Saturday 23 April 2016

Showing EIT information in DVBStreamExplorer Service View

DVBStreamExplorer V.4.0.20 includes a new feature that will allow EIT information to be continuously saved  to XML files from TS Monitor (DVB). DVBStreamExplorer Service View has been updated so it can now load and display such files. Below is screenshot after loading EIT XML file. Note how service names are initially displayed as triplet of ONID/TSID/SID.



To show real service names, load a DVBStreamExplorer service XML export that contains the necessary information. Below is screenshot after loading such file.


Note that the service tree items are ordered by the underlying ONID/TSID/SID values. This should preferably be changed to order by service names.

Friday 15 April 2016

How section binary view in DVBStreamExplorer helped locating a bug

A little known feature in DVBStreamExplorer is the ability to view raw section content in main window. This feature recently helped me out locating a bug in DVBStreamExplorer.
Some time time ago I had done some DVB-S scanning of several satellites. SI and SVC XML files had been saved. Recently I tried to open SVC XML file in DVBStreamExplorer Service View which I was running from Visual Studio. I got this error during load.



I opened SVC XML file in wxHexEditor. I was able to locate the 0x07 character.



The problem was related to a service name. I was able to figure which service had the problem. I loaded the SI XML file in DVBStreamExplorer and navigated to that service and got this view.



There appears to be some kind of control character before service name. That's suspicious since control characters are supposed to be filtered out before being displayed. To view raw section content select section on tree view. And select 'value' tab in bottom view.
The first byte in highlighted area is 15 which is hexadecimal for 21 decimal which again is the length of the string. Then there is a sequence of 10 00 07 which constitutes character set selector. From ETSI EN 300 468 table A.4 it can be seen this is Latin/Greek. After this sequence there is the actual service name string. Considering that issue is about an unexpected 0x07 character it's obvious to suspect that 0x07 is considered part of the service name string.
After a code review such a bug was indeed found. This has been fixed in DVBStreamExplorer 4.0.20 just released. SI XML was loaded in new version. Service name was now displayed correctly as seen below.


A new SVC XML file was exported. And this time it could be loaded from DVBStreamExplorer Service View without any issues.