Digital TV

MPC-HC provides an excellent platform for high quality video and audio digital TV. Most of the
capabilities that make MPC-HC an excellent player are available for digital TV.

Digital TV is still under development so there are some capabilities not supported yet. Only DVB-t is
currently supported, while ATSC is currently under testing. DVB-S is not supported yet. Recording TV or
time-shifting are not yet supported.

How to configure the capture device:

Capture device

The first step to configure the capture device for MPC-HC is to access the configuration screen from
View->Options->Capture Screen. Make sure you select Digital as default device.

Select “Microsoft Network Provider” or ”DVB-t Network provider” as Network Provider and the
appropriate Tuner and Receiver according to your device.

Guide written by XPC

Decoders

Once you have the capture device configured, the appropriate decoders have to be selected. The
application will use the decoders defined in view->options->Internal/external filters, using the standard
priority rules. At least one MPEG-2 and one H.264 video decoders are required for video, and one MPEG
Audio and one AC3 are also required for decoding audio.

The decoder to be used for H.264 has to be carefully selected since none of the internal H.264/AVC
decoders are currently working for TV. An external one should be used, such as Divx H.264 decoder,
CoreAVC Video Decoder, H.264/AVC ffmpeg-mt, etc.

One important aspect that has to be configured for each of the chosen decoders is deinterlacing.

Example of filter list:

Supported devices

Any BDA device should work properly. The following devices have been tested and worked OK (which
does not mean that any device not appearing in this list is not working):

Pinnacle 310i
Pinnacle 3010ix
Pinnacle 7010ix
AverMedia AverTv Volar Black HD USB
Cinergy T USB XXS Digital Tuner

We need help from the community to complete this list!

Guide written by XPC

How to Scan for Channels

Open the capture device by clicking Open->Capture device or pressing <Ctrl>-v. When accessing for the
first time you should get a black screen with an empty TV navigation panel on the left and several
buttons at the bottom of this panel. If the panel is not visible, check View->Navigation panel.

Click on the button “Scan” at the bottom of the TV navigation panel to open the scan dialog.

Make sure that the frequency and bandwidth parameters are the ones defined for your area and update
them if required. Click start to start searching channels. This should take some minutes. At the end, you
should get a list of channels similar to the above example. Click on “save” to save the list. The TV
navigation panel should then be updated with the new list of channels. Now you can select one channel
by just clicking on it. Then you should start getting sound and images.

You can repeat this process whenever updating the list is required. Each time you save a new list of
channels, the old one is removed.

Guide written by XPC

Watching Digital TV

To open the TV, just select from the file menu Open->Capture device or just use the <Ctrl>-v hotkey. The
application will take few seconds to build the required filters and will tune the TV to the last channel
used in your previous session.

Switching channels

Three options are available for switching channels. The easiest way is just clicking on the channel name
in the TV navigation panel on the left. The second option is Skip Back/Forward buttons and the related
hotkeys (PgDn/PgUp). Finally the menu Navigate->Previous/Next or Jump To.

EPG Information

After switching to a channel, the OSD will show for few seconds the channel name and the event short
description from the EPG information. When clicking the “Info” button, the event summary and the start
and end time according to your computer time-zone will be shown for few seconds.

Selecting audio track

Some channels broadcast several audio tracks with different languages or audio formats such as AC3,
DTS, etc. Using the dropdown list in the TV navigation panel you can choose the audio track. Each time
you select the current channel you will get by default the last chosen audio track.

Subtitles

Guide written by XPC

subtitles are not yet available.

Radio stations

The radio stations appear in a separate list that can be accessed by clicking the button “Click to see
Radio Stations”.

Pause/play

When pressing pause, all the streams are discarded until pressing play again.

Guide written by XPC