Posts by GaryB

    I just looked, BBC1 HD, BBC2 HD, BBC News, and ITV HD don't have a logo. 4 HD and 5 HD do. Though I'm sure I remember seeing the HD logo on BBC1 before.

    Don't forget that the HD channels don't always broadcast HD content. I just flicked between BBC1 HD and BBC1 SD and couldn't see much difference. I read somewhere that they vary the bandwidth for each channel, depending on what is being broadcast.
    There are only about 15 HD channels, around half of the channels on the DVB-T2 muxes are SD.

    That's interesting dcervi, maybe I'm being overly critical of the PI. Once I get a PSU for my Pi hub I'm going to try it with multiple tuners. I have 3 USB ones, and a dual tuner PCI card scattered between various machines, it would make sense to get several of them in one place.

    From my understanding, the tuner doesn't do a great deal with the data, it either writes the raw stream to disk, or passes it on (or both). So the limiting factor is likely to be disk I/O.
    I can confirm that the Pi3 can handle one tuner, but I'm not certain it would cope with more. All of the I/O (network and disk) is going through a single USB 2.0 channel, so it's limited to 480 Mbps. IMHO I/O performance is probably the biggest limitation of the Pi. In your position I'd look into tiny PCs, for example one of the newer Asus EeeBoxs.

    Yes, exactly.
    You can assign priorities to the tuners and it will try them in order, so if you have one SD and one HD, you make the SD one higher priority to keep the HD tuner free unless needed. You can also record multiple channels from the same mux at the same time from a single tuner. Obviously limited by getting it onto disk fast enough.


    It's not that Kodi doesn't like the second arrangement, it works, but you get all the channels twice, and you can't tell which one is from which box (unless you re-name or re-number them). If one was terrestrial and the other satellite, for example, it would make sense, but when it's all from the same transmitter it's a mess.

    You can have multiple tuners attached to the same box, Tvheadend will automatically decide which tuner to use and it's seamless within Kodi.

    What doesn't work very well is having tuners in two different boxes. Kodi will let you add two PVR front ends, but it doesn't merge the channels, they all get listed twice with the same name. It ends up a bit of a mess. I've been trying to find something that will let me merge backends, and present a single PVR to Kodi, haven't found anything yet.

    To tune Tvheadend into extra muxes:

    Open the web interface and sign in with an admin ID.

    Navigate to Configuration->DVB Inputs->Muxes

    Here you should see a list of the ones it's detected.

    One of the defaults (514MHz) will probably have "Fail" in the Scan detect column as this is wrong. Just ignore it or Edit and disable it, it'll just come back if you delete it.
    Use the link I posted earlier to see which one(s) are missing. Click Add, fill in the details, and then save.
    Sutton has 9 muxes, I can't remember which are missing, but you should end up with 10 listed (because of the erroneous one).

    I have 5 at DVB-T/QAM64, 1 at DVB-T/QPSK, 3 at DVB-T2/QAM256.

    It's possible that you won't pick up mux 9 (714MHz) as that's supposed to be local to Brum and at much lower power, it only carries 5 channels anyway. I'm less than 5 miles from the transmitter so they're all perfect reception for me.

    Once you've done that, go to the Network tab, select the network, then click Force Scan. Wait a few minutes and you should get the extra channels added.

    Hopefully that's enough info to get you going, post back if anything isn't clear.

    I use the Sutton Coldfield transmitter, and I found that the mux list is wrong. Full list here: Sutton Coldfield (Birmingham, England) Full Freeview transmitter | UK Free TV 📺

    I did a bit of digging and found that the muxes are hard-coded, so the simplest thing is to correct it manually. I'm getting 140 channels.

    Freesports is on Com8: DVB-T2, 586000000, 8MHz, QAM/256, 32K, 1/128, NONE, 2/3, NONE, 0.

    You might find this useful to see if you're using the best transmitter: Full service Freeview transmitters | UK Free TV 📺
    Sutton and The Wrekin appear to have a massive overlap, but Sutton is a much more powerful transmitter (200kW vs 20kW).

    With the old channel list, try: Settings->PVR & Live TV settings->General->Clear data

    It should re-import after you do that.

    Mine is the same model and lot numbers. The tuner was released in 2014 and cost a fair bit more than it does now. Maybe the low price is because they weren't selling and there's a lot of old stock to get rid of? Doesn't matter if it does the job.

    I mounted mine with the fan under the lid of the case with air blowing out (upwards), and drilled 8 holes that lined up with the fan. My reasoning was that's the way the air would be flowing when the fan isn't running due to convection currents. It probably doesn't really matter though, the main thing is just that air moves through the case.

    I should have explained why I said that. If your storage is on an SD card constantly updating a log file can shorten the life of the card, though I guess just the one file a few times a day won't have much impact. Mine is stored on a RAID array on a server so it isn't an issue for me.

    No, no resistance. I connected the fan to +5v and the collector, emitter to GND, GPIO pin to base. (I think that's right, got it the wrong way round when I first typed it.)

    You don't need to touch the Raspberry Tools addon, just install it. The Python code imports the GPIO library.
    You could do exactly what you've suggested there, that's the easy way. I put run-fan.py in /storage/local/bin/ (I have some other scripts in there), but anywhere in /storage that suits you.

    The advantage of systemd is that it will automatically restart the script if it fails for some reason. I've attached my .service file, that needs to go in /storage/.config/system.d run-fan.service.txt
    Enable it with "systemctl enable run-fan" and start it with "systemctl start run-fan".

    BTW, the .txt on the end of the files is just because this forum only allows uploading of certain types of files.


    My next project is to use multiple GPIO outputs so I can vary the speed, still haven't thought through exactly how yet.

    I used an S8050 transistor, I think a relay would draw too much current.

    Yes, I used the Raspberry Pi Tools addon for the GPIO library.
    I've added the Python script I use, feel free to use as-is, or just as a pointer. I run it using systemd, but you could just execute it at startup.
    run-fan.py.txt
    (I have my /storage on NFS, if you have it on an SD card you won't want the logging.)

    I've done what I think you're after, I found my Pi 3 was overheating when playing HD content. It switches the fan on when the temperature goes above 55C and then switches it off again when it drops below 45C. (Having it switch on and off at the same temperature will make it switch too quickly.)
    What part are you having trouble with, how to actually control the fan, or how to do it in LibreElec?