MythTV and KnoppMyth progress
TV: here’s a quick update on my PVR box progress. I have a very extensive /etc/LOG which I should probably just publish as-is, really, rather than trying to make it legible ;)
Anyway, the hardware arrived last month, but the main VIA EPIA ME6000 board was non-functional — it could never get as far as powering up the CRT for the BIOS self-test. So it was RMA’d back to http://www.mini-box.com, and they sent out a replacement, which arrived a couple of weeks ago.
I finally got to checking this out the weekend before last, and hey presto, it powered up nicely. There followed a whole week of busy nights doing a load of cautious hardware hooking-up, not-so-cautious KnoppMyth installation, and thoroughly non-cautious hacking crazily at the desired enclosure with a hacksaw (because I was too cheap to buy a Dremel).
Things got a little hairy with respect to CPU temperatures, but some looking at specs (the VIA Eden CPU can deal with up to 90 degrees C!), and repurposing of a bin-bound case fan together with some soldering and snipping, has that under control.
Eventually, we’re now at the stage where it can:
- watch live TV in perfect realtime, pause, rewind, timeshift, ffwd, etc. (the PVR-350 output is good)
- record our desired shows (bloody Antiques Roadshow! argh), according to the TV schedule
- play mp3s
- be ssh’able and sftp’able via a wifi USB dongle
- expose its schedule and allow recording via MythWeb
- expose its full desktop UI via x11vnc
and it looks good doing it, too. Credit goes to the MythTV guys for a fantastic job on their project, especially with its well-polished UI.
In addition, I have to plug KnoppMyth heavily. They’re dealing with an awful situation with hardware compatibility where bleeding edge features like MPEG2 decoding and TV out are concerned, and doing a great job — there’s been several occasions where I’ve been staring down the barrel of a daunting patch/rebuild/test cycle, and then find out that KnoppMyth includes that component built-in for free.
But — on the other hand — no credit to the hardware vendors. As I link-blogged yesterday, VIA is doing the classic ‘throw it over the wall’ trick with respect to their linux support — video drivers are written and deposited on their website, with scant documentation and virtually no support.
That’s bad enough, but even worse is the situation with Hauppauge’s PVR-250 and PVR-350 TV encoder/decoder cards. I realised soon into the setup process that other options for these should have been considered – Hauppauge have done a great job at confusing the issue for driver developers, as far as I can see. Here’s an example. When you buy a ‘WinTV PVR-350′ card, you may get the same box with the same manuals etc., but including these bonuses under the covers:
- one of seemingly about 5 different tuner chips, which you’ll need to edit
/etc/modules.conffor; - one of about 3 different remote controls with differing output codes;
- a good chance you’ll have to enter two mysterious ioctls to fix the colour registers, because recent PVR-350 models have changed these somehow and everything shows up as purple-on-green through its TV-Out.
It’s absurd. The results are threads like this and a truly daunting setup procedure, which (of course) everyone blames on the software (and Linux itself).
Anyway — how am I doing vs. Brendan’s progress? ;)
- pro: my X display sizes are good
- pro: no need to switch audio outputs
- pro: I’m not using a separate cable box, so no need to hack up something IR to switch channels for me
- con: I can’t yet watch AVIs or other video files, which I think he has working.
More on the latter when I eventually solve it. (it’s tricky. I suspect I’ll need to run two X servers with two TV-Outs to do this acceptably, and that’s uncharted waters.)
Tags: box, hardware, job, knoppmyth, log, progress, pvr, schedule, tv, update, via
ha ha ha ha
ThisIsLondon: ‘David Blaine thought he was ready for anything. The US illusionist suspended in a glass box over London had prepared himself for 44 days of starvation, loneliness and boredom.
But there was one thing he had not planned for - Londoners.
… the prize for invention went to golfers who teed up with clubs on Tower Bridge and tried hitting the box with golf balls.’
Tags: anything, boredom, box, glass, illusionist, londoners, prize, starvation, thing, thisislondon
SpamAssassin 2.50 released!
SpamAssassin 2.50 released, with Bayesian goodness, auto-learning, and a 97.77% accuracy out-of-the box. Hooray!
Tags: accuracy, bayesian, box, goodness, hooray, spamassassin
Durian fruit
CNN: A box of durian, sprinkled with carpet deodorizer, sparked an aviation alert in Australia on Thursday (via monkeybum):
When they finally found the source of the smell, it was a box of durian, a large, spiny tropical fruit renowned for its fetid aroma. While many people in Southeast Asia consider the durian a delicacy, it is banned from Singapore’s subway and some restaurants in the region because of its overpowering smell.
‘This wasn’t a safety issue, this was gross issue — no one wants to fly in an airplane that smells like that,’ (Virgin Blue boss Brett Godfrey) said. He compared the smell of the gourmet fruit to ’something you’d find in your outdoor dunny’ adding that ‘it just is the most pungent, disgusting smell.’
No shit — durian really stinks. I’ve tried to cultivate the taste for it, but failed miserably. Worse, for 3 hours in the passenger seat from Khao Sok to Surat Thani in Thailand, I was stuck with a selection of ‘em by my feet — no escape!
The nearest thing to their odor is really pungent, cheesy socks. ‘foetid’ is the word for it.
Tags: alert, aviation, box, carpet, cnn, deodorizer, durian, fruit, issue, smell
