RedButton MHEG-5 Engine support for the NZ freeview profile
We now have support for an additional Open Source MHEG-5 stack, the RedButton standalone MHEG-5 engine.
Again I’ve included 3 sample screen shots of the RedButton engine in action. The video window is empty as we are running the engine in a debug mode.
At the moment there are just a couple of minor issues -
- Fonts appear to be too large
- We don’t have correct DVB MHEG font “Tiresiasâ„¢” so sans is used.
- The sans font doesn’t have the correct Maori characters, we should be using FreeSans.
- Some of the boxes around OK and EPG are a little off, but this might relate to the font metric differences.
- We can’t always use left/right to move between the channels in the EPG. This can cause rb-browser to freeze.
- Time zone doesn’t appear to be used when starting the EPG, so times are off by 12 hours.
Overall the visual support and layout of the MHEG code is equivalent to the MythTV engine with a couple of minor differences
- MythTV Engine has better font layout and sizing.
- The RedButton engine displays the selection arrows correctly.
In order to use the RedButton engine you first need to get the latests SVN releases of the two tools
rb-browser
Now at present rb-download can only directly support DVB-T devices, so we need to manually tune to the DVB-S frequency for the main freeview channels. Hence the sequence of commands required is along the lines of
Now pressing the “e” key will activate the EPG. Note that you may need to modify the dvbtune command to suit your own LNB configuration.
Also remember that this will only work if you tune into one of the freeview transmissions. The Sky TV versions of TV One and TV 2 do not carry the MHEG data stream.
For more details on the work OpenMedia has been doing to support freeview with MythTV take a look at the myPVR freeview information page.