Irish DTT, MPEG2 cards, and MediaPortal Guide

Hitman Actual

Hi all, here's a quick guide on how I got my old MPEG2 PCI TV Tuner card to receive the four Irish MPEG4 terrestrial channels using MediaPortal. As far as I'm aware, not all current MPEG2 cards will be able to do this, and even if the one you have will, you still need a decent spec'd PC for the job (something to do with the extra processing power required for MPEG4, I think), so as the saying goes, YMMV. But this may save you the hassle/expense of shelling out for a dedicated MPEG4/H.264 card for the sake of four Irish channels when your old card will do the job. [Edit to add: Use this guide at your own risk... it worked for me, but if you screw up anything on your system, don't come crying to me.]

BTW, a lot of my ideas are sourced from this MediaPortal Guide by a NZ dude called cranz, and this guide on XMLTV, just to give credit where it's due.

Anyway, to start, the card I'm using is the Hauppauge HVR-1100 DVB-T/Analog/FM PCI Tuner card. My system is fairly high-end: Asus P6T Deluxe, Intel Core i7 920, 6GB DDR3 RAM, and Geforce GTX280. My OS is Vista Premium 64-bit, something which is actually quite important performance-wise (more on this later).

Downloads and Installation
First of all you need to download a couple of Codecs. For video, the only Codec I could get to work was the Cyberlink PDVD9 version, which can be installed on the system by installing the trial version of PDVD9. Even when the 30-day trial is up, the Codec will still be on the system. As far as I'm aware, PDVD8 also works, but I couldn't get an OEM version of PDVD7 to work. Likewise, I had no joy with the CoreAVC or FFDShow Codecs.

For the audio Codec, the Monogram AAC Decoder by RadScorpion seems to be the only one readily available for the task, although I'm sure there are others. Anyway, this one works.

Next you need to download the Birtles XMLTV GUI, which you'll use to update the MediaPortal EPG. Once you've downloaded the Codecs and the XMLTV GUI, you can go ahead and install them before installing MediaPortal.

MediaPortal itself can be found here; I used version 1.0, but I see that there is v1.0 RC4 pack available as well, so you might as well use that one. Note at this stage that installing MediaPortal can be a lengthy affair depending on what components are already installed on your system. For me, the installation took about an hour as the microsoft file SQLEXPR.EXE had to be downloaded at a paltry 20kbps, so just bear with it (and also follow any prompts carefully).

MediaPortal TV Server Configuration
1. When MediaPortal is installed, there will be three shortcuts on the Desktop: MediaPortal TV Server Configuration, MediaPortal Configuration, and the MediaPortal application itself. To start off, double-click the TV Server Configuration icon. The first time you run this, you will be met with a DataBase window. I don't have a capture, but from memory all you need to do is enter the password “MediaPortal” (case-sensitive) in the appropriate area of the window and click Test. You should get a successful message; just click OK, and then Save in the DB window to continue. That's the last time you need to work in that DB window. The MediaPortal TV Server Configuration should now start after a few seconds delay. Expand the TV Servers menu and click on your DVB-T card. In Country, select UK-All Regions, and then click Scan for channels. This will take a few minutes, but when finished the four Irish channels should be found.

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2. Next, expand TV Channels. This will show the four channels as shown below. Ensure to tick each check-box beside each channel.

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3. Next, expand Plugins, the last item in the main listing, and enable XmlTv.

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4. Click on XmlTv; this should display the Settings window as shown below. Take note of the directory path “C:\ProgramData\Team MediaPortal\MediaPortal\xmltv”. We need this later for the XMLTV GUI setup. Note that this is a Vista path; for XP a different path will be displayed. Once done here, click OK and close down MediaPortal TV Server.

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MediaPortal Configuration
5. Next, double-click the MediaPortal Configuration short-cut on the Desktop, and expand the Television menu. This shows the Codec's used by MediaPortal. In our case, the most important ones are the H.264 Video Decoder, which should point to the CyberLink H.264/AVC Decoder PDVD9, and the LATM AAC audio decoder, which should point to the MONOGRAM AAC Decoder. If the settings are wrong (e.g. pointing to FFDSHow, or whatever), set them to the correct Codecs. Another optional thing to do is to tick all the Allowed Zoom Modes to give you more display options later on when everything is working.

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6. Next, expand DirectShow Filter Control > Video Renderer Settings. This is where the performance enhancements of Vista come into play. The Enhanced Video Renderer option is basically part of the improved media processing capabilties of Vista, and also include DXVA2.0 which shifts a lot of the media processing to the graphics card, should the GPU support it. In saying that though, I was still getting ~30% utilisation on one of the CPU cores when running MediaPortal, so I can imagine that lesser systems might struggle. [As an aside, I've no idea what will happen if you try to enble this on an XP system, or if you even can, so it might be safer to use the older VMR9 option to start off.]

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7. Finally, while you're here, you might as well set up the Remote Control if your card has one bundled with it. Click on Remote, and select the appropriate controller (I just had to select the Hauppauge tab, tick Use Hauppauge Remote, and click Defaults). Once you're done here, click Ok to shut down MediaPortal Configuration.




At this point you probably want to go ahead and run MediaPortal itself from the Desktop and see if the you can view the channels as set up. But I'm going to move on to the EPG setup anyway.

EPG/XMLTV Set-up
8. Okay, first of all run the XMLTV GUI from the Desktop. If you're using Vista I strongly advise you to right-click the short-cut and select Run as administrator; this should prevent any annoying Vista UAC issues where the EPG XML file won't be written to correctly. The main GUI window is shown below.

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9. Select Tools>Settings, and the Global Settings>XML tab should load up. Now, under Save Listings To:, you need to enter the directory path noted earlier from step 4 of the TV Server Configuration above, and append the file name tvguide.xml to it (so the Vista path will read “C:\ProgramData\Team MediaPortal\MediaPortal\xmltv\tvguide.xml”). As noted before, if using XP the path will be different.

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10. Now, select the Grabber tab, and tick the UK_RT checkbox. This is the Radio Times EPG, and contains the listings for the four Irish terrestrial channels. Highlight/Select UK_RT, and the Channels button will appear.

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11. When you click the Channels button, the full listing of available channels appears. Scroll down to get the Irish channels as shown, and use the [>>] button to add them to Selected Channels box. This ensures that our XML file will only have the relevant channels. *Important Note* Take note of the exact spelling of any channels here e.g. check whether there is a space between RTE and 1, etc. This will be important when you get back to MediaPortal TV Server.

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12. Click OK twice to get back to the main XMLTV GUI window, and click Grab Listings. The log should update as shown, and the tvguide.xml file should now be in the folder set up in step 9 above.

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13. Next, you need to run MediaPortal TV Server again. For Vista, I again recommend right-clicking and running as administrator to bypass any UAC reading/writing issues. Once the TV Server Config opens, select the TV Channels menu. At this point you must set the Channel Names exactly as noted in step 11 above- select a channel, click Edit, and remove the spaces in RTE 1/RTE 2.

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14. Nearly there now... Again select Plugins>XmlTv, and click the Mappings tab as shown below. Click Load/Refresh, and the four channels should be shown mapped to approriate channels in the guide. If you're happy that the associations are correct, click Save.

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15. And finally, select the Settings tab, again under XmlTv, as was previously shown in step 4 above. If it's the first time to set up the EPG, the MediaPortal Import Status Report will be blank, otherwise it will show the previous update as in my case. In any case, click Import, and the MediaPortal EPG should be updated (This may take a while depending on your system).

Just a final note on EPG updating: the bulk of the steps above only need to be carried out once. In future, all that needs to be done is to run XMLTV GUI and select Grab Listings (step 12), then run the MediaPortal TV Server Configuration, go to the XmlTv plugin Settings and click Import. I'm also sure it should be easy to schedule the tasks automatically but I haven't bothered with that.

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So that's basically it. Close down the TV Server Config, and run the MediaPortal application. You should have a full TV guide (for two weeks from the EPG import, btw), and access to the Irish channels.





Just one point- I can't seem to get TV3 working properly (so I guess I'm a dirty stinking liar when I say I have all four channels), so I'm wondering if this is a general problem? I'd be very interested to know.

In any case, it's way, way, waaaay past Beer Time on a Saturday evening, so I'm outta here. Hopefully this will help someone anyway.

Apogee

Just to clarify, there are no MPEG2 DTT cards as such, as none of them has onboard MPEG2 decompression hardware. They only demodulate the DVB-T signal and all video decompression is done by the PC, regardless of whether it's MPEG2 or MPEG4. By contrast, some satellite cards, like the Skystar 1, have a onboard chip which handles MPEG2 decompression, thereby taking the load off of the CPU.

TV3 are no longer available on the DTT trial/test/rollout because they refuse to pay RTÉNL.

Nice guide btw!

gtg60

Hitman Actual wrote: »

Hi all, here's a quick guide

Quick?? I'm glad you didn't do the long version
Top class though, well worth a sticky IMHO

Hitman Actual wrote: »

Just one point- I can't seem to get TV3 working properly (so I guess I'm a dirty stinking liar when I say I have all four channels), so I'm wondering if this is a general problem? I'd be very interested to know.

TV3 has been replaced by a testcard for the last few days, can you get the testcard?

smadger

Nice guide.

I was using coreavc for a while. It works ok but tended to hang the machine occasionally (every few days).

Recently switched to the new version of divx codec. Include audio decoder too It's a lot more stable now.

eddiem74

Would be good to link to or sticky over in the HTPC & Media Centre forum, also.

Great Guide ¬!

Hitman Actual

Thanks for the feedback, lads.

Apogee wrote:

Just to clarify, there are no MPEG2 DTT cards as such, as none of them has onboard MPEG2 decompression hardware. They only demodulate the DVB-T signal and all video decompression is done by the PC, regardless of whether it's MPEG2 or MPEG4. By contrast, some satellite cards, like the Skystar 1, have a onboard chip which handles MPEG2 decompression, thereby taking the load off of the CPU.

Ah, that makes much more sense now. I was wondering why so-called MPEG2 cards were able to receive the new trial. Thanks for clarifying that. (although I'm actually an electronic engineer, and I should have known that. )

Apogee wrote:

TV3 are no longer available on the DTT trial/test/rollout because they refuse to pay RTÉNL.

gtg60 wrote:

TV3 has been replaced by a testcard for the last few days, can you get the testcard?

Lousy cheapskates! I'm able to get the testcard alright in TV Server Configuration Preview mode, but it hangs the main MediaPortal application.

smadger wrote:

I was using coreavc for a while. It works ok but tended to hang the machine occasionally (every few days).

Recently switched to the new version of divx codec. Include audio decoder too It's a lot more stable now.

What OS/TV card are you using? Any performance issues?

eddiem74 wrote:

Would be good to link to or sticky over in the HTPC & Media Centre forum, also.

Great Guide ¬!

Absolutely, I just wasn't sure if x-posting or posting in multiple forums was against the rules. I thought it might get more exposure in this forum.

jimmyjim11

hauppauge have new software out dtt works in WinTV v7 link

nice work hitman

think you still might need power dvd do

watty

Core AVC is good MPEg4 codec

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