Day 14 - Channels 16-24 no longer used

It looks like the rest of the Olympics should be a "breeze" recording-wise because the BBC have now stopped broadcasting any live sport on channels 16-24 with this message in the EIT data on those 9 channels:

"Coverage of the London 2012 Olympic Games has now concluded on this BBC Olympics channel."

In case you're wondering why the BBC didn't just shut down those 9 channels completely, I suspect it was for several reasons:

• If 16-24 went completely blank (no signal), there would be mass panic that those 9 channels "weren't working" and that there was a transmission fault - cue loads of complaints to the BBC.
• The deal for the 24 channels probably always included the 9 that aren't transmitting live sport now for the same time period as the remaining active 15 channels, so it doesn't save money (though Sky are actually paying for the sat space, not the BBC!) if they were fully shut down.
• You get to transmit the timetable video/BBC Olympic theme in the same comforting/annoying manner that we've seen in the previous 3 weeks or so.

However, I still think the BBC should put up a caption on the 9 "inactive" channels with the same sort of text that the EIT message has to inform people that it's really not worth going above channel 15 any more now. Interestingly, channels 16-24 are now grouped as being an "alternative broadcast group", which tvheadend does mention in its dialogue box when you click one of those channels to record in them.

However, it doesn't handle the Now/Next program titles for channels within that group very well, because the first "Now" programme title it picks up from any channel is the group is used for all 9 channels' programme titles - whoops! So, for example, pc2's tvheadend is now showing "This is BBC Olympics 18 HD" for all channels 16-24...oh dear.

One thought has struck me - if the BBC replaced the timetable video with a static computer-generated caption like I mentioned (which maybe moved slightly over time to avoid any burn-ins on plasma), then wouldn't the bandwidth required to transmit those 9 channels fall drastically (it could be set to a low constant bitrate for example)? And then - you're twigging now - couldn't that released bandwidth be used to increase the bitrate of the remaining 15 HD channels on satellite? I wonder if any of the BBC engineers have thought about this? Perhaps a) it's extra work and b) it would give the final week of events a better picture quality then the first two, which would be inconsistent.

This reduction of more than a third of the active channels is reflected by another drop in recordings today - 15 channels, 20 sports and 38 slots totalling 120 hours and 59 minutes. Yes, just as we get the lightest recording load for a full day to date, I also moved from 6 to 7 available tuners - 3 on pc1 and 4 on pc2. The Now/Next system seems to be working on both PCs, so I won't touch the config again for that until after the Olympics.

Due to the way channels are allocated to transponders, although pc2 can record 16 simul channels now, its quad sat tuner can only record on 4 transponders of course, whereas all 6 transponders remain in use (1-6, 7-12, 15-13 is the grouping for the 15 channels). Hence, it makes very little difference to the "tuner juggling" I tend to have to do (which is why I wrote a program to tell me which channel to allocate to which PC and this is now skewed towards pc2 because of the extra tuner it now has). It does mean that doubling up recordings can happen more often though.

I'm also hoping that the revamped EPG stuff in the new tvheadend I've installed will stop that annoying multiple identical recording scheduling bug I've seen several times in the older version (in one case over 200 identical recordings crippled the system and I had to take emergency action).

An excellent 19th GB gold medal today from Alistair Brownlee in the men's triathlon today (and his brother Jonathan took bronze too), which has equalled the number of golds we got in Beijing with still 5-odd days of events to go. Sadly, our athletics is trailing off with a bunch of injuries and bad performances somewhat taking the edge off the "super" bit of last Saturday.

I do think dressage is a bizarre "sport" - force a horse into an unnatural set of choreographed moves to get a subjective score from judges. Who cares today, when we got our first ever dressage gold and this means the 20th gold for GB! It means we've officially beaten our Beijing medal table at 16:08 on 7th August 2012.

Laura Trott's cycling gold (21st for GB) in the omnium was very impressive indeed, what more can you say? Well, perhaps mention that we have a lead of 10 golds over South Korea, which means it's likely we'll be in 3rd place in the medal table at the end of the Olympics.

Sir Chris Hoy's 6th Olympic cycling gold - this time in the keirin and it was the 22nd gold for GB in these Olympics - means he has now more Olympic golds than any other Briton in history, beating Sir Steve Redgrave's 5 rowing golds. As the late David Coleman would have said: "remarkable".

A slightly disappointing high jump bronze for Robbie Grabbarz was more notable for pushing our medal total to 48, which is now one more than we won in Beijing. I believe this makes it our most successful Olympics in over a century in terms of total medals - a metric that no-one other than the USA cares about in the entire world.

The USA sorting the Olympic medal table in terms of total medals won is simply 100% incorrect, because that rates gold = silver = bronze, which is just ridiculous on every level. It's even a little insulting to gold and silver medal winners that their performance is rated no better than the bronze medal performance. It's wrong, USA, so fix your medal table sorting criteria right now :-)

I'm still not happy with the Now/Next (EIT) info on the latest tvheadend release I installed on pc1 and pc2. It seems to work initially and then intermittently fail, no matter what settings (e.g. with or without the Freesat EPG option, which has never worked anyway). So it was more scrambling to put some manual events in this evening and that means rolling back to the previous tvheadend on both PCs from now on because manually inputting recording slots of this sort of volume is infeasible really (plus dodgy Now/Next means potentially missing out on schedule changes too).

 Day 14 recording size: 783GB - grand total so far: 11957GB (11.7TB)

Day 13 - Not a Manic Monday

After all the athletics hoo-har at the weekend, it's almost like a day of rest today, with only 16 channels, 22 sports, 41 slots and the lowest recording hours for a full day by a long way: 132 hours and 59 minutes. It's also the first full day not to have any 7+ hour slots, for which we can be mightily grateful for. I got my Tesco grocery delivery at 11.30am - everything turned up with no subs, plus two bottles of white wine I hadn't even ordered! Some poor soul is going to be boozeless today, but the irony is that I don't drink alcohol at all, so my sister's going to benefit instead, assuming Tesco don't try to get them back from me :-)

I installed the latest tvheadend late last night on pc2 and it has new EPG options for various grabbers, including OpenTV (Sky) and Freesat. I enabled the Freesat and EIT grabbers, but sadly only the Now/Next info seemed to appear. A bug with not remembering the "remove unsafe chars from filename" option has at least been fixed though.

During my normal pre-recording tests, I tried out pc2's 4th tuner and it surprisingly seemed to work now, albeit with one of the transponders reporting a signal issue. To play it safe, I'm not planning to use it today, but I might try enabling it briefly at some point today to see if I can get all 6 transponders reporting an OK status. It makes me wonder if the older version of tvheadend (still running on pc1) had a tuning bug that's been fixed now, with the bug giving the appearance of a non-working tuner.

Is it just me or is the morning BBC Olympics coverage on BBC One HD just pants? Unless there's a sport with a Brit involved, they don't show any live sport for up to 2 hours, instead wallowing in the previous day's Brit efforts (replaying stuff, having any Brit medallists and pundits to gab on and on about it). Remember that Olympics coverage on the 24 channels has generally started at around 8.25am and yet it can be beyond 10.00am on some days before we actually see some live sport on BBC One HD. Remember that there's two evening highlights programmes (Olympics Tonight and Olympic Sportsday) that people can watch to catch up on what happened, so the next morning should be live sports from 8.30am onwards really.

Decided to try pc2 tuner 4 this afternoon for the first time in a while, because it was showing signs of life before recording started this morning and didn't seem to produce any errors when I assigned a recording channel to it later on. I've only assigned one transponder to pc2 tuner 4 for the moment as a precaution (yes, it's got an OK status).

It was a very tense team showjumping competition today with a jump-off that GB won to get their 17th gold medal of the Games and that restores the 6 gold lead that we had overnight against South Korea.

BBC terrestrial HD channels may have completely missed live coverage of Jason Kenny's cycling gold (our 18th gold)! They moved the velodrome action to BBC Two in SD to make way for the news on BBC One HD, had an obscure Japan vs. France women's football match on BBC Three/BBC HD and even the last chance for Freeview HD, red button 301 (in HD on 304) was a GB basketball group match!

I recorded it on BBC Olympics 5 HD, which appears to have been the only live HD coverage on the BBC - perhaps the biggest HD channel allocation mess-up of the Olympics so far? To add insult to injury, Kenny's medal ceremony was also only live in SD on terrestrial (BBC Two again) - this time a Brazil/Poland beach volleyball match on red button 301 (SD)/304 (HD) was considered a more important use of precious terrestrial HD Olympics coverage.

The Now/Next system collapsed on pc2 today just as about 10 recording slots were due to start in the space of 10 minutes (just before 19:00) on the two PCs. I suspect it's got to be something to do with the update of tvheadend, but it meant frantic manual creation of 6 or 7 manual slots on pc2 to complete the evening's recordings.

Luckily, I have a tuner allocation file created by a program for each day, so I could cross-check that all the sports were covered. I also added the remaining 5 transponders to pc2 tuner 4's configuration (meaning we're back to up to 16 simul channels on pc2) and put most of the remaining evening slots on pc2.

After a reboot of pc2 when recording finished for the evening, the Now/Next stuff seemed OK (it may have been options I had been fiddling with in the EPG config of tvheadend during the day). I've now turned off getting any Freesat EPG - that can wait until the Olympics finish - and also installed the latest tvheadend on pc1 as well - both seem to have working Now/Next at least.

I've replaced the first disk in pc1 (which had about 30GB left out of 2.8TB-ish) with a fresh empty one - I could have replaced both, but it's quick to do at any time really. Before you ask, pc1 tuner 4 still isn't working after the tvheadend upgrade :-(

Day 13 recording size: 807GB - grand total so far: 11174GB (10.9TB)

Day 12 - Second Sunday is thankfully quiet

After the excitement of Super Saturday, recordings ease to their lowest level for a full day so far, with 18 channels, 21 sports, 44 slots and 160 hours and 22 minutes of recordings. We can also celebrate the end of the tennis for two reasons: 2 gold or silver medals and no more multiple 8+ hour tennis slots in one day  (it was the only sport that always had 2 or more such slots on a daily basis).

Looking at the hard disk usage (roughly 550GB per PC per day), both PCs have about 1.1TB left on their second disks at the start of today. It's lucky that today has 10-15% less recording time than usual, so it may be that 600GB is free for Monday on both PCs and I'll probably swap out both 3TB drives on pc1 when Monday's recordings finish (pc2 has a third disk in so is "safe" on Monday/Tuesday regardless).

Interestingly, the BIOS on both PCs' Intel motherboards has SATA marked as hot swappable, meaning you can theoretically add or remove hard drives without turning the power off. It's something I've never attempted and I still think it must carry some power-related risk, so I really don't want to try tempting fate. Plus, I'm not sure if Linux would automatically recognise an inserted internal hard drive without requiring a reboot.

I was just looking at tvheadend's bug reporting pages and one bug/feature (Freesat EPG support) has finally been fixed some 21 months (!) after it was first reported. I'm now sorely tempted to throw it onto one of the PCs (keeping the old version around to switch back in of course) to see what they've done - obviously I'd have to wait until about 1.00am on Monday morning to do that :-) It's not clear what you do about Freesat's EPG vs. EIT though on the 24 sat channels though.

I'd probably put the new release on pc2 because that's exclusively recording sat channels. In an ideal world, we'd get the next week's schedules filled in with no duplicates or overlaps if we're lucky. I don't like Now/Next events popping up many times during the day as each of the 24 channels moves onto the next slot - I'd much rather see the next 24 (or 168!) hours planned in the recording section of tvheadend and only if the schedule changes during that day should Now/Next stuff override it.

I just downloaded the latest tvheadend source (it actually moved its Github URL since I last built it on 22nd July) and it built OK. It's not installed on pc2 yet of course, but there was quite a rework of the code in the last few weeks related to EPG grabbing. It appears to have moved to a modular system, presumably because of a lot of shared code between each grabber parser. Interesting to note that whilst everything I've read claimed the Freesat EPG was encrypted, it doesn't appear to be. It's just compressed as a huffman-encoded stream, which - despite the massive length of the source code containing the huffman constants - is actually a well-known format to uncompress. Gotta love open source, haven't you? :-)

Perhaps one of the worst live camerawork of the Olympics, particularly involving the chance of a GB gold medal, was the end of the men's star sailing today. GB needed to be 6th or better if the Swedes won and 4th or better if the Brazilians won. I thought they showed very poor tactics of messing with the Brazilians (e.g. sailing on the same side of the course as the Brazilians, despite the Swedes leading on the other side plus tacking in front of the Brazilians too often, losing them time). When the Swedes took an early lead, GB should have chased after them and not the Brazilians.

So we get to the end with GB in fifth (still pointlessly messing with the Brazilians!) and the Swedes win the race. New Zealand 2nd, Germany 3rd and then we seem to get poor camera direction and skip to GB coming in, presumably for gold. Nope, they dropped behind the Brazilians to finish 7th and yet we never really saw the 4th-6th boats (there was a tiny glimpse of the Norwegian boat who was presumably one of them). The commentators didn't seem to realise for quite a while that the Brits had slipped to 7th and didn't even mention who had slipped in to 4-6th for ages (in fact, the viewers didn't get to know the interlopers until the official finishing caption appeared).

I do wonder if radio comms are allowed to people back at shore to get position updates - I guess not because coaches could give them tactics advice. Maybe they could get a computerised "Radio Sailing" neutral comms which just automatically continuously reads out positions and distance gaps with a computerised voice? I've got to say that without the captions and 3D computerised position images, the live pictures give absolutely no clue at all as to who is leading a lot of the time! It's not a good sport to watch live in person, IMHO, and the fact you need binoculars all the time to watch it doesn't help either!

More bad camerawork followed with the Ben Ainslie gold medal-winning race and ironically, the same dubious tactics as the star race almost happened again! Ainslie kept messing with his supposed rival for gold whilst ignoring the Dutch sailor, who almost got into gold medal-winning 2nd position in the race. At the critical point in the downwind leg, we missed the melee that forced the Dutch sailor to back off and not take the 2nd place that would have given him gold! As I just said before, it's a rubbish TV sport even without the dodgy BBC camera direction. Still, it means our 15th gold and restores the 5 gold lead in the medal table we have on the South Koreans, so it's not all bad.

Just watched a superb Andy Murray gold-winning tennis match - very few players have ever blown Federer completely off the court, but the amazing 6-2 6-1 6-4 score doesn't lie. That's 16 golds for GB now and extends our lead to 6 golds over South Korea. After a depressing first 7 days of events without a gold, they're coming thick and fast. First GB Olympic gold medal in tennis in over a century.

I only watched the last 30 minutes of the following Murray/Robson mixed doubles, because I was fairly sure they wouldn't win. They were playing the #1 ranked pair, which included Azarenka, who is the world number one in singles. Robson double faulting twice in the champions tie-break basically handed the gold to the opposition, but it's another silver for the medal table at least.

 Day 12 recording size: 906GB - grand total so far: 10367GB (10.1TB)

Day 11 - Jessica's second day

21 channels, 23 sports and 55 slots totalling 188 hours and 5 minutes of recording mark the start of the second weekend of Olympics recording, though digiguide.tv's claim that channels 22-24 aren't used sounds a bit fishy to me. There's a few "new" sports like triathlon and trampolining today, plus maybe the first time we've seen 6 slots for a sport (table tennis) in one day.

I was slightly disappointed with Jessica Ennis's high jump (9cm short of her PB set 5 years ago) and shot put (39cm behind last year's PB) yesterday, which does highlight that she can be inconsistent in her events. It is a little strange that she can set two excellent PB's (110m hurdles and 200m) and yet be so far off her PB's in the other two. The hurdles run was particularly impressive though, setting a time of 12.54s that equalled the Olympic gold medal run in the 110m hurdles final four years ago!

I guess we can't complain too much because even with the uneven performance, this was actually a PB for her first day total, making her on target to beat her GB record of 6,906 points that was set only a few months ago. She'll need a 6.40-6.50m long jump, a 47m javelin (probably needs a PB in this because it's her weakest event) and a 2:07 or 2:08 800m today to win gold and break the British record.

Whether it's a known issue with the quad sat tuner card I have, but pc2's tuner 4 is now showing the same "constant FEC" or "bursting FEC" status in tvheadend that pc1's tuner 4 has had since the Olympics started. As a precaution, I've removed the transponder info from pc2 tuner 4, but this means I can't double up anything any more of course because I'm down to 6 tuners now. Luckily, I was actually doubling up the only channel on that tuner (11 - showing water polo this morning) when the error occurred, so I just stopped the pc2 recording and let's hope I get no more faults, because I will then start losing video big time. Sadly, pc1 tuner 4 is still non-functioning (just checked it now) and I don't have much hope that it will come back before the end of the Olympics.

Stunningly, our 9th gold medal (in the rowing men's four) has put us third in the medal table, which is the highest position we could ever achieve! And we're onto the 10th gold now with the women's lightweight double sculls pulling off an impressive win (though the BBC News home page claimed we have 9 golds for a good 15-20 mins after the 10th was won!). The big question now is: can we keep third place in the medal table to the end of the Olympics? I suspect it could be tough unless we get some surprise golds from somewhere.

Jessica jumped 6.48m in the long jump this morning, which is only 3cm short of her PB and near the top of end of my predicted 6.40-6.50m jump range I said she needed for gold. It's now looking very good for gold for Jessica tonight, provided she can get close to or exceed 47m in the javelin. One minor trivia point about Austra Skujte whom Jessica is leading by 258 points - Austra is actually the decathlon world record holder. She's managed to hold onto that world record for 7 years because I bet that very few women's decathlons actually take place.

Not clever to interview people at the rowing regatta right by the PA speaker - that's happened at least twice this morning and you'd think they'd have learned not to try to out-shout David Bowie's "Heroes" by now :-)

An excellent new PB of 47.49m in the javelin for Jessica has sealed both Olympic gold and the British record (which she holds already anyway). There's now some silly talk on the BBC of exceeding 7,000 points, but Jessica would have to beat her 800m PB by a full 2 seconds, which isn't going to happen. Showing how weak Jessica's javelin is, she only threw the 10th longest distance and her lead to Skujte has actually been cut to 188 points.

Well done to the women's cycling team pursuit who picked up our 11th gold of the games, now meaning that we have a 2 gold lead over South Korea and remain in 3rd place in the medal table. The cycling, like 4 years ago, has been very impressive, with a load of world records and some dominant performances.

3 gold medals for Team GB in one night in the athletics stadium is nothing short of astonishing - I wasn't sure we'd get more than a couple of athletics golds in the entire Olympics. Jessica's run in the 800m was almost as good as her 110m hurdles yesterday. She won her heat, but surprisingly didn't set an 800m PB on her way to a new British and Commonwealth record total of 6,955 points and the gold medal of course.

I did pity Greg Rutherford in the long jump though - his was the big surprise gold of the night, but everyone was cheering Mo Farah to his historic 10,000m gold at the time so it got a little lost in the Mo-fever in the stadium. It was the first time  GB had won three Olympic golds in a single athletics session, but seeing GB - predictably! - lose on football penalties against our medal table rivals South Korea left a little bit of a sour taste to the evening's end. Still, GB's 14th gold has stretched our lead to 5 ahead of South Korea, which should keep third place safe for at least a few days.

A lot of late-night terrestrial overruns by some 25 minutes because of the athletics (yes, including the lottery show), but I see the BBC threw in a 2 hours 59 mins Now/Next slot on BBC One HD at 22:25 to cover all their Olympic overruns in one giant block, so I'll leave that running until Olympic Sportsday ends.

 Day 11 recording size: 1011GB - grand total so far: 9461GB (9.2TB)

Day 10 - Athletics begin...c'mon Jessica!

The athletics are probably my favourite sport in the Olympics, so today is a big day, with my viewing loyalties a bit split between Jessica Ennis and Rebecca Adlington tonight. It's another sub-200 hour full day though, with 24 channels, 24 sports, 55 slots and 193 hours and 43 minutes of recording time. Yes, you read that right - with up to 4 athletics events happening simultaneously today, the BBC doesn't allocate more than 2 channels (in fact, only 1 for most of the time).

digiguide.tv doesn't list an evening basketball session tonight (there is one according to the BBC Website - update: Now/Next slot claims a 00:30 finish), but basketball and volleyball (23:40) are the only events to finish after 23:00 tonight. Another digiguide.tv omission is the 12:00 tennis slot on channel 24 (I've complained on their forums that virtually nothing is on channel 24 in their listings through to 10th August, but fresh Now/Next slots keep turning up on it!).

Is it just me or is all the best terrestrial Olympics coverage on BBC HD? We get HD, a reasonably unobtrusive logo (unlike BBC Three's equivalent SD purple logo), not much inane studio chat and - IMHO of course - a better selection of sports than the main BBC One HD channel, which to me adds up to a superior experience. They just covered the mammoth Federer vs. Del Potro tennis match, although the commentator made the classic maths error of saying "Federer is serving for the Xth time to stay in the match" when it was actually the X+1st time...whoops!

The first time Federer was serving to stay in the match was at 4-5 in the third set, so you don't just subtract 4 from Federer's current third set score before he serves, but actually 3. So at, say, 15-16 with Federer to serve, that would be the 12th time he would be serving to stay in the match. The commentator kept saying it incorrectly just virtually every single time (about a dozen in all) which  drove me mad!

Another annoying thing about the tennis is that they allow babies/very young kids into the crowd who inevitably start bawling at the worst possible times in a close match that needs quiet just before serving and during the rallies too. This has happened several times in the Federer match and in most matches I've watched so far - the Wimbledon tournament doesn't allow babies or very young kids in, so why should the same tennis venue allow them for the Olympics? A mistake from the organisers, I reckon - there should be a minimum age limit of 5 and even then, if a kid persistently cries, they should be warned initially and then thrown out if it recurs (with no refunds!).

And, yes, I waited until the match finished to split the Federer recording and it looks like I'll have to add another tennis slot to cover a late night session (it overran until about 20:45) with Murray, who impressively won his semi tonight and is guaranteed a silver medal.

Just put in a big grocery order to Tesco online for delivery on Monday morning (yes, in 2-hour slot that only has one or two new recordings to deal with). It's mainly junk food to keep me going for the final week or so. Normally, I'd go to my local Tesco, but I'm not leaving the house during the Olympics, so I'd always planned for an online grocery shop. Delivery is £3.50 in case you're curious, which I think is reasonable for such a large purchase.

Just an off-topic lottery note here - next Tuesday's Euro Millions will capped at 190m Euros (about £150m) and if Tuesday's jackpot isn't won, next Friday's draw will be similarly capped. If no-one wins next Friday's draw either, all the jackpot prize money (which will be 190m Euros plus whatever was capped in the 2 draws) will be added to the Friday draw's 5+1 prize pool (i.e. it would be a "roll-down" draw). Yes, the rules are completely confusing and there shouldn't be any cap anyway. Oh, don't forget that lottery money was used to fund Olympic athletes in a major way, so there is a tenuous connection after all :-)

 Day 10 recording size: 1133GB - grand total so far: 8450GB (8.3TB)

Day 9 - Quietest full day so far

There's a definite drop in events today with 21 channels, 21 sports, 46 slots and the first full day under 200 hours of recording (173 hours and 28 minutes). We still manage to get another 5 sports starting simultaneously at 08:55 though.

It struck me today that it's possible the BBC Olympic theme tune for these Olympics has now aired more times than any other song in the history of the BBC (and maybe the history of the world?)! Think about it - 48 channels on sat/cable all looping the song and it started playing maybe a week before the Olympics (not sure exactly when) and whenever there's no live video on the 48 channels (SD+HD, which must be at least 12 hours a day per channel). The previous record holder for UK TV was probably something like the Coronation Street theme tune I bet.

Some basic calculations for the tune coming up. Assuming it is 3 minutes long (at some point I'll time it, but I'm so sick of it at the moment, I really can't :-) ) and it aired for 7 full days before the first events and for 12 hours a day (that's conservative because there were probably less than 10 hours per day of live sport per channel) from 25th July to 12th August (19 days). So that's (24 * 7 + 12 * 19) * 48 = 19,008 hours! If it is 3 mins long, that's a staggering 380,160 times it will have been played. The mind truly boggles and let's hope the BBC negotiated a fixed fee for it, because the performing rights alone could pay for, well, an hour of Graham Norton's salary.

I thought I'd actually try out the BBC's Flash-based Olympics video player today to see what the quality was like and also what events you could watch after they've finished their live stream. After all, the BBC Sport site heavily plugs them as "catch up" video and I suspect that's how the majority of people will watch them. After all, there's several HD channels (dozens if you have sat or cable) to watch or record the events live, without needing a Net connection too.

The first thing to note is that you can't seem to get the entire video coverage that is on the 24 channels I've been recording (i.e. an exact copy of every minute that they transmitted) once the live stream for an event has finished. All the events seem to have been edited right down to the actual live sports action and nothing more. One advantage with that, at least, is that each sub-event is properly split, unlike the sat coverage which is just hours of blocks of video (often doing nothing but showing a live picture of the stadium or showing timetable video - football being the worst offender here with its stupid 2-match 5-hour slots with nothing happening in the middle for an hour).

Also, Gary Lineker's endlessly repeated plugs for the video player claim that you can click on fullscreen and see the sport in HD. Well, that's a lie on two fronts I suspect - the fullscreen option still leaves huge black borders down the left, right and particularly the bottom (though not at the top for some reason) and also the quality seems to fall well short of HD to me (no idea if it was a bandwidth issue, but I typically get 8Mbit/sec and wasn't doing anything else on my connection at the time) and wasn't even SD quality I reckon. It all goes to show that recording the original HD transmissions was indeed the way to go.

I also had a good look around on iPlayer to see what they were offering, but they seem to have just the terrestrial channels on there - it's as if the 24 sat channels never existed. Considering iPlayer is available on loads of platforms, it's a shame that the full set of Olympics video coverage isn't on there.

transmedia on pc1 and pc2 is now using the second 3TB disk on both machines. pc1 only has two 3TB drives, so in 5-6 days, I will swap out at least one of the drives in pc1. It might be two drives swapped out then, depending on calculations as to how many swaps will be needed on both PCs. pc2 may need one more drive than pc1, but it's not clear yet if that's the case.

The Now/Next (EIT) system has been working fairly well so far with automatically setting recordings on the various channels - though I have to put all the sports strings that are in actual live sport programme titles into tvheadend's Automatic Recording otherwise I'd have recorded loads of "This is BBC Olympics X HD" timetable videos :-) Predictably, it's not been perfect so far and here's some of the weird things that have been happening with it to date:

• Fresh Now/Next info (I have "idle scanning" set in tvheadend to pick the EIT info up regularly) just seems to occasionally appear from nowhere and add to a currently recording slot! Although the Web interface of tvheadend doesn't allow you to record the same programme to two separate files simultaneously, if the new info does add to the current slot, it does end up with you recording the same channel twice from that point onwards. I just leave both running unless there's SSD space issues, because often the new info may extend the current slot's running time.
• I have EIT enabled on terrestrial channels too and a few days ago, it set about 12 identical recording slots for the red button channel 301! I just deleted 11 of them and that was fine.
• Today, I had a tennis slot at 12:00 being continuously updated with seemingly exactly the same EIT info, but for about 20-30 minutes, the tvheadend Web interface kept refreshing every few seconds and a new log line appeared in the logging window for each of the EIT "updates". It eventually stopped and there was indeed only one event scheduled for the tennis after all that!

I suspect that Now/Next with some sort of string-matching automatic recording facility is the only way to actually schedule the 24 channels without doing a huge amount of manual programming of the EPG. It's even worse if you have two "recorders" (PCs + tuner cards) because that's double the effort too. Of course, I don't think any well-known brand of sat hard disk recorder can do more than 2 or 3 channels out of the box, though I believe some firmware hacks can raise that limit. Plus twin tuners limit you to a max of 8 out of the 24 channels of course, so you'd have to buy 3 of those recorders and hack the firmware, at which point you're better off with a PC media centre IMHO.

You also wonder if the BBC has dedicated anyone to actually look at all 24 video streams in, say, a 6x4 mosaic and have something flag "5 minutes or less to end of slot" on a particular video stream. If the live sport continues with less than 5 mins left of the slot, that video should be touchable and an option to extend the slot by, say, 15, 30, 45 or 60 minutes should appear. When one of those extensions is selected, the Now/Next info changes and introduces a new slot starting at the same time as the original one would have ended and also shortens the next originally intended slot (though the BBC usually space out the slots with an empty one inbetween, hopefully exactly for this purpose!). That would allow anyone like me recording as much as they can to be able to get all the overruns too.

Typical that as soon as I start talking about Now/Next info, I have the first real crisis involving it! Basically, tvheadend went berserk and put in hundreds of identical events for the evening hockey today on channel 13 on pc1, which is a terrible, terrible bug in the software. I started to delete them, but couldn't trash them fast enough (ludicrously, no bulk deletion of scheduled recordings is possible in the tvheadend Web interface) before they actually started.

You can guess what happened next - tvheadend tried to start hundreds of simul recordings, the load average went through the roof and the Web interface and all recording on pc1 ground to a halt. I found the solution fairly quickly - I moved the channel 13 config file out of the way and restarted tvheadend (at least it's good at resuming recordings in a fresh file when you do that). I then trashed the multiple recordings with endless mouse clicks and fired back up channel 13 again to record the hockey. So I lost a few minutes of about 5 events, maybe 15 minutes of the hockey and, no, before you ask, pc2's tuner/transponders were busy and couldn't record channel 13 as a fallback. Not best pleased with the tvheadend author - time for a bug report methinks!

Great to see three golds being won by Team GB today in cycling, shooting and canoeing, though sad to see Pendleton and Varnish get disqualified in the cycling. Did we actually ever get a decent replay of the early overtake? The one I saw already had Pendleton's wheel overlapping Varnish's when it started.

Just had a peek at tomorrow's athletics schedule on the BBC Sport Website vs. the athletics slots they've allocated tomorrow and I'm quite disappointed. Just like the gymnastics, the BBC aren't allocating enough channels to the athletics. We have 3 athletics sub-events overlapping tomorrow morning/lunchtime and up to 4 overlapping tomorrow evening. So the BBC decides to allocate just one channel to the first session and only two (in fact only one for the first 90 minutes!) in the evening. What's worse is that channel 24 is completely unused all Friday and channels 22 and 23 are free on Friday evening too...grrr!

 Day 9 recording size: 1097GB - grand total so far: 7317GB (7.1TB)

Day 8 - Oh come on, someone win a gold...and they finally did!

We're into the second week of events and although less gold medals are obviously awarded in the first week since most events are in heat rounds rather than finals, it's still quite disappointing that the Olympics host has failed to win a gold medal. There's chances of a few today though, but so far the British Olympians have disappointed - many not getting into finals when they were expected to.

Today's recording stats are all 24 channels, 23 sports and 54 slots totalling 211 hours and 2 minutes recording time - this includes 3 minutes pre-padding and 5 minutes post-padding for every time slot. pc2 has generally been recording more than pc1 (up to 16 HD channels simultaneously in fact) and its first 3TB disk is now 92% full. My transmedia program should therefore start using the second 3TB disk in pc2 by lunchtime.

Just been checking digiguide.tv's listings for the 24 channels through to the 10th August (yes, 2 days short of the end) and the 8th August is apparently only using 12 of the 24 channels! A "half-day" of sport next Wednesday then? Or a listings error? Who knows.

I'm going to experiment with a tuner allocation program I wrote the other day. It basically suggests which PC/tuner should be allocated for the next event to avoid over-allocating tuners like I mentioned in yesterday's post. If either PC is already recording the same transponder it is used again for the new event, otherwise it's the PC with most free tuners available. If that ties, then it's the PC with the most tuners overall, which is currently pc2's 4 compared to pc1's 3.

I have no doubling-up code in it yet, but that gets trickier because there will times where you'll have to cancel one or more of the double-ups to free up a tuner for a new slot that needs a fresh transponder.

Hey, did we just have five events start simultaneously at 08:55 this morning? Two badminton and one each of beach volleyball, archery and fencing. That may be the first time it's happened because I can only remember four simultaneous starts prior to today. That fencing slot has also joined the bad boys hall of fame of overly long slots at a painful 7 hours and 15 mins and will be split today. The only other scheduling note of interest is that basketball sets a new latest-ending record by finishing at 00:30 tomorrow morning (update: strike that, it  looks like basketball finished well before midnight and left timetable video up when it was done in the slot).

Just been watching the swimming heats this morning on BBC Olympics 1 HD and I've aways liked the two commentators, but they're making a classic error - probably the production team not prompting them - of stopping commentary on the sat channel whilst Sharron Davies interviews whoever just finished the previous heat (presumably for one of the terrestrial channels, I dunno). Problem is that the sat channel continued with the live action and never showed the interview at all. We even had the silly point where Michael Phelps starts his heat to total commentary silence on the sat channel for a length and a half of the pool!

Needless to say, I missed the first GB gold in this Olympics whilst watching the swimming - Glover and Stanning, who amazingly (considering our good gold medal record in men's rowing) are our first ever women gold medallists in rowing, albeit the sport was only introduced to the Olympics in 1976.

A tennis session seems to have appeared out of nowhere on channel 24 - it was supposed to be badminton until 15:40, but the Now/Next has kicked in tennis between 14:45 and 20:00 today on the same channel. I've left both recording for the moment and I'm sure this has happened once or twice before as well.

No golds for 7 days and then we get 2 in one day. Watching Bradley Wiggins win the cycling road time trial was great, only soured as usual by Hugh Porter's utterly useless commentary. Why that guy still has a BBC job is anyone's guess - misidentifying the riders regularly, stating who was leading time checks without actually looking at a computer screen first (and therefore getting it wrong and having to correct himself when actually looking at the screen afterwards) and even calling the event the team time trial at one point! I believe he was equally bad in the men's road race (which I didn't watch because I wasn't convinced we'd get a medal despite the pre-race hype). Liggett and Sherwen on ITV4's TDF coverage were just so much better.

I decided to take the one and only fsync() call out of my transmedia program today. It's a C library call used usually just before you close an open file you're writing  - to HDD in this case - to physically commit the data to HDD. It does take many seconds - proportional to the file size - to execute fsync() because the writes are buffered in RAM and I have 12GB/16GB in the PCs. However, Linux is very good at disk buffering and flushing smoothly at regular intervals, so I've taken the fsync() out.

Although the file written to is only on HDD, I'm not convinced that the Linux kernel doesn't cause it to affect other filing systems. For example, it's very strange that the equivalent command line program, "sync", doesn't let you specify a file, directory, mount point or device at all! It does mean that a power failure may lose video, but I have a UPS on both PCs, so that's quite unlikely to happen. It also makes transmedia "finish" its SSD->HDD copy significantly more quickly, though of course it's not truly finished until the buffered disk writes are written to HDD a little later (I suspect that'll generally be completed within 30 seconds).

I was reviewing the transmedia source code further today and spotted two minor stupidities. When the verify pass is turned off, I still calculated the checksums for each 1MB of data read in, despite never actually comparing those checksums with the data written and then re-read from the HDD (because I don't do that re-read if verify is turned off). That was an easy fix, but the second dumb bit of code was that if the source file couldn't be deleted after the copy to HDD was successful, I'd madly delete the HDD copy too!

The reason that deletion was stupid is that if the source file is deleted or renamed after transmedia opens the file, Linux is neat enough to allow the reads to continue on the open file handle until the file is closed again. Yes, the source file has gone from a user-visible point of view (e.g. "ls" doesn't list it), but Linux will not finally delete files until all processes that have it open actually close the file. Now I just log a warning about not being able to delete the source file, leave the probably fine HDD copy intact and then continue on with the code, which is much more robust IMHO.

  Day 8 recording size: 1132GB - grand total so far: 6220GB (6.1TB)