jj20x

When spiderplant commented earlier in the month that much of what gets called "testing" on this forum actually isn't, I linked to a website showing all services on all of VMs transport streams in a certain region. I was quite surprised that none of the above were listed in any of the recent scans. Although I don't have any equipment to check for myself, I know an SDR hobbyist and asked if he could figure out what is happening. He wasn't interested enough to obtain the drivers but knew someone who would have suitable equipment.

As spiderplant suggested, there are many services in the service description table which are hidden from the EPG, including every regional variation of BBC, ITV & C4, every local tv station carried by VM, listings for "channel moved" placeholders that at have long since been removed, and many others.

Arabic Hafla, Fox News Channel, NDTV India and NDTV Spice all fall into that category. They are all listed in the service description table and each has EPG data associated with it. None of the services were carried on any of the transport streams, so the conclusion has to be that they are certainly not testing across the entire VM network.

He suggested that they may have been added in preparation for future channels, or that they may have tested in the past and subsequently been removed. The number of "Channel moved" entries seems to suggest that VM doesn't necessarily remove the service description entries when the "service" is removed. No reason why they should as this isn't visible to the customer under normal circumstances. The final possibility being that the services are being tested on an isolated segment of the network, available only to VM staff, but if that was the case, why add the service descriptions globally?

Arabic Hafla: this service is listed as being on transport stream TSid 44 with a service id of 4412. There was no service id 4412 active on TSid 44.

Interesting that the EPG data refers to this as a TIVO service, other services on that transport stream are TIVO related services such as Netflix, Worldbox, Vevo etc. So it may eventually show up as an Arabic version of Worldbox.

Tsid 1 lists various "tiers", "Spanish Tier", "Portuguese Tier", "French Tier" and "Polish Tier". Definitely not new channels but presumably associated with the new Worldbox apps such as Spanish Viva and Portuguese Coleta, which VM don't seem to be giving much publicity. Maybe an indication that French & Polish Worldbox apps may be "coming soon to Virgin Media". Alas, nothing in there for an "Arabic Tier" that could be linked to Arabic Hafla.

NDTV India and NDTV Spice are listed as being services 1031 and 1032 on TSid 10. Again, these services are not actually running on TSid 10.

Fox News Channel is listed as being on TSid 20 with a service id of 2015. As with the above services, there was no service id 2015 present on TSid 20.

Quite disappointing overall to discover that these "tests" are just entries made in service description tables with no active services actually "testing" across the network.

So are there any tests taking place?

Other than the possible indication of future apps and the BBC Olympic channels, not really, not new channels at least. He discovered some additional transport streams on frequencies above the regular channels. These were labelled "Freq Test" and clearly there to test the frequency range rather than test new channels. The service description tables also listed other services on transport streams which were not actually active. TSid 389 listed as carrying various test streams labelled Test 1 to Test 12 and TSid 399 listed as carrying 2 services: Top Left 4KTV test and Bot Left 4KTV test - he said there were no services listed as carrying Top Right or Bot Right.

I won't speculate about that last one but I daresay that there won't be a flood of 1/4 screen UHD TV channels coming soon to VM.

That's about it, he said that examining the network information table might reveal more but with the hundreds of entries in there, he wasn't inclined to spend vast amounts of time trying to unravel it. On the whole, he said that cable tv is of little interest to the hobbyist. Most of what is carried on VM is encrypted and there is generally a much wider choice of FTA channels available on Freeview and satellite, so no incentive for anyone to explore DVB-C in this country.