PRAISE INDEED - MORE RECORDINGS THAN DEVICES

[bigaluk]

I have a dual DVB-T tuner and a single Satellite tuner (all Hauppauge).

 

I wanted to check that (like other tools such as Powercinema, MCE, PVRX2, Nero, etc) I could record two terrestial channels at once.

 

Imagine my surprise when in fact I (accidentally) started FOUR terrestial recordings simultaneously. I let them all run for 10 minutes and viewed the recordings. It had indeed recorded four perfectly good different channels!

 

How can this be?

 

Just how far can this go?

 

Has anyone else found an upper limit?

 

 

WOW

 

[bigaluk]

Indeed the limit appears to be four channels. When one of these was a satellite channel, the system fell in an ugly heap when I tried to run a large application. However, 4 terrestial channels are managed with no problem.

 

What is odd though is that the RECORDING STATUS shows one tuner delivering three channels and the othe only one. Trying to add a fifth displays the "No hardware available" dialog. This begs the question: is DVBViewer really using one tuner for the first three channels and putting the last one on the second tuner? Could it be that an artificial limit is preventing me from recording SIX terrestial channels? Or is this dialog (enclosed JPEG) lying to me?

[jf2020]

This is not how it is working. In the analog world one frequency = one channel. With the digital broadcasting multiple channels are transmitted on the same frequency. The number depends on the bandwidth and how much of this bandwidth is allocated to each channel. It is just one steam of interleaved packets, each packet has an identifier so that the decoding software knows to which channel it belongs.

 

DVBViewer receives this stream and so is able to record all the channels transmitted. So the limit is the number of channels transmitted on a given frequency.

 

One thing that has not changed is that one tuner is able to tune only one frequency at a given time, so if the two channels that you want to record are on different frequency you need two tuners. If they are on the same you need only one. When you nedd more frequencies (tuners) than you have available DVBViewer reports no (more) hardware available

[bigaluk]

Thank you for such an excellent and clear explanation

 

Someone enlightened me similarly at work earlier today. And on another forum (GBPVR) someone even told me that there is a viewer that can display all the channels on one mux simultaneously (eight from one tuner). Whilst this starts to go beyond the useful in practical terms, it is very enlightening as to how the thing works.

 

I thought it went under the heading "not a lot of people know this, but...". Now it just seems I'm reading the wrong articles!

 

Any ideas on good sources of technical descriptions on satellites from dish to screen for the common man?

 

(I'm a software engineer, not a radio enthusiast, so I haven't been tracking how it all developed).

[ElecardFAN]

Yes, the (DVB) Viewer is also able to display multiple channels simultaneously. In order to save CPU power the multiple channels are rendered in some fancy mosaic window in front of the main screen. The coolest feature is the preview picture. There you can watch live tv simultaneously of two channels and you can easily switch the channel. I never saw such an intuitive solution in any other software.

Just enable PiP, the same channel is appearing in the resizeable mini window. If you want another channel just select it with the remote and send it into the PiP.

[Tjod]

If you are looking for Technical Information about the Transponderstream Transedit > Analyzer (Member Section) is a nice Tool.

And the Manual too http://www.DVBViewer.com/griga/TransEdit%20E/Content.html

[GingerMac]

 

I had an experiment along these lines a while ago, this is what I got, possibly if I'd have had the patience I could have selected more channels via the EPG, some channels are not live until the evening.

 

I have three tuners, one Nova TD Stick, and the twin Nova T 500 all by Hauppauge.

[Griga]

One of our testers managed to record 60 (!) radio channels simultaneously from Astra 19° East 12265 H with DVBViewer and a single DVB-S tuner (as separate recordings, of course, not as a transponder dump). It took DVBViewer one minute to get it going, since the scheduler doesn't start more than one recording per second.