BBC Schedula

BBC as in BBC Microcomputer, not BBC as in BBC broadcasts, although for much of it's history most of the content controlled was rebroadcasts of mainstream TV.

This system had at it's heart a specially programmed BBC Microcomputer, which controlled the station's audio and video hardware whenever live programs were not being shown, so that the network was kept busy

First created around 1994, by Dominic Plunkett and Alan Murrell. Dominic worked out how to drive YSTV's satellite receiver by analysing the bit pattern emitted from the remote control, and transcribed this into the BBCs memory (this was quite a feat as the BBC does not have much memory). However, he never let slip as to how he worked out it was actually on.

During 1994-95 it was let loose to the masses, and Chris Kwouk stepped forward as a keen exponent as he knew it was the answer to many of YSTV's scheduling problems. However, some people were slightly baffled by user interface. During a visit to Alan Murrell sometime later in 1995 Owain Davies discussed the issue of the user interface with Alan and suggested he could write an alternate but he could never match the excellent work that had been done in device control. Alan offered to substitute the user interface for a serial interface thus allowing another computer to control the BBC schedula.

Owain set about writing a user interface based in C on a DOS platform. The program would need to run from a boot disk disk on a hard disk less 386. He thought he would try and use pointers to store all of the scheduling information. This version soon found itself in the bin after many crashes and he reverted to a static array. The resulting system looked a little like a personal planner on a sky box today. True to his word, Alan, produced the ammended program for the BBC. First trial, did not go successful at first, until Alan advised to lift the front edge up of the BBC up a couple of centimetres and then drop it. After which, much to Owain's delight, it worked. The new system proved popular and was used during 1995-96.

At the start of 1996-97, Owain attempted a further feat with the PC user interface. He had experimented with an extremely crude VGA to composite converter from Bull Electrical, that somehow seemed to work. His aim was to get the scheduler to announce the start of a program and show schedules by putting it's VGA output to network and showing some graphics. It was trialed before it was ready, and the system would get itself into a very confused state. Reluctantly, he reverted to the previous version.

Rob Sprowson came along a little while later and further improved it, including re-doing the remote control code to control a Sky digibox rather than the original analogue receiver, and hooking it up to the Station Video Mux

The serial input to the system proved to be invaluable towards the end of the system's life, by which time no-one really knew how the innards worked. It enabled Kevin BowmanUnverified or incomplete information to create a webpage/database based system to replace the DOS front-end. This was initially a stand-alone system that sat in the control room running on a Penitum running FreeBSD. Everything was written in PHP - even the daemon that read the database and kicked out the requests to the BBC over the serial port. This required a specially re-compiled version of PHP that allowed the script to keep running for ever rather than being killed after accumulating 10 seconds of CPU time (usually some weeks after being set running). Dave Baker then moved the front end pages to the YSTV web server, still driving the same machine for the back-end. This meant that the Scheduling Manager could fill up the schedules without actually coming in to the station. At about the same time some more hacks were inserted to make the system talk to the Video Server, at least after a fashion. Throughout this the BBC had to be kept, as no-one knew what protocol passed between it at the Network Audio Mux and Station Video Mux doing the actual control.

In a final burst of enthusiasm in early 2005, Dave Baker and Richard Ash moved the database to the main YSTV server and the PHP control daemon to the Video Server so that the FreeBSD machine could be retired, mainly in the interests of it's space in the rack. Over the summer of 2005, the whole lot was replaced by Spider and SchedSeven, a new from-scratch solution built by Rob Humphrey and Dave Baker