Hi All,
Can't believe its already been more than a month since the initial version of Open Tuner. Things have moved quite quickly and its been a fun project. Today I would like to share the next version, which is substantially different than the first version. Thanks to help from Brian (G4EWJ) the author of the Winterhill Software I have managed to get to the end goal which was to get both tuners and demodulators going as available in a single NIM module. This means that you can tune and receive two independent signals using either the same RF input, or splitting them between two different inputs.
This means that if you have one the Minitiouner Pro variants that come with the two usb ports then it should work out of the box allowing you to receive 2 transports. However, if you are running the Batc Minitiouner V2 with the single usb, then all is not lost.
With a small daughter board (available in the BATC Shop), or you can even DIY your own version since it has like 3 components ,you can also unlock the magical 2nd channel. It basically adds a USB module connected to the 2nd transport on the NIM module. All the information on adding the 2nd channel including the programming is available here. There is also information available on the BATC wiki which includes the schematic should you rather DIY it yourself. Please send pics of your modified Minitiouners!
Because of the nature of two tuners, the flow and gui of Open Tuner had to change quite a bit, so you will notice it looks drastically different than the first versions. Because of this I'm keeping both on the download page for now.
Because I had to rewrite big chunks of Open Tuner I've decided to do a few things differently and this has allowed me to add FFMPEG into the mix as well. This means you can select between either using VLC for decoding and display, or FFMPEG for decoding and display. The advantage of the FFMPEG though is that its possibly to recompile it with different codecs, including the new (old) H266 codec that everybody is playing with on QO-100.
And lastly for the people using this as a terrestrial DATV receiver I also changed the tuning controls a bit to give you more control and change frequencies on the fly.
You can use the mouse scroll wheel to change the frequency on each section (GHz, MHz, KHz) with the addition of pressing CTRL or SHIFT to change the tuning delta.
I didn't want to do a manual before since OT was changing rapidly, but with the new version I'll be spending some time putting that together first as there are lots of little features that aren't obvious.
Lots of testers have been trying it out the past two weeks and I thank everyone for their wonderful feedback. It still has a bit to go, but its making good progress.
On a side note: The different languages have suffered a bit with this update and I will need to spend a day to get that all in order, so you might notice a mixture of your chosen language and English throughout the application.
As usual any issues can be reported on the Github Issues page (give the repo a start while you are there ;)), but there is now also a BATC forum available here.
Thanks for the support everyone, now go and download the latest release and try it out!
73,
Tom - ZR6TG