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All posts by js

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

J
All free TV channels in the UK
Tuesday 7 August 2018 1:21PM

ASTRA/BSkyB Diffs:

Vintage TV, currently with black screen, was removed from BSkyB 367:

Comparing files List ASTRA 07-08-2018 11 01.txt and List ASTRA 07-08-2018 13 01.txt


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

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

EPGID Change, Bouquet Change, LCN Change
Vintage TV 1 3531 53515 2098 2 11597V 0 1 BSkyB 111111111111111 367
Vintage TV 1 0000 53515 2098 2 11597V 0 1 BSkyB 000000000000000

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J
All free TV channels in the UK
Tuesday 14 August 2018 8:12PM

QUEST HD arrived on Freeview today with LCN 114 in the com8 multiplex:

COM8
(
LCN SID TYPE SERVICE NAME
055 B090 22 5STAR+1
086 B0E0 22 More4+1
088 B150 22 NOW 80s
092 B100 22 Rocks & Co 1
093 B140 22 Together
094 B130 22 PBS America
095 B110 22 FreeSports
096 B120 22 Forces TV
106 B040 25 BBC FOUR HD
111 B000 25 QVC HD
112 B010 25 QVC Beauty HD
114 B060 25 QUEST HD
205 B030 25 CBeebies HD
)

There is ample space for QUEST HD now BT Showcase HD has ceased:

Video Bitrate (Mbps) sampled at 34 <= dPCR <= 36 ms intervals over 10 seconds for Arqiva D Com78 National (14/08/2018 16:16:00)
maximum | minimum | average | service_name
05.610 | 02.110 | 03.419 | QVC Beauty HD
10.479 | 03.742 | 05.928 | CBeebies HD
14.887 | 01.046 | 09.140 | QUEST HD
01.658 | 00.717 | 01.145 | 5STAR+1
02.223 | 00.654 | 01.217 | PBS America
01.743 | 00.785 | 01.231 | Forces TV
01.897 | 00.520 | 01.116 | More4+1
02.104 | 00.683 | 01.135 | FreeSports
01.423 | 00.898 | 01.082 | Together
04.714 | 01.658 | 02.635 | NOW 80s
15.074 | 01.470 | 05.885 | Null Packets
04.884 | 01.470 | 02.892 | All Other Streams
36.825 | 36.825 | 36.825 | TS Bitrate

The sample of com8 used for the Video Bitrate table above, happened to catch QUEST HD showing an advert for its football coverage - a really fast video sequence.

As can be seen in the table, the peak Bitrate was 14.887 Mbps with an average of 9.140 Mbps.

On satellite, QUEST HD is 9.200 Mbps - essentially constant bitrate:

Video Bitrate (Mbps) sampled at 35 <= dPCR <= 35 ms intervals over 15 seconds for 11426.50 V 27500 5/6 DVB-S QPSK (14/08/2018 19:20:28)
maximum | minimum | average | service_name
09.662 | 08.258 | 09.200 | QUEST HD/52581
03.852 | 03.755 | 03.800 | FreeSports
01.989 | 01.030 | 01.539 | Food Network
01.983 | 00.772 | 01.689 | Food Netwrk+1
01.885 | 01.212 | 01.624 | Craft Extra
03.675 | 01.961 | 02.451 | Gems TV
01.844 | 01.123 | 01.497 | PBS America
08.213 | 08.047 | 08.126 | FRANCE 24 HD
02.839 | 02.707 | 02.778 | FRANCE Eng
03.269 | 03.060 | 03.192 | TV5 MONDE
03.186 | 01.207 | 02.346 | Null Packets
06.034 | 03.216 | 03.996 | All Other Streams
42.239 | 42.238 | 42.238 | TS Bitrate

Note: 52581 is back, now with just three of the twelve QUEST HD streams - H.264 Video, AC3 Audio and MPEG Audio.

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J
All free TV channels in the UK
Tuesday 14 August 2018 8:56PM

ASTRA/BSkyB FTA Diffs:

Channel i was removed from BSkyB 752.

Jewelry Maker was Renamed JewelleryMaker.

52581 showing QUEST HD was removed from BSkyB Bouquet 13 - Test.

New test items 62144 and 62155, both FTA SD, exist so far as mere SDT entries:

Comparing files List ASTRA 07-08-2018 18 01.txt and List ASTRA 14-08-2018 18 01.txt


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

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

Renamed
Jewelry Maker 1 3354 50310 2065 2 11082H 0 1 BSkyB 111111111111111 674
JewelleryMaker 1 3354 50310 2065 2 11082H 0 1 BSkyB 111111111111111 674

EPGID Change, Bouquet Change, LCN Change
Channel i 1 4102 50891 2090 2 11479V 0 1 BSkyB 111111111111111 752
Channel i 1 0000 50891 2090 2 11479V 0 1 BSkyB 000000000000000

EPGID Change, Bouquet Change, LCN Change
52581 25 6541 52581 2116 2 11427V 0 1 BSkyB 000000000000010 1056
52581 25 0000 52581 2116 2 11427V 0 1 BSkyB 000000000000000


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

SERVICE NAME TYPE EPGID SID TSID ONID FREQ.P ENC EIT PROVIDER BOUQUETS LCN
62144 1 0000 6244 2035 2 12383H 0 1 BSkyB 000000000000000
62155 1 0000 6255 2035 2 12383H 0 1 BSkyB 000000000000000

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J
All free TV channels in the UK
Tuesday 14 August 2018 8:58PM

Freesat Diffs:

Freesat 161, SHOWCASE was renamed CLTV:

Comparing files List Freesat 07-08-2018 18 01.txt and List Freesat 14-08-2018 18 01.txt


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

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

Renamed
SHOWCASE 1 20019 53598 2098 2 11597V 0 1 Freesat 111111111111 161
CLTV 1 20019 53598 2098 2 11597V 0 1 Freesat 111111111111 161

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J
All free TV channels in the UK
Wednesday 15 August 2018 9:05PM

ASTRA/BSkyB Diffs:

FRANCE Eng, the SD version of FRANCE 24 HD, has been removed from 11427V:

Comparing files List ASTRA 14-08-2018 18 01.txt and List ASTRA 15-08-2018 18 01.txt

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

SERVICE NAME TYPE EPGID SID TSID ONID FREQ.P ENC EIT PROVIDER BOUQUETS LCN
FRANCE Eng 1 0000 52560 2116 2 11427V 0 1 BSkyB 000000000000000


FRANCE Eng used about 3 Mbps total on 11427V.

Null Packets fill the void to maintain the constant TS Bitrate:

Video Bitrate (Mbps) sampled at 30 <= dPCR <= 44 ms intervals over 15 seconds for 11426.50 V 27500 5/6 DVB-S QPSK (15/08/2018 18:09:52)
maximum | minimum | average | service_name
09.289 | 09.094 | 09.200 | QUEST HD/52581
03.843 | 03.755 | 03.800 | FreeSports
02.683 | 00.917 | 01.798 | Food Network
02.221 | 00.767 | 01.817 | Food Netwrk+1
03.165 | 01.479 | 02.031 | Craft Extra
02.657 | 01.617 | 02.131 | Gems TV
01.556 | 00.647 | 01.024 | PBS America
08.228 | 08.057 | 08.126 | FRANCE 24 HD
03.277 | 03.076 | 03.193 | TV5 MONDE
06.109 | 04.352 | 05.350 | Null Packets
04.760 | 02.985 | 03.770 | All Other Streams
42.239 | 42.238 | 42.239 | TS Bitrate

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J
UTV
Thursday 16 August 2018 12:40AM

Cate Taylor: According to


Sky manual tuning - a516digital


you can add them manually:

**********
SkyQ - the "settings" menu
Go to "Home", "settings", then "manual tuning".
You will need a number of tuning parameters such as frequency, polarisation and Symbol Rate and then save the newly added channels.
**********

UTV and UTV+1 are free to air on frequency 10906, polarisation V, Symbol Rate 22000.

UTV HD is free to air on frequency 11068, polarisation V, Symbol Rate 23000.



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J
Winter Hill (Bolton, England) transmitter
Wednesday 22 August 2018 12:12PM

Update - Errors in the current Freeview EIT:

There are 954 events containing invalid character codes in the EIT off BBCA.

There are 43 events containing invalid character codes in the EIT off BBCB.

There are 954 - 43 = 911 events containing grammatical errors the EIT off BBCB, caused by the omission of the intended character codes.

An example event:

Freesat - this is what the event should look like:

BBC Radio 1, Thu 23 Aug 04:00 - 06:33: Adele Roberts
Adele's got you, Early Morning Crew! Guess the lyric for a shout out in Whose Rhyme Is It Anyway?'

Here, Freesat is correctly using 0x2018 and 0x2019 for left and right single quotes respectively.

This site probably won't represent those characters, so here is what it should look like using just the ASCII apostrophe:

BBC Radio 1, Thu 23 Aug 04:00 - 06:33: Adele Roberts
Adele's got you, Early Morning Crew! Guess the lyric for a shout out in 'Whose Rhyme Is It Anyway?'


The Freesat EIT text is Huffman coded and the decoded output is in utf8, so, for example, the left single quote is 3 bytes [11100010 10000000 10011000] which translates to Unicode 2018.

See UTF-8 - Wikipedia

The invalid character codes on Freeview are the least significant bytes of the correct codes.

It's interesting that the missing top byte is always 0x20 - the code for a space. Are Freeview running something that strips extraneous spaces from the input data?


EIT off BBCA - invalid character codes 0x18, represented by {L'} and 0x19, represented by {R'}, for the left and right single quotes respectively:

700 BBC Radio 1, Thu 23 Aug 04:00 - 06:33: Adele Roberts
Adele{R'}s got you, Early Morning Crew! Guess the lyric for a shout out in {L'}Whose Rhyme Is It Anyway?{R'}

EIT off BBCB - missing apostrophe and quotes - therefore grammatical errors:

700 BBC Radio 1, Thu 23 Aug 04:00 - 06:33: Adele Roberts
Adeles got you, Early Morning Crew! Guess the lyric for a shout out in Whose Rhyme Is It Anyway?


An example from the 43 events common to BBCA and BBCB EITs, which contain invalid character codes:

094 PBS America, Sat 25 Aug 18:10 - 19:10: Plane Resurrection - Series 2
B25 Mitchell: The plane of choice for the {L'}Doolittle Raid{R'} needs a major winter overhaul to be ready for the air show season, but this little lady proves to be something of a diva. (S2 Ep5)

Note: All 43 events are on DVB-T2 multiplexes.




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J
Winter Hill (Bolton, England) transmitter
Thursday 23 August 2018 7:47AM

The example event above was replaced by this:

700 BBC Radio 1, Thu 23 Aug 04:00 - 06:33: Adele Roberts
Adele{R'}s got you with a Summer Mix, Early Morning Crew! She hits play on a Drake versus Kanye mix

No matter, nearly all Adele Roberts event descriptions start with "Adele{R'}s got you", so demonstrate a bad code.


Here's a new one - with a duff code in the title:

Freeview:
105 Channel 5 HD, Thu 30 Aug 04:00 - 04:45: Now That{R'}s Funny

Freesat:
105 Channel 5 HD, Thu 30 Aug 04:00 - 04:45: Now That's Funny

As always, Freesat get it right with code 2019 = single right quote, and Freeview get it wrong with code 19 = garbage.

Because Channel 5 HD is on a DVB-T2 multiplex, and all EIT text for services on DVB-T2 multiplexes is Huffman coded, this error is present regardless of which multiplex the EIT came from.


Another thing that needs reporting is the appearance of the FTA content management descriptor on DVB-T.

Most events on these radio channels have FTACMDs:

BBC 6 Music
BBC R1X
BBC Asian Net.
BBC Radio 1
BBC Radio 2
BBC Radio 3

This set is also the set that have duff codes.

The FTACMD for those events has a value of F6 which according to ETSI EN 300 468 means:

Scrambling shall be applied where applicable for content protection.
Redistribution over the Internet is not allowed with the following exception: Redistribution over the Internet within a managed domain is enabled after a specified long (possibly indefinite) period of time.
The content revocation process shall be applied.





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J
Winter Hill (Bolton, England) transmitter
Wednesday 12 June 2019 5:13AM

EIT errors update.

There are 1364 events, whose title or description or both, contain invalid codes, in the current Freeview EIT off DVB-T multiplexes from Winter Hill.

Having failed to get through to Digital UK, I tried this route:

Radio & Television Investigation Service - Diagnostic form

with the Tell the BBC' option specifying "Which BBC service?" as "EPG".

This is was my message:


**********

Invalid Character Codes in the EIT off North West multiplex BBC A.

See https://pastebin.com/KCQXirUA for an explanation and complete list.

See also:

Winter Hill (Bolton, England) Full Freeview transmitter | free and easy

Winter Hill (Bolton, England) Full Freeview transmitter | free and easy

An independent confirmation here:

"Unknown unicode character in EPG title crashes scheduled rec"

SmartDVB

**********


That was a week ago and nothing has changed.

I had set the paste at pastebin.com to expire in 7 days, so that has now been removed, but, here is the current version:

https://pastebin.com/DJpnCdpw

As I explained in the ukfree.tv links above, the EITs off the BBCA and BBCB multiplexes differ.

Here is the full list of errors showing how most of the BBCA EIT errors have been inadvertently 'fixed' by the omission of the offending characters, leaving grammatical errors in their stead:

https://pastebin.com/nL3DHQhP

Note that the event times in this list are in GMT.

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Brian: The coverage checker shows Orton as your Most Likely Transmitter and Winter Hill as the sole Alternative Transmitter:

Coverage Checker - Detailed View

D3&4 is on UHF50 from Orton, as is BBCA from Winter Hill.

If you change the aerial orientation from Vertical to Horizontal you may lose D3&4 from Orton and find BBC A from Winter Hill in its stead.

That might explain your observations if you have been getting BBCA off UHF50.

With the aerial set vertically, you should get good reception of both BBCA on UHF43 and D3&4 on UHF50.



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