On Sun, Oct 11, 2020 at 4:54 AM Douglas Peale <Douglas_Peale@comcast.net> wrote:
> Unfortunately, there is currently no ATSC broadcasts happening for San Francisco, so I can only test it with ATSC 1.0 channels.
There was not expected to be any ATSC 3.0 broadcasts in
the SF Bay Area immediately as the priority was the repack
(and Sutro was explicitly called out as the poster child in
the FCC planning document as being one of the biggest
challenges, and its schedule was among the last to be
completed, and some work continued until just a month
or so ago) and last I heard no actual transmitter sharing
arrangements have been publicly announced which will be
required to move forward in anything more than a toy test
(a press release from the industry marketing group about
intent is not an actual deliverable).
As far as I recall, only one of the top 10 media markets
actually has an ATSC 3.0 transmitter active (although,
as with San Francisco, a few more have transmitters
announced by press release).
Not surprisingly, mid/small market locations where a
single company owns multiple transmitters (typically
on the same tower) have been the majority of earliest
deployments since someone like Sinclair could use one
of their transmitters for ATSC 3.0 and move the previous
station over to share with the other transmitter. That
single owner multiple transmitters scenario is rare(r)
in larger markets (at least partially due to various
historical FCC rules, and because in larger markets
it was very very lucrative to return one of the
transmitters for the repack ($200-$300 million in a few
markets)) now requiring (typically) very competitive
owners in those larger markets to agree to work
together to share moving forward. It will happen
in most markets, but it will require a lot of negotiation.
It is further complicated in larger markets which have
multiple transmitter sites and multiple fill-in translators
(such as the greater SF Bay Area) as existing
coverage of ATSC 1.0 transmissions must be (roughly)
maintained after any transmitter sharing shuffles and
repurposing for ATSC 3.0 for at least the next few
years per FCC requirements (in order not to
disenfranchise existing viewers who likely have only
an ATSC 1.0 capable TV set), and if you have looked
at the RF service contour maps for the SF Bay Area
the existing coverage is not consistent from all
transmitters even just from Sutro for coverage
purposes (and add in San Bruno Mountain, and
Mt. Allison and Monument Pk and things get even
more complicated for a proper sharing arrangement
for moving forward long term).
I remember seeing an engineering proposal for just
a single shared use case SFN and antenna design
in the greater SF Bay Area, and there were many
challenges discussed (and while new construction
could have made some things easier, no one in their
right mind thought construction of a new tower was
going to be a viable alternative in that location (or,
for that matter, many larger media markets)).
That all said, there should be an initial (test) ATSC
3.0 deployment in that market at some point, so
you just need to be more patient.
> Is there any development version of MythTV that supports any of the new features of this tuner?
At the time of the announcement of availability a few
of the US based devs indicated that they *might* order
a unit to kick the tires (perhaps ordering the DEV unit
to be able to explore the raw stream?). I don't know
if they did, nor if they have received their unit, nor what
their time availability might be for playing around with
the unit (likely they either have lots of free time, or
negative free time). Hopefully one/more will chime in
if they have any of that elusive free time available.
A C-level staffer from SiliconDust has stated that
the HDHR remuxes the ATSC 3.0 video stream into
a MPEG-2 Transport Stream (that is just the container,
not the encoding of the content which is (typically)
HEVC; your local cable company will typically also
use an MPEG-2 Transport Stream for all their channels
which are typically either MPEG2 or AVC encoded)
so existing apps "should just work".
However, while the content is remuxed to a format
compatible for capture, as I recall only recent MythTV
master has been updated to properly support HEVC/H.265
recording from stations with full parsing and reporting.
So those wanting to record/play ATSC 3.0 HEVC with
MythTV likely need to be running the master branch
(and one may need a VPU with HEVC decode, especially
on lower powered systems, for playback).
Note that ATSC 3.0 can deliver more than just video and
audio (and can also optionally require selected content to
be protected), but the early broadcasters are mostly focusing
on the simpler ATSC 1.0 broadcast TV replacement market
and MythTV support is also focused there. There could
possibly be some future work in apps (such as MythTV)
to support some of the alternative capabilities, but they
will likely need to be written to target those capabilities
(similar to the MHEG support that MythTV has).
I can see some potential issues with selecting and
scheduling a device which has mixed capabilities
(for this initial HDHR ATSC 3.0 device there are four
tuners, but two are ATSC 1.0 only, and two are ATSC
1.0 and ATSC 3.0 capable) along with existing tuners
which may require careful capturecard/videosource
setup, but I believe the issues can be addressed by
intelligent setup choices in the existing system. That
is not to say some future improvements might not be
helpful.
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