WTF WTF WTF.

Thanks to the Scarlet Drama Show Of The Month apparently TV Vlaanderen DVB-S users suffered lack of access to their (TVV) channels for hours on end. Great redundant infrastructure in top quality datacenter guys…

But more into my own zone, WTF is Telenet doing again… Apparently it’s being talked about on the TIK and Userbase forums already, but there seem to have been some changes put into place. Firstly, Telenet cut off FTA on the former In.DI network, leaving everyone not using their decoder out in the cold. I’d suggest swapping to TVV but the statement above does not inspire much confidence.

Then, apparently they now scramble more channels then before on the regular Telenet network as well. Suddenly my DVB-C PCI card in my Myth box became even more useless than before as the channels I was able to view (eg ARD) are now encrypted. Apparently only Arte and TVE are FTA now. I read that since monday (which was NOT 20 april, Telenet guys) the VRT channels are FTA including Radio stations and HD channels.

Unfortunately I can’t verify this as my card can’t pick up the transponder they’re on 🙁 I have VRT over DVB-T, but that’s not all the channels that are available on DVB-C so I’ll have to look into what’s happening here with the tuning. In any case, I’m deeply sad about this whole thing.

Dear Telenet, Just give me the godsdamn boxkey or FTA all the channels that I can get over analog connection and I’ll forget you suck donkeyballs.

If you want to do some finetuning of your analog channel frequencies, MythTV doesn’t have a really handy interface for it, and you can’t immediately see the results of your actions. With this page (courtesy of my darling wife) you can enter the correct frequency of the channel (I extracted it from C:\Program Files\DScaler\program.txt 😉 ) and it’ll give you the correct MythTV channel name + optional finetune frequency.

After you’ve scanned your channels on your analog tuner (in my case, a PVR-500) you’re left with a bunch of unknown channel numbers. At first I started tuning in and jotting down what channel was what number, until my darling wife pointed me to a Telenet site, zenders.be , which has a nice channel mapping per postal code. Very handy 😉

As a last post in this blogathlon, what I’m going to do next: well, move, obviously. Also migrate my server stuff which is still running on old Dual P3’s to the new Supermicro server as soon as I get the new chassis delivered.

After that, next project should be opening a nlams2 point of presence for Phyxia Networks at the NIKHEF datacenter in Amsterdam. 

For the new home: finally get the entire mythtv installation in working order. This includes: DVB-T inputs for VRT and RTBF, DVB-S to Astra (we don’t have any sat hardware yet, that’s for after the move), dual analog cable tuner on the PVR500 card, all on the backend machine; then the correct setup of the living room frontend, building a new frontend for the bedroom (we’ll also need a monitor or TV for there) and also finishing my Java frontend so we can also watch livetv (and perhaps recordings) on our Windows workstations.

Enough work I’d say 😉