I was having a hard time on getting DVBViewer working, since I paid my hard earn cash with it there is no point of letting it sit there without using it, so here I come, work around and debug time…

For my earlier experience, please read: DVBViewer – Great idea, buggy codes…

Here is a list of my current status:

– DVBViewer 4.6.0.0 which I was using, the first 4.6 series releases, is JUST buggy, 4.6.0.1 which was released afterwards works just a little bit better..
– I found that running DVBViewer on a 64bit windows 7 system is tricky, I believe it is NOT that stable on 64bit system…
– From time to time DVBViewer is having problem at hardware drivers level, example, I set a record timer at certain time, it will start record, but recording are like 1xxkb ONLY, which of coz, does not contain the show I want to record, this is due to DVBViewer is having problem accessing hardware of the USB TV tuner card, it seems no TV signal was received by DVB to process, the only solution I found on this issue is physically unplug and replug the USB TV Tuner card from the system, my plan was using devcon to cron unplug and replug of the device by software, only to found that devcon is NOT working well and correctly on 64bit system…
– About the EPG Chinese chars mess up issue on Web Interface, it has been fixed by the latest Recording service (still in beta! always beta..), but it raises another problem, if recording filename is set to %event%, it mess up the output of recording, DVBViewer will NOT record correctly, filename will become ????, no solution yet, so I am off Recording Service at the meantime, back to using the build in Timer function of DVBViewer main program, which of coz, I will NEED to keep the main exe open…
– I request a function on DVBViewer official support forum about “was that possible to record subtitle in different file instead of all in 1 ts file”, all I got was a few line reply from officials that “No”, and a few reply from die-head fans which accuse me of “Not DVBViewer issue on converting recordings, and ts is open format…etc etc” well, is good to see there are user who is having good time with this software, and official support did reply quick, but dead end it is.
– Spend LOTS of time finding “how to extract subtitle from the TS recordings.”, this is NOT a hard thing, but due to different country/broadcaster uses different way of embedding subtitle in different system, it was a pain to trial an error and search to learn what is going on, in HK, all subtitles are broadcast by Image format, which is like SUB/SUP used in DVD/Bluray system, these subtitle are not in text, they are images, no teletext, project-x seems to be the only tool set I found working ok with the recordings from DVBViewer.

With all the time and effort of going though it, I manage to achieved certain level of my needs:
– Now I am able to record, NOT reliable tho, due to the hardware issue I mention above, I have yet to found a way to work with it..
– I am able to extract subtitle from the recorded stream by project-x, and am able to edit/crop/cut ads and unwanted part of the record on STD channels (4), which is broadcast in MPEG2 video stream, editing with project-x seems not supporting the HD channels, which is broadcast in h264 video stream, tho I am sure I can workaround it with other tool sets since it can still demux the ts file into parts.
– on STD recordings (MPEG2 video + multi channel AC3 audio +Sup/Sub subtitles), I first edit the wanted/unwanted part of the stream, demux the ts into different parts (m2v+ac3+sub+idx), and uses a tool call Avidemux to remux, encode them into AVC+AAC mp4 file format for using it with my devices.

What are my next moves?
– Getting recording service to work, as mention above, %event% with Chinese name mess up recordings (do not record correctly), I suggest this has to deal with internal coding on Windows 7 64 bit systems, which many other programs too have problem with utf8/big5/ascii code page conversion.
– Get more test on HD channels post-processing, should be piece of cake, the catch is it is gonna be slow I know since 1080 h264 re-encoding is gonna be hell even on my fastest working system.
– Embedding the subtitles and multiple audio tracks to the output file itself, the current sub/idx subtitle works fine with Media Player Classics, VLC and AirVideo on iDevice, but not if I want to sync it to my iDevice or Android device since it does not support sub/idx subtitles, it is known that m4v file format, which support embedding subtitle and multiple audio tracks and playback on iDevices, currently my approach is main mp4 file + different ac3 audio file + sub/idx subtitle file in same directory, which I think it would be nice if I can embed them in 1 file, the catch is I have to find a way to convert the sub/idx to srt format, which is TEXT file, a way to convert these images and time-line to text would be a challenge since it would require a good Chinese OCR software to be in the work.

That seems to be my current status, may update when there is more…
but by the way, I can at least getting some basic recording working.