Day 2 - Now it's the men's turn

I'll be spending the next few hours looking at the satellite tuner problem on the first PC as we move into the second day of events, this time with 8 men's football matches. I was a bit annoyed that the BBC Olympics HD channels have been "double heading" matches in their EPG/Now and Next slots, so there were several 5 hours 5 minutes slots yesterday with 2 matches in each slot. This is poor on two fronts - one is that you'll have to record both matches together as a single file and then video edit them later and two is that there was a big gap in the middle of the 2 matches where nothing was going on anyway! Never mind the two sets of video edits I'll be doing for that Columbia vs. North Korea farce last night...

It's an earlier start today, so broadcasts begin at 11.50am and it looks like three BBC Olympics HD channels (1-3 again) are in use today. Sadly, I'm not only any closer to finding out why sat tuner 4 on pc1 isn't working, but - unbelievably - sat tuner 4 on pc2 is exhibiting the same symptoms! For the moment, I have removed all transponders from tuner 4 on both PCs and am recording BBC One HD and BBC HD on terrestrial on both PCs, so there is no loss in recordings at all.

Yes, the double failure in an identical way made me suspect the latest drivers for the sat card, so I rolled them back a version and it made no difference. pc2's tuner 4 failure is slightly different though - there's a mix of "Constant FEC", "Bursty FEC" and one transponder even has an "Ok" status!

Anyway, enough of my woes, I did have some success with some coding in preparation for Saturday's first full day. At the moment, I've got recordings triggered by the phrases "Olympic", "Olympics Football" and "Olympics Fencing", which works when there's no sat tuner clashes on Wed-Fri, but Saturday uses 22 of the 24 channels and as I start adding more Olympics phrases, it's highly likely I won't be able double up everything on both PCs.

Hence, I'll be writing code to do the following:

• Get the satellite EPG for the 24 Olympics HD channels and trim it down to a simple data file per day with a line for each EPG slot (this has been done): channel_number|start_time|end_time|Olympic <sport name>
• Set the number of tuners to 2 * 3 for the moment. If I get the duff tuners working, this could rise to 2 * 4, so maybe allow that to be a parameter to the program (partially done).
• Have a hard-coded structure for the transponders (call them 1-6) and which channel numbers are on which transponder (4 per transponder) (done).
• Hard-code in the 26 sports strings (Olympic <sport name>) and assign a rating of 1-10 to each sport too. The higher the rating, the more you want to double up the sport (i.e. record on two PCs rather than one) (done).
• Allow for any pre-padding (2 mins) and post-padding (5 mins) in tvheadend, but add 5 seconds before and after in case two slots cushion up to each other after the padding (done).
• Given all of the above, display a list of sports strings that need to enabled for the day on pc1 and pc2 (ones not listed should be disabled). To calculate this will be tricky - basically, every time slot mentioned in the sports data file has to be recorded somewhere at least once and doubling up will score higher for my favoured sports (but it doesn't guarantee even sports I rated 10 will get double recordings if it's a busy day).

Oh, one tip I did learn when configuring the sat tuners in tvheadend today - you have to leave "Idle scanning" ticked on if you're using the Now and Next (EIT) info like I am. If it's ticked off, it won't get the "Next" info automatically and the idea of using the sports string to insert a scheduled recording automatically falls flat on its face.

Was it just me or were the Team GB men's football team just as rubbish as ever? Maybe it was the ludicrous two noises that accompanied every single replay of tonight's match that put them off! I'm sure I didn't hear that awful noise (especially obvious with my big sub-woofer) for the Team GB women's match yesterday. After 20 minutes and 20 replay noises, I was ready to throw a brick through my plasma! I was almost hoping for no fouls or attempts on goal just to avoid any replays. A quiet swish is all that's needed if you really must have an intro/outro sound effect for replays (do you really need any effects sound during a replay?), but not a loud harsh throbbing noise that's like having your head bashed with a dustbin lid. Get rid of it, BBC!

Day 2 recording size: 387GB (a new record) - grand total so far:  603GB

Day 1 - Women's football provides a gentle start

I'll be posting up each day until the closing ceremony, providing you with some "entertainment" as to my no doubt several recording woes. It's sad to see that the Radio Times XML feed that I was hoping to use for the 24 HD Olympics channels still hasn't got the channels listed today. It's not an issue because I've been setting up Automatic Recording rules in tvheadend - basically any BBC programme with "Olympics" in the programme title will be recorded - and all 24 HD channels have Now and Next info on them so the recording timers will be set automatically once the EIT info appears.

Yes, I have only tuned in channels that will actually air live Olympics and have split them between HD on satellite and SD on terrestrial. It should be noted that means I'll be recording BBC One HD and BBC HD on satellite and all the Freeview BBC SD channels (yes, including - but not limited to - BBC One, BBC Two and some BBC Radio channels) on terrestrial. All SD channels will be recorded twice - once on each PC - but I can only record 12 HD channels per PC now (because one sat tuner on each PC will be doing BBC One HD and BBC HD). This means I will be recording some sports once only when more than 12 BBC Olympics HD channels need to be simultaneously recorded.

This first day is handily a very light start: a maximum of three simultaneous BBC Olympics HD channels (numbered 1-3) to be recorded on each PC, plus BBC One HD, BBC HD, BBC One, BBC Three and BBC Interactive 301 get their Olympic debuts. Needless to say, the BBC have already messed up the schedule because BBC Three doesn't go 24 hours a day until Friday 27th, so BBC Three joins the Cameroon vs. Brazil women's football match at 7pm, when the kick-off appears to be 6.45pm! To compound this, BBC HD airs programmes from 4pm today and yet also joins that match at 7.00pm.

BBC HD apparently couldn't sacrifice a repeat of "Great British Railway Journeys" with the smug Michael Portillo to show Olympics football! And don't think you can use Freeview red button channels 301 or 302 to see the start of the match either - only 301 is used today and it's showing USA vs. France at the time. Got to wonder why 302 isn't used for the Cameroon vs. Brazil game really because it is indeed used for clashes in the men's football tomorrow. So it looks like Freeview viewers are already shafted on day 1 but don't worry, it may be even worse for Freeview archery fans on Friday's day 3 - I'll cover that closer to the time.

It does seem strange that with 5 full-time Olympics Freeview channels - BBC One (SD/HD), BBC HD, BBC Three and red button channels 301 (SD and HD!) and 302 - that a very light day 1 (only 6 women's football matches and overlaps only require 3 of the 5 channels) sees Freeview viewers miss out on Japan vs. Canada and Columbia vs. North Korea (including a flag "scandal" - see later) in their entirety and also the start of Cameroon vs. Brazil. That's an airing rate of about 60% for a day that they could have easily covered 100% with channels to spare. Not a good start if you like women's football and only have Freeview and it only gets worse as the Olympics progress. In other words, Freeview is not a good platform to watch or record as much Olympics as you can, but I've always said that ever since the 24 HD channels were announced.

I will be recording a few other things during the Olympics that are on the same BBC channels I've tuned in, but aren't actually live Olympics sport. I did record the Absolutely Fabulous Olympic-themed episode on Monday this week, but it got quite bad reviews so I haven't even watched it yet. I run an unofficial lottery site so I'll be recording all the lottery shows. Yes, I even bought a rare Euro Millions ticket for Friday's huge draws that are offering a record £205m in prizes to UK players. Needless to say, the BBC air the lottery show on BBC Two right in the middle of the opening ceremony, ho hum. Oh and I'll be recording the torch relay documentary (BBC One HD/BBC One 7.30pm tonight)  and Olympics countdown shows (Thursday and Friday on BBC One HD/BBC One) that are on this week.

Evening update 1:
Predictably, I had a major crisis a few hours before recording the first event. The fourth sat tuner on my first PC was refusing to co-operate, reporting poor signal quality (eventually falling to zero) and "constant FEC" status in tvheadend. As a temporary workaround, I switched BBC One HD and BBC HD recordings to terrestrial (pc2's tuners were all fine, so there was no real chance of not recording what I wanted).

I will investigate this tonight and tomorrow morning and hopefully work out exactly what's wrong. If it's a hardware fault, I can't really be without 4 tuners for an unknown number of days if I RMA the sat card, so I may have to struggle on with "only" 7 sat tuners instead of 8 until after the Olympics. And now you know why I bought two of everything - for exactly this sort of problem.

Evening update 2:
And you thought weather would be the first thing to disrupt the Games didn't you? Nope, it's the officials at Hampden Park stadium in Glasgow, who apparently put South Korean flags on the stadium screen next to player's names as they were showing pictures of the North Korean women football players! The North Koreans duly left the pitch in protest and didn't come back again for an hour. The officials apologised and I do think it was an overly exaggerated reaction to what appears to have been an honest mistake.

I've added an extra slot to catch the second half in my recordings, though the Now and Next info still says "This Is BBC Olympics 3 HD" for the 9.55pm slot, rather than "Olympic Football". Yes, I'll probably manually stop it recording once the channel returns to their timetable video when nothing's going on. It does go to show that you need to keep an constant eye on the BBC Sport website for Olympics screw-ups like this!

Evening update 3:
It occurred to me that if I hadn't checked the BBC Web site for Olympic news tonight, I'd have missed recording almost the entire second half of the Columbia vs. North Korea match thanks to the aforementioned one hour delay. What if this happens again e.g. rain delays or whatever? How do I get a recording of an event - preferably in HD - from elsewhere? I'll just say one word and leave you to Google it: get_iplayer. I've investigated as a fallback and it does work, albeit it tends to download in real-time of course.

As a final thought for the day, when BBC Three does go 24 hours on Friday, they ironically then fail to air a single second of anything Olympics - not even a preview or a documentary or anything. So that's no archery and no opening ceremony on the freshly minted full-time "BBC Olympics flagship" channel, which really does beg the question why they didn't wait another day to go to the full 24 hour schedule...

Day 1 recording total size: 216GB
(Each day I will be listing how much the "raw" - i.e. without transcoding, edits, deletion of duplicates - recording took in total across the two PCs)

2 days to go and some test channel issues

Great, we're now less than 2 days away from the first Olympics sports being broadcast and the 24 BBC Olympics HD test channels have me a bit worried:

• All the 24 test channels seem to be identical, which appears completely bonkers to me. Yep, not even the channel name is on the screen to identify you've tuned into the right channel (luckily, EIT info can be picked up to get the programme title, which is currently "This is BBC Olympics X HD" - where X=1-24 of course).
• There is a new shockingly huge "BBC SPORT | Olympic_Rings_Image" onscreen logo in the top right now on every one of the 24 channels, which I'm hoping is just for the test channels. If that is broadcast on all (or even some) of the 24 channels when there's live sport on, it will be a national disgrace IMHO. The logo text is neither thin nor particularly transparent, it's all in capitals and, yes, "BBC" is in reverse video to make matters worse. I'm massively cringeing looking at it right now and it will seriously devalue the Olympics coverage on the 24 channels if it is used.
• There are no speaking heads on any of the 24 channels, so you can't tell if the audio will be out of sync - that's 50% of their usefulness gone then.
• The rotating timetable currently shown is a right hotpotch really. It again highlights that an obvious thing they should have done is air the timetable for the next set of events for this particular channel only, which would have been a hugely useful feature. Maybe they'll implement it properly when the first events take place, but the current timetable is simply rubbish (yes, it's a test, but it should really be a good test, which this isn't).

It's nice to see that digiguide.tv (which I subscribed to recently) has got the Olympics EPG, but even their data looks a bit suspect (e.g. no actual mention of 27th July's archery session and the generic sessions they have on channels 1 and 2 don't even match the 09.00-15.00 time of when the archery takes place!).

Meanwhile, the Radio Times XML TV master feed (which I use with TVheadend to schedule recordings) is steadfastly ignoring the 24 Olympics channels, which means I may have to code something myself, but even that would probably mean producing a list of programmes to manually (sigh) set the timer recording for.

BBC publishes Olympics SD/HD satellite tuning info

Although several places on the BBC Web site claimed that the BBC Olympics SD and HD satellite tuning info would go on the logical page you expect - namely the one that's been around for years - it turns out that they gave up on that idea completely it seems.

Instead, the critical page for people like me with media centre goodies is actually a fresh one here, predictably found via a Google search and not via any link on the BBC site. It looks like they are naming them "BBC Olympics [1-24] [SD|HD]", which is at least consistent. However, everything else is "all over the place" - Eurobird 1, Astra 2A, Astra 2B and Astra 2D are all used and the frequencies are pretty scattered.

I will probably put a "-T1" to "-T6" transponder suffix on each of the 24 HD channels because although tvheadend is clever enough to "fill up" each satellite tuner that has channels on the same transponder, it's not clever enough to actually warn you in advance that you've exceeded the number of physical tuners!

For example, in my case, it could take as little as 5 simultaneous channels that are each on separate transponders for me to actually lose part or all of one of the recordings when using a quad tuner sat card. tvheadend should flag in advance all simultaneous recordings on that sat card that need to have one or more of them deleted because not enough tuners are available, but it sadly doesn't.

Streaming XBMC to phones/tablets

One nice thing about XBMC is that streaming to a new client is as easy as putting the back-end's (tvheadend) hostname, port, username and password in the client and away you go. On Android phones and tablets, however, there wasn't any official XBMC client, so I found TVHGuide instead. It's an apk (not in Google Play) that talks to tvheadend to get the channel list and presents a basic interface that passes on any stream to a suitable video player. It works fine for SD channels, but seems to fail with any HD channels, so I stopped using it.

However, the good news is that XBMC has now been ported to Android! It's apparently the full client - including add-ons - and I hope someone remembers to build it with the PVR add-ons! Quite why PVR facilities are still considered optional to the core XBMC code is completely beyond me, especially since every other client media centre software in the world seems to have them.

Of course, we're now in a race against time for the first beta apk's to appear before the Olympics start. Let's hope that they work on my HP TouchPad running CyanogenMod 9 because it will allow me to wander around the house with a tablet showing live Olympics (on a different channel to the plasmas). In the meantime, I'm playing with the official XBMC remote control app for Android, though it's missing the streaming element sadly.

BBC Olympics app - no tablet love?

I was quite excited to see this week's release of a new BBC Olympics app on the Android platform, though I  was extremely surprised to see that it was on smartphones only. Considering the app will indeed let users stream any of the 24 channels that I'll be recording, it's nothing short of astounding that Android tablets with their much larger screens can't have the same treatment. Bang goes watching it on my HP TouchPad with CyanogenMod 9 then :-(

One thing such a tablet-based app would have been good for would have been a 24-channel live video mosaic (e.g. 6 by 4 or 8 by 3) and then you just touch the appropriate channel rectangle to switch to fullscreen for that live channel (and maybe I do the same with my plasma TV setup by switching my live feed on there to match). You can't really do that sort of mosaic idea on a small mobile screen, so for the BBC not to release a tablet version is quite disappointing. Maybe they'll do a new version just before the Olympics start that does include tablets?

BTW, I've registered for the 30-day free trial of Eurosport Player on my 50" Panasonic Viera plasma smart TV today. Annoyingly, I had to put my debit card details in, despite it being a £0.00 transaction. This is done in the hope you'll forget to cancel at the end of the free trial (13th August - day after the closing ceremony), at which point they take £4.99 a month. By then, the Olympics and Tour De France will be done, so I'll cancel.

Up to 5 channels are available to pick from, but some obvious negative points are the decidedly non-HD picture quality, ad breaks, occasional "ERROR" screens on a black background that don't recover back to the normal picture automatically and the large ever-present red and white solid Eurosport logo (except during ad breaks!). An even bigger black mark to Eurosport, though, for using Silverlight to power the desktop version of their player - why not Flash or HTML 5 which have far more penetration on desktop browsers than Silverlight? Overall, the experience is only an average one - tolerable for free, but certainly not worth paying for. Plus I hate any TV channel that can't be downloaded/recorded for later viewing at a later time, especially one that's paid and with ads!

And, finally, there's a new "Post Olympics" page available where I explain what I'll be doing with the kit once the closing ceremony finishes on 12th August.

Scraping the BBC Olympics schedule

You'd have thought that a downloadable CSV of the Olympics schedule would be available somewhere, but apparently not. Luckily, the BBC site has a grid view version of the schedule that is fairly easy to scrape and parse - mind you, that link was very hard to find (it's nowhere to be seen on the BBC Olympics page - duh!).

A bit of lynx and bash scripting came up with the start and end times of each sport on each day, though remember that these are split into sub-events, which often overlap and hence will require multiple HD channels. This first attempt was solely to find out the earliest start time (08:00 - Modern Pentathlon) and end times (23:50 for Beach Volleyball and the "winner" Basketball at 00:00 midnight) that the sports are due to be broadcast, ignoring any potential overruns.

Surprisingly, the athletics don't start until at least 09:00 (twice) and the earliest sessions are often 10:00 or even later. The next enhancement of the script will be dig down and find out the start and end times of sub-events, because we want to find out how many sub-events will air simultaneously (i.e. track the maximum for each day) across all sports for, say, any 1-hour period in the day. This will give a simple set of daily figures for the maximum simultaneous recordings that will be needed. In theory, it should be 24 on at least a few days you'd expect, but I wonder if this really is the case!

What may happen is that the BBC will allocate a certain number of channels per sport (and these blocks of channels may occasionally change during the Olympics because some sports take place exclusively before or after others, so you may as well re-use some blocks in those cases). We'll know later this week once 14-day EPGs start to trickle in for the 24 HD channels. I subscribed to Digiguide.tv recently as well because it looks like they're getting the 24 HD channels in their listings.