

"These PIDs are not declared within the DVB tables. They are not usefull and are taking bandwith inside this Mux.
The PID list is available in PRODBR website, you can also contact us for more information."

It is a common error to refer to PIDs where streams are meant. PIDs don't have a Bitrate.

I couldn't find any PID list at the PRODBR website.

Finally, they show the Winter Hill BBC B Bitrate as 40.10 Mb/s. It isn't. It's now 40.209 Mbps but it used to be 40.215 Mbps so something has changed.

I would be interested in reports as to the presence or otherwise of a stream with PID 21 in the BBC A and BBC B transport streams from other regions.


link to this comment
GB flag
J
Winter Hill (Bolton, England) transmitter
Monday 23 September 2019 9:36PM

Bad Character Update.

The BBC seems to have fixed its EPG text.

There are just two BBC events with errors left.

Curiously, it's the same expression in both events, but with different error bytes, specifically:

The low byte 0x10, substitute {-), of a Unicode hyphen 0x2010 in the first and the low byte 0x0B, substitute {), of a Unicode zero-width space 0x200B in the second.

As is most often the case, the EIT off BBC A has the error bytes and that off BBC B omits them. As usual, Freesat show what the text should be.


BBC Radio 3, Wed 25 Sep 14:00 - 15:30: Afternoon Concert:

BBC A:
Poulenc's Organ Concerto, Mathias's Threnos and Saint{-}Saens's mighty Symphony No 3 from the St Davids Cathedral Festival with organist David Briggs. Conducted by Daniel Blendulf.
Plain: 53 61 69 6E 74 10 53 61 C8 65 6E 73

BBC B:
Poulenc's Organ Concerto, Mathias's Threnos and SaintSans's mighty Symphony No 3 from the St Davids Cathedral Festival with organist David Briggs. Conducted by Daniel Blendulf.
Huffman: 53 61 69 6E 74 53 61 C3 AB 6E 73

Freesat:
Poulenc's Organ Concerto, Mathias's Threnos and SaintSans's mighty Symphony No 3 from the St Davids Cathedral Festival with organist David Briggs. Conducted by Daniel Blendulf.
Huffman: 53 61 69 6E 74 E2 80 90 53 61 C3 AB 6E 73


BBC Radio 3, Mon 30 Sep 19:30 - 22:00: Radio 3 in Concert

BBC A:
The opening concert in the Ulster Orchestra's 2019/2020 season, conducted by the orchestra's new chief conductor, Daniele Rustioni. Music by Verdi, Elgar and Saint-Saen{}s.
Plain: 53 61 69 6E 74 2D 53 61 C8 65 6E 0B 73

BBC B:
The opening concert in the Ulster Orchestra's 2019/2020 season, conducted by the orchestra's new chief conductor, Daniele Rustioni. Music by Verdi, Elgar and Saint-Sans.
Huffman: 53 61 69 6E 74 2D 53 61 C3 AB 6E 73

Freesat:
The opening concert in the Ulster Orchestra's 2019/2020 season, conducted by the orchestra's new chief conductor, Daniele Rustioni. Music by Verdi, Elgar and Saint-Sans.
Huffman: 53 61 69 6E 74 2D 53 61 C3 AB 6E E2 80 8B 73


As for errors from other service providers, they continue much as before.

link to this comment
FR flag
J
Freesports
Tuesday 5 November 2019 8:29PM

Tommy Mcaulay: The main audio for all four services is in AC3 format. The two that you have audio for have MPEG audio streams as well, for Audio Description, and that is what you'll be hearing. It appears your boxes don't support AC3 audio.

link to this comment
AT flag
J
Winter Hill (Bolton, England) transmitter
Thursday 7 November 2019 12:44AM

Two weeks on from the local multiplex frequency changes and the Winter Hill NIT is still showing all three on 754 MHz.

The responsibility presumably lies with Digital UK.

The DTT NIT seems to have been reduced to a carrier bag for LCNs and daft messages like this one: "Database right of Digital UK Ltd 2019".

They never bothered to include a decent T2-Delivery-System descriptor that showed the frequency of T2 multiplexes, thus eliminating the possibility of automatic tuning of the correct frequencies via the NIT.


link to this comment
FR flag