NineHD Coming March 17

Looks like the number of Australian free to air channels (at least in the capital cities) is increasing next Monday. Nine have announced that 9HD will finally start - http://www.tvtonight.com.au/2008/03/nine-hd-launches-march-17-to-be-sure-to.html

ABC3 on the way

Australian digital multi-channelling seems to be exploding. The government has just announced an ABC3 station. The station is aimed at kids, but at least it's still a new station which will hopefully encourage more.

Details: http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,22466369-29277,00.html

MediaCoder for transcoding

I just noticed a new (well, actually not so new... but new to me) transcoding app. MediaCoder is a batch system for media transcoding. It looks like it supports a nice range of formats, and the UI is nice, but I think it could still do with some improving. Perhaps a wizard to make setting up jobs simple.

New Beta Version Shipped

The RikPVR beta is now going strong with a quite a few people signing up. I've been pleasantly surprised at the quality of feedback I'm getting from the testers.

Last night I released a new version which should be available via the auto-update facility. This new version addresses a serious bug which quite a few people encountered (see the forum post for some details). The bug was centred around a DirectShow filter which ships with RikPVR. The filter required some DLLs which weren't always present (the VS2005 C-runtime DLLs). Thankfully, simply changing the compiler settings to statically link the runtime solved the problem.

I've also had considerable interest from overseas testers, in particular a number of people in the UK have signed up. This new release will address some problems they had as well and should hopefully now allow UK and European users to scan for channels without crashing. I've tracked down the UK frequencies as well so they won't need to manually enter them.

Finally, I've added support for selecting between standard definition and high definition channels when you create a recording. Each channel in the guide can have multiple broadcast channels associated with it. (e.g. Channel 7 in the guide could have Channel 7 SD and Channel 7 HD both attached to it) When you right click on a show you now have the option of choosing which of these channels to use for the recording. You can also adjust the channel through the recording properties.

This is the first feature added based on feedback from a user. I did already have plans to do this, but its priority was bumped when somebody requested it.

Anyway... I look forward to hearing more from the testers as this new version comes through to them.

Welcome to the RikPVR blog!

It's Beta time!

Finally after much development it's finally time to start releasing RikPVR into the world. Initially I'm simply looking for beta testers to try to iron out any final bugs. A final release should be available within a couple of months.

RikPVR has already been through a series of Alpha releases to a select group of users which has been very successful.

Keep an eye on this blog. I'll be posting about happenings with RikPVR, digital TV in Australia and the world and perhap a bit of the history of RikPVR.