[OT] Germany 0 - Spain 1

New D+ card and NewCS

Yes, long time without entries in this blog, but my real life job is eating all my time, including the free time. Today I get a bunch of time to write this post.

This month spanish D+ is changing their SECA cards V9.0 (still secure) by a new one V10.0 (or A.0 ;) ) and I had received some emails saying that it works fine with PMCAM but NewCS (cardserver for DreamBox and others) fails to initialize the card. Well, NewCS works fine with this new card but you must disable SECAPPV feature in the configuration, this setting ONLY WORKS IN SECA1 cards, so cards with a version equal or bigger than 7.0 can not be set in AutoPPV mode and the only way to get a PPV event is extracting the card from DreamBox and put it in official received or PMCAM (PPV script active).

To change this setting in NewCS for DreamBox you can use Neveto software or manually using FTP. Edit the file "/var/tuxbox/config/newcs.xml" and look for an entry like this:

<Seca-PPV>Yes</Seca-PPV>

and change it by

<Seca-PPV>No</Seca-PPV>

now your NewCS should bootup correctly.

PS: To get PPV support in NewCS request to the authors of NewCS, to add PPV authorization instruction to the code. The implement should be quite easy, they only have to answer with a given instruction when ECM reports a specific status code, and this mode is fully compatible backwards for all SECA cards, SECA1, SECA2 and "SECA3", while the one used now (set the m80 register) only works in SECA1 (pre v7.0).

Good luck to everybody.

More and more birds in the sky

More satellites are crossing the sky to start serving new satellite services, this time there is a new satellite for North America the "Galaxy 17" armed it will stop and start broadcast at 17 degrees west. with 24 Ku band and 24 C band transponders,This is the expected foot prints for C and Ku band.

The other bird is the european "Astra 1L" which will broadcast from 19.2 east degrees, the main Astra broadcast point. The introduction of this satellite will force the move of Astra 2C to the 28.8 east degrees to add around 200 channels to this position. Astra 1L is carrying 29 Ku band and 2 Ka band transponders, I hope this new satellite bring us more High Definition contents and better signal in some weak points. This is the expected foot print:

Satellite news in the USA sky

An user of this page known as "thefez" has reported that the heavilly damaged Echostar 4 bird is working at least partially under tests, but at 77º west instead its original designed for position. Currently only two transponders are working (which is really impresive, see this satellite history below). As this satellite can suddenly fall over our heads it will not be (by now) included in the lists but you can use this INI file to test it, cut this information, paste it in your notepad and write it as 2830.ini



[SATTYPE]
1=2830
2=Echostar 4 - Test

[DVB]
0=2
1=12341,V,20000,56
2=12516,V,20000,34


It is broadcasting some Dish Networks channels, in SD of course, with some of them in spanish (at least 8 out of 22).

The Echostar 4 was launched in May 1998, after launch 2 solar panels does not unfold, so some transpoders went out of service. In July 1999 thermal and fuel problems drop some transponders out. In October 2000 more fails drop more transponders out and 26 of 44 are out of service. In June 2002 more problems and 38 transponder were out of service. In September 2004 the not unfolded solar array suddenly unfold :) and the satellite starts a orbital movement without a position to reach until this days.

---

In the other hand Anik F3 is now flying the USA sky to reach its position at 118.7 West to broadcast Telesat services, covering television, internet and some bussines mass data links. It will be ready to work some day in May and it carries 32 Ku band transponders, 24 for C band and 2 for Ka band (remember than in europe the Ku and Ka band are usually called Ku band in both cases). Dish networks will broadcast television channels from this platform.

vPlug is now public available again

Two weeks after the "drop" of vPlug project, Vahid has published a new release at DVBN again, so the project is not ended, but the author will not give any kind of support outside one forum which name and address is publically unknown (quite sure a persian one). This procedure will keep the author far away from the usual "non-working-understand-IDon'tWantToRead" threads, and as he can still read other forums, the bug reporting will be kept up to date.

Vahid's vPlug development dropped

Vahid, author of vPlug (MDAPI and DVBCore compliant plugin for DVB cards), had dropped its development (AKA Game Over) as notified this afternoon in the well known DVBN forum.

The reason or reasons for this project cancel has not been expressed by Vahid, but this kind of projects usually sets a lot of stress in developers, too many people reporting "bugs" (bugs in their systems, but usually not a bug at all) and requesting "new" features. Vahid always tried to keep people happy improving his/her software almost every week.

I'm quite sure something happends in his/her real life and the software project was one of the first removed things from his/her life.

Vahid, please be happy...

The TS 184 bytes hell

As most DVB cards software developers knows, SS1 (Technotrend Premium) cards (and all MDAPI compliant programs) give you TS packets of 184 bytes instead the 188 bytes of each TS packet, this means you receive only the payload, yes you have the most important thing, the data, but you miss the PUSI (Payload Unit Start Indicator) flag. Try to get plain tables from payload only data is quite complex and most people simply try to find some patterns in the data intented to parse, the problem is that this patterns work with one broadcaster and fail in others (little differences in how data is represented), so this is not a very good mode of parsing.

When I was working in PMCAM2 found the same problem to handle EMM data, so I wrote a piece of code that do not search for patterns, instead it checks some DVB semantics in order to find the stream sequence. The algorithm works in a 99.99% of table cases, with better results as less table IDs are being broadcasted in the same PID, this means, if the given PID only broadcasts 1 or 2 different table IDs the algorithm will be almost perfect, but if the PID gives you 255 (that's impossible) table IDs the algorithm will not work at all (unless all the tables carry a CRC32 check).

As many people have this problem, the source code of the algorithm and a DLL implementation (in order to be used in other programming languages different than Delphi) has been published. You can download it from my site, or from this direct link:

http://joshyfun.peque.org/special/TS184_100.zip with source code, compiled DLL and one example written in Delphi.