Success with German DVB-T2?

[Nils Kassube]

Ingolf Steinbach wrote:
> 2017-03-02 22:38 GMT+01:00 Nils Kassube <kassube at gmx.net>:
> > dvbstream -f 754000 -o 8192 | vlc -
> 
> Unfortunately that did not work either.
> 
> Tuning to 754000 Hz
> VLC media player 2.2.4 Weatherwax (revision 2.2.3-37-g888b7e89)
> Using DVB card "Silicon Labs Si2168", freq=754000
> tuning DVB-T (in United Kingdom) to 754000000 Hz, Bandwidth: 8
> Getting frontend status
> [...]
> Not able to lock to the signal on the given frequency

Hmm, that doesn't look so good.

> Thanks anyway. Does "locking to the signal" already require the
> ability to decode HEVC/H.265?

No, the hardware should lock to the signal, no matter what is 
transmitted with the transport stream. The receiver hardware decodes the 
QAM signal and does the error correction and then it sends the entire 
transport stream to the PC. The HEVC decoding is the job of the media 
player (vlc in this case).

The dvbstream program selects the frequency (option "-f 754000" in the 
command above) and receives the entire transport stream from the 
receiver. Then it selects the wanted PIDs of a single or several program 
streams and outputs it to stdout (-o). However I don't know the 
available PIDs, so I used the wildcard PID 8192 which lets dvbstream 
output the entire transport stream. But as the receiver doesn't lock to 
the signal, there is no transport stream sent to the media player.

However there is one thing I haven't found out so far: The freenet TV 
platform is supposed to transmit encrypted data for the private stations 
and I don't know which part of the reception chain does the decryption. 
The current preliminary DVB-T2 transmitter has two stations (Das Erste 
HD and ZDF HD) which are supposed to be freely receivable and four 
private stations which are probably already encrypted. So if the entire 
transport stream is encrypted, I would assume that the decryption is a 
part of the receiver hardware and due to the lack of a decryption module 
your receiver may not be able to lock to the signal. If this assumption 
is correct, you would have to wait until all the transmitters are 
transmitting DVB-T2. Then the free stations will be on their own 
unencrypted transmitters.


Nils