More updates: Appears I had the position of the Hamilton infill transmitter slightly wrong on the map, updated the co-ordinates.
New Zealand recently launched Freeview|HD, a High-Definition free-to-air television service.
There are now two Digital Video Broadcast (DVB) services in New Zealand. The first is a satellite service which launched last year and the newest is a terrestrial High Definition service.
Last year, I bought a satellite-based Freeview box because the television reception at our flat was shocking and there was a Sky satellite dish on the roof when we moved in. Setting that up was a breeze, just plugged in the cables and it practically set itself up.
Two weeks ago, I decided to buy an Elgato EyeTV Hybrid to see whether it could handle the new terrestrial service so we could watch television is crazy resolution. The answer was a resounding “sort-of”. The software that comes with the EyeTV Hybrid and all Elgato’s products is regarded as the best native Mac PVR software, so I really wanted to give it a go.
I took it all home and plugged it into our Mac Mini. I got the software installed and then mucked around trying to figure out which cable coming from the wall was the UHF aerial. There were three cables, one I knew was the satellite as I had our old Freeview box plugged into it. It didn’t take me too long to find which of the other two it was and then it was on to try and get everything set up.
My first hurdle was that the DVB parameters for New Zealand in EyeTV are copied from Australia’s. Turns out that New Zealand has changed their specifications quite a bit and have used a lot of cutting edge technologies so I wasn’t too surprised that I had to fiddle around to get the everyting to work correctly.
What I needed to do was select United Kindom as the country and use the settings for their service as they use a similar system to theirs. I tried tuning in the channels using the search function but found that the UHF aerial on our new flat doesn’t appear to be the best so the auto-tune kept missing channels.
I found a reference of all the frequencies used for Freeview|HD at launch and input those numbers directly into EyeTV and all the channels came up in the list with their names.
The next hurdle was that New Zealand has chosen some fairly new compression codecs, they’ve chosen H.264 for the video and AAC for the audio. This gives New Zealand the ability to transmit much higher quality signal and save a lot of bandwidth. The downside to this is that not many software packages support these codecs using DVB. EyeTV 3.0.1 does not support AAC audio and has extremely limited support for H.264.
The net result is that the currently released EyeTV version will not show you any interlaced channels and won’t play any sound. Looking at anything except TV One, TV2 and Kordia’s Freeview test channel resulted in a crash.
I emailed Elgato to find out if support was being worked on. I had discovered that Norway chose the same set of codecs and Elgato were currently working on support for Norway so I hoped we’d be able to piggy back on that. Sure enough, I was sent a beta release to try out and see whether it solved any issues.
The beta release I was sent stopped EyeTV from crashing and the audio now works superbly, I still can’t seem to get the interlaced channels to work correctly though. That means I can only watch TV One, TV2 and Kordia’s Nature Loop. Alas, hopefully Elgato will get that sorted in the near future.
Meanwhile, I can record, rewind and pause live HD TV on TV One and TV2 and record Analog TV of TV4. As we still have our Satellite box hooked up we can watch all the Standard Definition Freeview channels but not record them without some hassle.
I can’t wait to be able to record all of them.
As a reference here are the technical specifications and useful numbers for the Freeview|HD Service:
- Country:
- New Zealand
- Service:
- DVB-T
- Band:
- UHF
- Bandwidth:
- 8MHz
- Video Format:
- H.264
- Audio Format:
- AAC, 24kHz, 96kbps
- Multiplexes:
-
- TVNZ
- MediaWorks
- Kordia
- Hamilton frequencies
-
- TVNZ (689.5MHz)
- MediaWorks (698.5MHz)
- Kordia (712MHz)
- Channels (Just the major ones)
-
Channel Multiplex Stream Type TV One TVNZ 720p TV2 TVNZ 720p TV3 MediaWorks 1080i TV4 MediaWorks 576i Maori Television Kordia 576i TVNZ 6 TVNZ 576i TVNZ 7 TVNZ 576i TVNZ SPORT EXTRA TVNZ 576i Freeview | HD Kordia 720p
5 Comments
Hi
Just wanted to say thanks for this excellent piece. I suspected that the Hybrid wouldn’t work with Freeview HD but was about to buy one based on assurances from 2 Mac dealers. I will hold off until the Hybrid supports the NZ standard or at least until they can provide beta software that works.
I would very much appreciate if you could provide an update when (if) it all works as it should.
Many thanks
I’m glad someone found my post useful!
Sure, once I hear some more from Elgato I’ll email you.
can you tell me where you found the list of frequencies for Freeview HD?
Sure.
Freeview|HD UHF Channel List
UHF Channel to Frequency conversions – Be sure to look at the New Zealand table for UHF Frequencies
Hi. Great review/section thingy. I just got my eyetv hybrid. How to you enter the frequencies into the software? And does a satellite get a better signal (quality and strength) compared to a roof antenna? Thanks heaps!