Wetek Play v1 (ATSC+EPG+FM) is it supported?

1st Official Post

    I purchased Wetek Play v1 on the basis of a claim to support the following in Linux:

    1. ATSC VSB
    2. OTA EPG
    3. analog FM radio

    After many months of trying, I cannot make features 2+3 work with any PVR client. Does anyone have all of these features working correctly on this hardware? If yes, which PVR add-on and which LibreELEC version was used? Any suggestions for other compatible hardware that has been tested successfully with all 3 of these features working together? Any luck with a different platform?*

    * JeOS implementations for Kodi - Official Kodi Wiki

    • Official Post

    The WebGrabPlus add-on (there is a thread for it in the forum here) was originally created to solve EPG for someone using ATSC, which is the forgotten end of the DVB world, it's nothing specific or unique to WeTek. Having never personally seen a WP1 I can't authoritatively state; but I'm pretty confident there is no FM tuner in those boxes so not sure how you'd get that to work (USB device maybe). I certainly never heard anyone asking questions about FM on them before.

    Quote from chewitt


    The WebGrabPlus add-on (there is a thread for it in the forum here) was originally created to solve EPG for someone using ATSC

    It was my understanding that WebGrabPlus gets EPG data from a web site, please correct if I'm wrong about this. That might be applicable to cable TV or IPTV channels. But OTA broadcast channels have the guide data embedded in the live stream already. Some of the PVR add-ons imply native support for OTA EPG but I never got it working. Still not clear if any of the PVR's were meant to support this natively.

    Quote


    I'm pretty confident there is no FM tuner in those boxes so not sure how you'd get that to work (USB device maybe). I certainly never heard anyone asking questions about FM on them before.

    Some TV tuner chips are software defined and not really limited to TV channel reception. I expected the Wetek OEM tuner module might be capable of that, since FM radio in this region falls inside the TV band. When "Radio" appeared in the Estuary main menu after a recent update, I thought this tuner feature had been auto-detected, and presumed there was some intent to support it.

    • Official Post

    DVB-T broadcasts in the UK contain a whole bunch of radio channels. If they are marked in the back-end as Radio the Kodi GUI can show them under the Radio tab. The ability to get EPG from OTA signals also varies around the world. No idea about ATSC.

    ATSC does have embedded OTA data, but support for it is basically non-existent in open source. Most of the people working on this stuff are in countries that use the DVB standards. It's to the point that most of us have just accepted getting yearly subscriptions from a place like schedulesdirect.com.

    Even in the commercial/closed source world, ATSC EPG support is not as good as it is for DVB. I've been testing software for over a month to correct an ATSC EPG issue for work, and only recently did we have success with this particular bug.

    Being in an ATSC country is like being a Mac user in a Windows world in the late 90s :/

    As for FM radio, I don't know if the Play ATSC tuner (same tuner for Play1, OE edition, and Play 2) has a chip that can get FM, but I'm fairly sure (70% sure) there is no support for tuning it to FM in the software drivers.

    Quote from Ned Scott


    Being in an ATSC country is like being a Mac user in a Windows world in the late 90s :/

    Yes I learned that the hard way. When I first purchased this product, the Wetek Android OS (Wetek Theater) did not support scanning for ATSC OTA channels at all, despite the fact that I purchased the tuner as part of the package. They also shipped the wrong power supply for ATSC countries. This was a huge disappointment since the integrated ATSC tuner was the only reason I bought that particular model. But they refused to pay return shipping costs, so I just kept the device and decided to never buy anything else from Wetek because you never know if you will actually get the features they advertise.

    About a year later, they fixed ATSC reception with an update, and now the OTA EPG is fixed too. So I know it works in Android, but this product does not have enough internal storage for both Android apps and Kodi apps. And Kodi is too slow under Android on this platform anyway. However, if Wetek OS and LibreELEC use the same tuner driver, then I expect that ATSC guide reception could be fixed in the PVR backend. I just need to figure out where to file a bug report (or where to track an existing bug report for this issue.) I would also like to know if anyone has one of the following dongles working in LibreELEC, either on-board, or through a separate tuner server, since they can receive any kind of broadcast on any band, regardless of the modulation standard, if you have an app to decode it.

    Buy RTL-SDR Dongles (RTL2832U)

    Quote from Ned Scott


    I've been testing software for over a month to correct an ATSC EPG issue for work, and only recently did we have success with this particular bug.

    Is this hardware/software combination anything that a home user could reasonably afford?

    Edited once, last by LE23 (January 13, 2017 at 1:39 AM).