ATSC 3.0: Dallas - 2020

[mooninite]

I tried contacting the FOX4 station FCC contact a week ago and did not receive a reply. Either they are out on vacation or feel I am not worth their time. I'm asking if they will drop to a AC-3 or AAC audio stream.

Does anyone know of a station or engineer contact for this ATSC 3 broadcast? I tried asking "jasonl" as he claims to have talked to such a person but he has not replied to either a private message or forum post.

[Jedi71]

Hi all,

I've just had my Connect 4k and Servio for about 24 hours. I have a few observations that I hope others in DFW can chime in on.

Fox 4.1, the 4k channel, not only has very low volume, but takes 5x's longer to tune in as the regular HD channels do. Has that been everyone's experience? It also stutters and skips ever so often

PBS Create 13.3 freezes for 5 seconds before flashing a blank screen then playing fine for about 10 minutes before it does it all over again.

And now 13.1 freezes as well.

And 5.1 NBC has "macroblocking" on faster moving content or edits.

This is not passing the wife test.

Thanks!

[Grumbles]

Hi all,

I've just had my Connect 4k and Servio for about 24 hours. I have a few observations that I hope others in DFW can chime in on.

Fox 4.1, the 4k channel, not only has very low volume, but takes 5x's longer to tune in as the regular HD channels do. Has that been everyone's experience? It also stutters and skips ever so often

PBS Create 13.3 freezes for 5 seconds before flashing a blank screen then playing fine for about 10 minutes before it does it all over again.

And now 13.1 freezes as well.

And 5.1 NBC has "macroblocking" on faster moving content or edits.

This is not passing the wife test.

Thanks!

Just got my Apple TV 4K and it was supposed to fix the problem with picture but no audio. Now I get audio and no picture. Picture is monotone green and stutters for about 30 seconds and then goes blank. If I go back to my LG tv, I get picture but no audio. That is when I get a picture at all. Takes about 2 minutes to get a picture about 1 time in 10 tries. The fact that Channels gets both audio and video tells me this is all a software issue. Looking forward to the app upgrade that fixes all of this. If Channels can use the receiver and get everything right, maybe silicon dust can figure it out...soon please.

[rmoran]

I was on phone with Dallas local SiliconDust tech rep. He said that he had a call with engineers and they would not give him a time frame. Could be quick, but may take a while. It is 100% a software issue.

[Grumbles]

I was on phone with Dallas local SiliconDust tech rep. He said that he had a call with engineers and they would not give him a time frame. Could be quick, but may take a while. It is 100% a software issue.

Just downloaded InstaTV Pro. It works with the receiver and fixed all my problems. It is only 1080i, but at least I can see all the Dallas stations without monochrome and stutter. It will be my go to until SiliconDust updates their app.

[mooninite]

I was on phone with Dallas local SiliconDust tech rep. He said that he had a call with engineers and they would not give him a time frame. Could be quick, but may take a while. It is 100% a software issue.

What is this regarding? The slow start-up?

Now that AC-4 support is available in ffmpeg I've started to play the FOX4 station with varying success. The live stream will playback in Kodi for several minutes without any noticeable issues and video and audio works. Video appears to be extremely low bitrate but this is a known issue. If I try to run the channel through Jellyfin that tries to read the stream first and then transcode it is failing to play 4 out of 5 attempts. Failure occurs before ffmpeg even gets called. The stream is timing out most likely due to the very slow start-up from the tuner. When the stream does play most of the time no video stream is playing and about 5 seconds of audio is output before the stream completely stops. If video is output the stream will last a few seconds longer before stopping.

Running the captured MPEG-TS stream through ffmpeg spouts out a ton of parsing errors.

Code: Select all

...
Error while decoding frame!
[ffmpeg/video] hevc: PPS id out of range: 1
[ffmpeg/video] hevc: Error parsing NAL unit #7.
...

[CBme]

Now that AC-4 support is available in ffmpeg I've started to play the FOX4 station with varying success.

Certainly good news, and I see your comment on 8349, but is the support actually in FFMpeg that applies to the source used by all the other apps in their builds or is it in only in richardpl's fork? Not a dev so I'm not sure how things get into the primary build (and then out to the the future builds of things like VLC).

[tmm1]

Running the captured MPEG-TS stream through ffmpeg spouts out a ton of parsing errors.

Code: Select all

...
Error while decoding frame!
[ffmpeg/video] hevc: PPS id out of range: 1
[ffmpeg/video] hevc: Error parsing NAL unit #7.
...

This is almost certainly a broken encoder config at the transmitter, so you should complain about it to your local station.

The stream crashes the reference HEVC decoder. See https://trac.ffmpeg.org/ticket/9034

[jasonl]

Unfortunately, the local station here doesn't seem to care that their encoder is severely misconfigured.

[Jedi71]

6, 7, and 8 didn't show up yesterday. They are there as of 10 minutes ago:

SCANNING: 533000000 (us-bcast:24)
LOCK: 8vsb (ss=100 snq=100 seq=100)
TSID: 0x0B15
PROGRAM 3: 5.1 KXAS-DT
PROGRAM 4: 5.2 COZI-TV
PROGRAM 5: 5.3 NBCLX
PROGRAM 6: 0 (no data)
PROGRAM 7: 0 (no data)
PROGRAM 8: 0 (no data)

I'm new here. Does this sort of thing happen alot, or is this a sign NBC is about to get 3 more sub channels?

[jasonl]

Not seeing them there currently. Hopefully it's just a fluke.