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What's the point of this Forum?


Kuni

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No one even acknowledges requests

For two reasons:

 

1) DVBViewer.com has no marketing department. With other words, there are no employees following the "keep the customer satisfied" guideline by replying with some polite text module "Thank you very much for being interested in our product. We'll consider your suggestion", and then they forget about it...

 

2) It is not favourable when developers get involved in feature request discussions, as experience showed. The first step of implementing a new feature is designing. And designing means having doubts. A developer has to anticipate potential problems and drawbacks, and there are always more than you might imagine. Expressing them publicly makes users feel rejected. And often enough feature request are not feasible, because of technical reasons, because there is no time for it, because resources are limited... because of reasons that are not understandable for users, or that are difficult to explain. In this case it would be honest to simply say no... but it again makes users feel rejected.

 

Sometimes it's wise to just do nothing :king: however, you can be sure that feature requests are read!

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Thanks Griga.

 

It's just a bit frustrating when you expect to be heard, but no one listens...

 

Oh and are big things still happening with regards to development? I haven't seen a Beta for awhile...

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Oh and are big things still happening with regards to development?

Dunno if you would call them big... I've been very busy with implementing playback of m2ts files lately (Blue Ray file format, a feature request), which means, some more video and audio formats had to be handled, several parts of DVBViewer had to be redesigned.... ah yes, and with MKV subtitles, another feature request. Before that, it took me months to enable playback of LOAS/LATM packaged AAC-HE audio, desperately needed by people in Norway, New Zealand and some other countries, because DVB-T broadcasters had started to use this kind of modern audio format, but unfortunately there was no software decoder available for it... of course a feature request, because people want to hear something when watching TV, as you might understand.

 

Lars is currently busy with some strange Popcorn stuff and the recording service - dunno what it's about, but it must be something very inspiring, as it seems. People were asking for it. And Christian... well, he's keeping the whole business together in the background, and he's working at DVBViewer Light versions requested by hardware manufacturers, as far as I know.

 

Besides that, the usual business. Supporting new DVB devices. Finding work-arounds for Windows Vista drawbacks. Fixing bugs. Things like that... you see, the main problem is: Every user thinks his problem or feature request is the most important thing in the world. But while im looking after one of them, there are umpteen new requests coming in. Hopeless, but not serious... :king:

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Thanks Griga, the H.264 stuff will be a Godsend...

 

Equally excellent that DVBviewe Lite is being taken up by HW manufacturers!

 

Lars is grumpy, amusingly so.

 

But really MY suggestion IS the most important, honest, just ask me.. :king:

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Maybe not the right Spot, but i love to see that you work every day on new things to implement and that the progress of DVBViewer never stops.

 

This report of yours what you are right now doing for DVBViewer is really interesting, and i would love to see such post more often :)

 

Keep the good work going :)

 

Regards

 

Themis

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@Griga:

 

fixing bugs... really hope so. Would be great to have a feature freeze and actually go fix bugs, as I would call some parts of OSD broken ;) and dvbsource doesn't seem to be too reliable either if the input signal reception isn't perfect.

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Honestly i doubt that the core features have bugs - at least bugs which will be realized by users. I must admit i did not read your previous posts, but to be honest i doubt that you figured out bugs which are not caused by wrong settings, messed up decoders etc.

 

Peter

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Honestly i doubt that the core features have bugs - at least bugs which will be realized by users. I must admit i did not read your previous posts, but to be honest i doubt that you figured out bugs which are not caused by wrong settings, messed up decoders etc.

 

It's alright to have doubts. I can only test with hardware/drivers I have so won't claim that all the things are neccesarily dvbv bugs. At the same time I am positive that quite many are. Regarding OSD - I have posted plenty screen shots where it's not working properly. As for other core parts - the newest version of dvb source filter misbehaves on certain DVB-S2 HD streams - after a while it's audio and video pts starts displaying random + and - values and it breaks. The old issue (although I am not certain the source filter or dvbv is at fault) - there's a chance that after losing signal for a moment video will come back and keep playing as a freeze-frame slideshow pretty much forever.

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there are only very few bugs I can confirm so far, all of them are minor and you most likely encountered none of them.

 

Just because you don't understand something or do think it should be handled in your way makes it by far no bug.

 

In my exprience with this forum (and from work) the users who cry loudest bug are (after looking into it)

a. simply incompetent,

b. have totally wrecked their windows installation (ecause of a.) and

c. should generally be forbidden to work with technical equipement more complex than a flashlight.

But as I said that's only my personal expierence of several years...

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there are only very few bugs I can confirm so far, all of them are minor and you most likely encountered none of them.

 

Just because you don't understand something or do think it should be handled in your way makes it by far no bug.

 

In my exprience with this forum (and from work) the users who cry loudest bug are (after looking into it)

a. simply incompetent,

b. have totally wrecked their windows installation (ecause of a.) and

c. should generally be forbidden to work with technical equipement more complex than a flashlight.

But as I said that's only my personal expierence of several years...

 

It really takes a lot to get any response at all really.

 

a. There is no proper up to date documentation to speak of. With out it you can define any bug as a feature.

b. If the OS is messed up then the support.zip attachment should have shown that.

 

Sadly your response doesn't really help. Would been much more efficient actually replying in the bug reports, even tho admittedly not all are bugs per se.

 

Best regards,

V.

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Thanks for the response, read about and tried this before, didn't seem to help at the time. Reverting to 3.0.1 did the trick tho.

Well, that's strange. Messing up time stamps is no known issue of DVBViewer Filter 3.0.2 - and many people are using it. However, there was a similar problem some time ago, caused by CAMs that showed a tendency to deliver corrupted data packets.

 

Did you already check the original time stamps (tick the Orig. PTS radio button on the DVBSource property page) when it happened? That are the time stamps of the incoming stream, directly read from the headers (same applies to the PCR), so there is not much opportunity for the DVBViewer Filter to mess them up. If they are jumping wildly, most likely the input is already corrupted. The DVBViewer Filter version may have influence on it (some strange interdependency, dunno), since the stream handling had to be changed due to issues with QuadCore CPU's, but I can't imagine how and why.

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Well, that's strange. Messing up time stamps is no known issue of DVBViewer Filter 3.0.2 - and many people are using it. However, there was a similar problem some time ago, caused by CAMs that showed a tendency to deliver corrupted data packets.

 

Did you already check the original time stamps (tick the Orig. PTS radio button on the DVBSource property page) when it happened? That are the time stamps of the incoming stream, directly read from the headers (same applies to the PCR), so there is not much opportunity for the DVBViewer Filter to mess them up. If they are jumping wildly, most likely the input is already corrupted. The DVBViewer Filter version may have influence on it (some strange interdependency, dunno), since the stream handling had to be changed due to issues with QuadCore CPU's, but I can't imagine how and why.

 

Thanks again. Didn't think to check original time stamps, will do if I manage to catch this again.... Spent last hour+ or so testing again with 3.0.2, couldn't reproduce it anymore ;) Which means that it was very stream specific issue (as it was happening only on a few channels while other HD channels were working fine). Also I have re-added the timestamp checking option... Would it be worth trying to get .TS file for that part of the stream (from timeshift for example) ? If I understand correctly source filter is pretty much first in chain and thus is the first to receive packets from the driver?

Edited by Valts
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If I understand correctly source filter is pretty much first in chain and thus is the first to receive packets from the driver?

No. The first instance is a tuner or receiver component, working as DirectShow wrapper for the driver. It delivers data to a another component (a DirectShow filter integrated in DVBViewer), that sends the data to the DVBViewer PID filter, that distributes packets according to the Packet Identifier (PID) to different parts of DVBViewer - video and audio to the DVBViewer Filter (supplying the decoders) and the recorder, teletext packets to the teletext parser, EPG data to the EIT parser, Service Information packets to the auto-channel update instance, etc. - well, described roughly. There is much more going on behind the UI curtain than you might imagine.

 

Unfortunately one faulty component (DLL, DirectShow filter, plugin...) within the DVBViewer process can be enough to ratten everything, e.g. by overwriting parts of memory that it shouldn't access. Windows won't complain (by saying "stop! access violation!"), as long as the component doesn't try to access memory assigned to some other process. Errors caused by faulty pointers (pointing to the wrong memory address) are very hard to track down. Sometimes they occur, sometimes not, sometimes in this, sometimes in that way, depending on the current memory layout and other circumstances, hardly reproducible. It can be caused by any component within the DVBViewer process, and DVBViewer uses a lot, different ones in each setting...

 

The issue described by you seems to be such a "chaotic" error. If it was an ordinary DVBViewer bug, it would have already been pinpointed - the DVBViewer developers are also DVBViewer users, and they don't like to be bothered by bugs. No one does. Except... well, you won't believe how much time I've already spent with attempts to reproduce malfunctions reported by users. You try and try, but it won't occur. Finally you give up, feeling uncomfortable, because something may be wrong, but you don't get that error - and there is no chance to catch it unless you get it. An absurd game.

 

Next day you come to the DVBViewer forum, and what do you read? Posted by the user who reported the so-called bug: "I've uninstalled the codec pack / plugin / driver / whatever that I've downloaded lately, and now everything is ok." There you are...

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Thank you for the very detailed explanation. The interesting part is I had no problem reproducing it. As I struggled a to get it not to break down in first 0-10 mins of viewing. Since I haven't installed or uninstalled any codecs beside the filter itself it seems that one of them indeed misbehaved on a specific TS...

 

P.S. left it runnin overnight, but seems to be working properly.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Skip DVBViewer and move on to something with more developers, like Meedio, MediaPortal or one of the good Linux-based applications. They´re free and you will get all the help and support you could ask for.

 

I feel that most of the users that will benefit from DVBViewer are germans, since 3/4 of all the treads in this forum is in german. Fair enough, but I realized that I needed a wider support-base, than DVBViewer at this point can give me.

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I feel that most of the users that will benefit from DVBViewer are germans

Just nonsense. You should read a bit more... from this thread:

 

Before that, it took me months to enable playback of LOAS/LATM packaged AAC-HE audio, desperately needed by people in Norway, New Zealand and some other countries, because DVB-T broadcasters had started to use this kind of modern audio format, but unfortunately there was no software decoder available for it... of course a feature request, because people want to hear something when watching TV, as you might understand.

German broadcasters don't use AAC-HE. The last step was to publish the results of my work as open source and to help linux devs to get it working. And that's what I'm doing now:

 

http://www.DVBViewer.info/forum/index.php?showtopic=28356

 

AverMedia devices are rarely used in Germany. So what?

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@griga

don't bother. It's not really worth answering post only meant as a provation. Seems like a ten year old school girl not getting her way and try to get nasty... :biggrin:

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Skip DVBViewer and move on to something with more developers, like Meedio, MediaPortal or one of the good Linux-based applications. They´re free and you will get all the help and support you could ask for.

 

I feel that most of the users that will benefit from DVBViewer are germans, since 3/4 of all the treads in this forum is in german. Fair enough, but I realized that I needed a wider support-base, than DVBViewer at this point can give me.

 

 

hahah, all total excrement compared to DVBViewer. They're free because they're bug ridden, dead slow, and developed by anyone who thinks they can code.

 

Oh you'll get help, lots of help, which you'll need...

 

Although I started this thread, I have ONE quibble with the software, which given the incredible amount of things that it CAN do, pales into insignificance.

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  • 4 weeks later...
Skip DVBViewer and move on to something with more developers, like Meedio, MediaPortal or one of the good Linux-based applications. They´re free and you will get all the help and support you could ask for.

 

I feel that most of the users that will benefit from DVBViewer are germans, since 3/4 of all the treads in this forum is in german. Fair enough, but I realized that I needed a wider support-base, than DVBViewer at this point can give me.

 

I have to agree to Kuni. I have tried all of the mentioned software and DVBViewer is by far the best solution for me. It's free (at least if you value your time), stable and works for my environment perfectly (one server + three clients). It's light, works well on my hp thinclient. Has excellent server capabilities, live tv on wireless network, EPG recording from you mobile, etc. When you get it working, you don't have to touch anything.

So Griga, Lars and others, keep up the good work. There are people who really appreciate your work.

 

Kapa

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.

So Griga, Lars and others, keep up the good work. There are people who really appreciate your work.

 

Kapa

could not agree more,when you think of all the different cards/pc setup's its amazing how well this software works.I am new to watching/satellite tv on my pc so not sure how it would work out I bought a cheap new compro sat card for less than £25.I bought DVBViewer after reading reviews,just let vista install the cards bda drivers(never tried compro's software) and installed DVBViewer,I can now get all the fta channels(and BBC HD and ITV HD without any stuttering etc and only using 5-10% cpu)without any crashes problems what so ever.I very much doubt I would have had the same sucess with the compro software.The small price of the software compared with what you get is just great.

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