TV Server and Azurewave

I bought a new dual tuner last week, the Azurewave DVB-T AD-TU700 USB2. The reason for this was two fold: Firstly my Pinnacle Dual USB had been losing the ITV/Ch4 multiplex occasionally and although I'm sure it's mainly to do with the quality of my aerial, it was getting annoying. Secondly, the Azurewave is a remarkable one third of the cost of a dual Nebula card and half the cost of the Pinnacle. (That is assuming that you can buy a Nebula now that they appear to have gone under). For just £30, I can have a dual DVB-T tuner which has had generally good reviews on the web.

When it arrived I switched out the Pinnacle and was pleased to see that the Azurewave only requires a single aerial connection rather than the Pinnacle's two. Unfortunately, no matter what I tried I couldn't get MediaCenter to recognise it. That was strange because it claims to be MCE compliant, and using the provided viewing software it worked ok. Similarly, later tests with other BDA compatible software also worked ok. I've put it down to something odd about my MCE installation, and as you'll see shortly it won't prove to be a problem.. It does also appear to be more sensitive than the Pinnacle as it solves the ITV/Ch4 issue.

TV Server

So, on to the reason why MCE doesn't matter any more: If you remember a post or two ago I was explaining how I'd managed to get over-the-network streaming of my live tv working using MediaPortal's TV Server. My aim is to move to that software full time, using it to record television and provide the streaming capability. It's important that it controls both as otherwise it can clash with MCE when they both try and use the tuners. (It's worth noting that MediaPortal has reached 1.0.0.0 RC 1 and is more stable than ever. It's also worth noting that you don't need to install MediaPortal to use TV Server on its own).

I installed the latest TV Server and set it scanning. It found all freeview channels immediately using the new card, and the scan process is a lot quicker than MCE which is a nice change.

As usual when I change tuners/recording systems (see previous posts!) I need a new plugin for my TV Guide application. Fortunately TV Server is written in .NET and uses SQL Server as its backend database. It only took a few minutes for me to find the table which creates recording requests and insert one myself.

The new plugin architecture of the TV Guide makes it incredibly easy to add new types of recording systems without changing any of the functionality of the TV Guide. 10 to 15 lines of code later, I had it all working.

My set up is now that I use TV Server and the Azurewave card for my primary recording, with the Nebula available for viewing or as a backup tuner for recording. TV Server supports recording multiple channels from a single multiplex too, which was not available with MCE. This means that there's rarely a need to use the Nebula. I've missed that functionality (Nebula had it) and it's great to have it back.

As time passes, I will retire the Nebula altogether however, and switch to watching TV entirely via the TV Server - across the network too if I so wish. When I do that, and based on the success of the Azurewave, I can see myself adding another of those cards to provide capacity for whole house TV with no clashing.

Transport Streams

The TV Server has the option to convert Transport Streams (.TS) into MPG as it records. I found this only to work on some multiplexes however. There was no problem with viewing all multiplexes, just with recording some of them.

That's a little strange, but I do know that there are big differences in quality (bitrate) between multiplexes and that might be the problem. I switched the TV Server to record in .TS format instead (pretty much what comes over the air) and it works fine on all multiplexes now. I simply use my existing post-processing tool to convert it into MPG using ProjectX . This is not much different from post-processing DVR-MS files created by MCE into MPG. It takes a matter of seconds.

I'll report back on how well TV Server performs over time. Of course reliability is everything, and one thing that MCE generally did very well, so I'm interested in how TV Server will hold out.