It’s 7pm as I write this and in the UK several channels have just started broadcasting. On a couple of those channels I have scheduled recordings. Normally what I would now be seeing is a message on my main home theatre pc saying words to the effect that Media Center was unable to start the schedule recording because no signal was detected on the selected channel but not tonight – tonight my recordings are happening without any messages.
I think previously that this message has been caused because all my recordings are set to start 3 minutes before the scheduled start time and these affected channels do not start broadcasting until exactly the on air time. It doesn’t seem to happen for every channel and I suspect that this may be down to guide data. On the channels that have always worked properly I get an entry on the guide saying Channel off Air but on the ones that do not I have No Data Available.
So what has changed to fix this. Simply I installed the new version of DVBLink. Hidden in the release notes for this new version is a one liner saying: Added generation of “Tuner busy” stream when there are no tuners available.
Now I am not sure if this is exactly what is meant by that entry but what seems to have happened is now whenever a channel is off air instead of getting a no signal detected in Media Center I get a signal but it is showing a message from DVBLink:-
Now because Media Center actually is seeing a signal it is happy to start the recording which is great. Of course it does mean I get a couple of minutes of this message recorded at the start but that is easy to skip.
One other side effect of this is it is easier to check whether you have DVBLink correctly configured on a Network Client. Whereas before if you had a No Signal Detected message it could mean either the channel was off air or the network link to theDVBLink server wasn’t set up properly, if you now see the above message you will no the link is established correctly.
One thing DVBLogic could probably improve is how the above stream looks on a widescreen stream and I am not sure if it will have any other adverse effects yet but at the moment I am certainly happy this feature was included.
UPDATE: I am trying to pin this down at the moment but I am currently experinecing a problem where on some TV programs DVBLink is not switching the channel back on at the on-air time and I am getting a recording full of the above message.
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