Step by step, digital television is conquering our country. From this spring, DVB-T (digital video broadcasting, terrestrial) is broad-casted in my home city. In our country someone decided to use MPEG4, h.264 video compression. All cheap available DVB-T receivers didn’t understand this compression method, so he have some problems here. In other internet pages I discovered some solutions to these problems. So I bought simple DVB-T add-on card for my computer. It is Leadtek WinFast DTV1000T. Original software from this card is not usable- it supports only mpeg2. So, I downloaded AltDVB software from internet. Next problem is h264 decoder. Freeware one from ffdshow package is not very good. I think it is intended to use with pure h.264 video stream. But, as I tested my card with small antenna, there is lots of stream errors in DVB broadcasting. And these errors cause ffdshow to freeze video or even crash operating system. I also tested some commercial h.264 decoders. First one is from Nero suite, second one is downloaded from sat users internet forum: CoreAVC Professional. Also there is usable codec in PowerDVD package. But only in some release version. Current PowerDVD player is not letting to use codec in other software.
Here is program interface:
(press on image for larger view).
I can see 10 “free” channels, 3 of them are just test table. And 10 coded, pay-TV channels.
The quality of the image is good compared to distorted analog TV image. But it is not perfect. If the signal strength is low there is lots of decoding artifacts.
Here is error free image:
And what you get is some crow is sitting on your antenna.
It is possible to record transport stream to hard disk. I was using free VLC player to play these images. Here is 1:1 snapshot of the frames.
(Press on image for real size).
