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.

Well, seems I’m on a (blog, har har) roll, "this just in" … via blade on irc:

View this first: Telenet IDTV broadcast

Then this: TV Vlaanderen DVB broadcast at the exact same time

Do we have to consider this to be normal practice?

Edit: it could be perfectly normal if someone messed up the timecodes to overwrite ads (normal practice, and TN probably pays for it) – thanks David 😉

Why call all cool stuff "punk" then call your new car "Jazz" ? I’ll never understand advertisers.

Top Gear. BBC2. If you’re reading this in time, and not watching, hurry to your remote!

Am i the only one getting pretty annoyed at these ads?

For starters, it’s a bit silly to show me this ad as I have no way of becoming an In.di kijker even if I wanted to (short of me moving to an In.di-covered area of course), so even if I would now say "WOAH, I LIKES!!!" there wouldn’t really be any point. + you still have to wait for the episodes to air before actually having recorded the entire season, so that’s not a very nice ad technique is it… (unless I’m mistaken, "neem hele serie op" just sets a number of scheduled recordings in the future, it doesn’t simply download the entire series from In.di servers, right?).

Other than that, I just wish I had the money to get VT4 to broadcast "Pirate bay kijkers hadden het VOLGENDE seizoen reeds VORIG JAAR op hun harde schijf staan" right after the In.di ad. Sigh.

Hmm, end of volume 1. Now am I the only one who thought this was a bit of an anticlimax?

Since today I have DVB-T working. I have a Pinnacle PCTV 300i PCI card, which is a Analog PAL + DVB-T tuner card. It is supported onder Linux, however I couldn’t get the DVT part to work.

Geert had a Hauppauge DVB-T USB stick since a few days which I could borrow, to make sure I had good reception with my old trusty analog UHF/VHF antenna. After some fumbling with the kernel modules and firmware his USB stick was up and running with reception, but my PCI card still didn’t want to budge. Armed with the knowledge that reception was good but the thing didn’t work, I asked the question in #linuxtv on freenode (again, I already tried a few times). Luckily, mkrufky/Michael Krufky was there to help me, but unfortunately his first few attempts I had already tried, modules already loaded etc. However, after I pasted something particular out of the dmesg output, bells started ringing…

[21|23:11:10] < sid3windr> tda9887 1-0043: tda988[5/6/7] found @ 0x43 (tuner)
[21|23:11:10] < sid3windr> tuner 1-0060: Chip ID is not zero. It is not a TEA5767
[21|23:11:16] < sid3windr> and then tuner 1-0060: microtune MT2050 found, OK
[21|23:11:28] < sid3windr> (this last one appears twice btw, perhaps that isn’t normal?)
[21|23:12:24] < mkrufky> it’s supposed to be a mt2032
[21|23:12:39] < sid3windr> oh?
(…)
[21|23:16:37] < sid3windr> HAHA
[21|23:16:38] < sid3windr> it works
[21|23:16:53] < sid3windr> mkrufky rocks. 

He already left the channel, but I’ll be sure to let him know. The module misdetected the tuner type, so here’s how to force it: 

It’ll still say the same in dmesg, but! tuning will work. 

root@khalid:~# cat be-Veltem
# VRT Veltem
# T freq bw fec_hi fec_lo mod transmission-mode guard-interval hierarchy
T 482000000 8MHz 1/2 NONE QAM64 8k 1/4 NONE

-> scan be-Veltem (scan from dvb-utils), and you should find 11 channels provided by VRT. If you’re closer to another broadcasting station (check vrt.be for the list), you can adjust the frequency there.

DVB under Linux still seems to be a bit quirky at times (and ick, tuning time is quite slow), but it works in MythTV. I’m watching remote, and the image stuff is rather slow at the moment. Have to figure out why, but my backend server is also resyncing one of its md arrays, so it’s a bit loaded… 

The (in the meanwhile not that) new Proximus ad just rocks. 😀

Yes, indeed — Top Gear is back on BBC2. If you’re reading this now and didn’t know, you missed it. Maybe FinalGear could help you out… Welcome back Hamster, and Jeremy and James as well ofcourse! w00t! 🙂

Very nicely done, although a better quality video would be nice to have: