Peter's Blog

Signed up for sky by Broadband which, as I am a sky movies subscriber, allows me to download said movies and watch them on my computer. The selection of movies is similar to the current selection on sky so it's kinda ok, not so bad that I ever get around to unsubscribing.

Sky By Broadband itself is heavily Microsoft DRMed but I don't really care. The files are circa 500M and they can be backed up to cd/dvd but you can only play them back on the pc you record them on. The licences to watch the films are time limited but the time limits are in the order of months. You have to download the whole film before you can watch it so it's not quite video on demand.

You are only allowed to register one pc in a household: I don't know if it's using my mac address to enforce this or what happens if the pc breaks and I want to use another one.

Still, it's costing me no extra and I can watch the films anywhere in the house and, in fact, anywhere as I can watch them while disconnected from the internet, such as when on holiday.

Oh, it covers Sky Sports as well but I guess from the themes on this site you can guess I'm not a big sports fan.

No blogging for a while, been busy fiddling with my new Hauppauge WinTV Nova-t USB2 Digital TV Tuner. This plugs into a USB 2.0 port (won't work with USB 1.1) and allows you to watch/record Digital TV (Freeview in the UK).

Very long story so here are the highlights:

• Needs terrestrial aerial so took notebook (d410) into loft and connected it to existing unused aerial directly. Strong signal with no proper alignment, watched TV in the loft.
• When it is working picture is very good, digital quality. Recordings are just as good.
• Hooked aerial feed to computer room, signal too weak, black screen.
• Put booster amplifier in loft, signal strong enough again.
• WinTV2000 viewer app is crude and occasionally crashes. 64 channels (including radio) are chosen from a standard windows menu, too many options for screen so you have to scroll up and down. Argh. Channels are shown in random order.
• Comes with remote control. Set it to pause live TV and it worked. Couldn't figure out how to change channel or get out of live TV without rebooting the app.
• No real program planner in WinTV2000, just now and next when you change channel. Video recordings handled by entering time/channel in a seperate scheduler app. Primitive!
• Nero Home doesn't recognise WinTV box.
• Tried box in desktop PC and doesn't work. Only finds a few channels and it refuses to display them, even side-by-side with working laptop. It is hooked to USB 2.0 add-in card. Very annoying as desktop would be better for recording/media centre duties.
• After much research, downloaded Meedio a media centre app. Had trouble getting it working, only worked if I ran it after running WinTV2000.
• Meedio insists on showing 16:9 images on full 4:3 screen, fiddled with settings, no difference.
• Meedio TV playback stuttered a bit.
• Meedio is supposed to scoop program planner from the freeview signals but failed to do so.
• Has to be the most annoying application I have ever used. Designed to be used on TV so uses huge fonts meaning menus can only show five items at a time: there are invariably six items total and I want the sixth so have to scroll. Every time you click on something it plays a silly sound which is sooo grating. You can only disable sounds by fiddling in obscure plugin settings.
• Whenever I plug WinTV box into a different USB port, even on same pc, plug and play asks to install drivers. D410 has four USB ports (including docking station), desktop PC has four, so this is pretty tedious, especially as out of the docking station the D410 has no CD (e.g. when I was in the loft).

State of play:

• Doesn't work in desktop
• WinTV2000 is weak and crashes
• Meedio is annoying and has numerous problems to resolve.

Plans:

• Need to align aerial properly.
• Try ShowShifter
• Try gbpvr if I can bring myself to install .NET. Most of these things seem to use .NET so it may be unavoidable
• Try MythTV if I can stand the hastle of getting it to run on linux

Conclusion: sky+ is so good. If my experiences are anything to go by, the pc world still has some catching up to do.

Is it possible to spell Hauppauge correctly without having to cut and paste? How to pronounce it? What were they thinking? Tip for the day: make it your password. Even if someone guesses it, they won't be able to spell it.

Update: attempt to install gbpvr and get

Not only is the error message completely useless to anyone without access to the source code, you cannot even copy it into google to search for it.

Update 2: it turns out that this error means "You haven't installed the .NET runtime you moron".

gbpvr running fine and looks much better than anything else.

How to watch tv anywhere in the house?

1) Capture sound/pictures from tv to a pc and stream them round the house via wifi.

2) walk around house with gorgeous d410 laptop.

3) enjoy.

No more messing around with tv cables in the attic.

Problems:

• how to change channel?
• why didn't I think of this before?

Watching the BBC news on Sky+ with the subtitles turned on. The subtitles appear a short time after the newsreader has spoken them and always appear a whole word at a time: it doesn't look like someone typing at a keyboard.

Newsreader

"The owner of a hotel..."

Subtitles

"Fiona of a hotel..."

It looks like it is using voice recognition, would an expert real-time subtitle typist make a mistake like that? But, on the other hand, is voice recognition software that good now, even with the resources of the BBC?

A few times a week our Sky Plus box is dying with a message to say 'There is a technical fault on this channel, please try later' (or words to that effect).

I have been doing the full system reset up till now but that takes a few minutes. I found a quicker way to do it today:

• enter service menu (Services, 4, 0, 1, Select)
• Sky+ Planner Rebuild
• wait a minute or two while the screen goes black and it feigns death
• enjoy more big brother

It still takes a minute or two but you can do it from the remote (e.g. laying in bed), you don't have to pull the power.

I was fast forwarding through the ads in Big Brother and the Sky Plus box just crashed. It refused to come up again, even when removing and restoring power.

I have seen something like this before so I followed the force firmware download: hold backup button while applying power until lights start flashing, then release button and wait. It takes a few minutes to finish and is a little nerve-racking but it does the trick. I think my box has a problem where I have to force firmware download every time it loses power.

As it was we missed most of Saskia's eviction interview At least we got to see her evicted

I had Ubuntu Linux running on a server box, an old pentium 333MHz with a couple of hundred megs of memory, reserving my main desktop pc, 1.5G, 512M ram for windows. As the server was on all the time I got in the habit of banging shift and using that rather than booting the windows box.

Today I decided this was a waste of the faster pc so I installed Ubuntu on it, on a second hard disk (the old 40M disk I took out of my Sky Plus box). It goes much faster, Gnome is usable, I'm posting this through it (via Squid). I can reboot into windows whenever I want to fiddle with USB perihperals that don't have linux drivers (scanners etc).

Only problem is that it is quite noisy. Stalling the CPU fan with a finger makes it much quieter so I may spend £7 or so on a CPU fan that generates <20db.

The program planner on my Sky Plus box had not been showing future schedules for a few days so I decided to power-cycle to force the listings to be downloaded. Alarmingly, after the power cycle the box would not reboot. Trying not to panic I checked this article and decided to do the force reset. This took a few minutes but it did work and Sky was back and the recorded programs were still there. Phew.

I've heard that replacement hard-disks can be a problem if they do not spin up fast enough. I'm wondering if the replacement Western Digital WD800BB-75DKA0 doesn't boot fast enough but forcing a firmware download makes the firmware come up after the disk is already spinning. Just a theory but enough for me to avoid Western Digital if I was changing the disk again.

I could do with a TV in my computer room. I have my old Gentoo server and a Pinnacle TV card sitting idle. I thought I would try just booting a Knoppix CD and seeing what I got. It booted ok and looking through the multimedia applications I found Xawtv, a TV application. It had a good go at searching for TV channels but it didn't find any. I faffed about for a while, setting up different types of TV card and tuner chipsets, but no joy. It didn't tell me it was broken but it didn't work either, all I got was a black TV shaped window with some noisy coloured pixels at the top. It my well be because of the aerial connection (in fact driven from my Sky Plus box downstairs, via a booster/distributor box) but it's too much hastle to grab a portable TV and check that out.

Knoppix: Works nicely. Possibly a good replacement for Gentoo as long as it has good package support.

Update: spent the afternoon on this and here are the conclusions:

• The card is a Pinnacle PCTV Rave
• It uses the MT2050 tuner chip which is not supported by the bttv drivers on the version of Knoppix I am using (17-7-04).
• Patches exist but not sure they will work on a live CD. I'll try latest Knoppix before installing something properly.

Update:

The tuner works with Knoppix 3.6 (2004-8-16) running the 2.6 kernel (i.e. with the boot option 'knoppix26). The picture is very noisy, looks like a lot of processor noise. I'm thinking of installing properly, rather than just using a live cd. Choice of distribution? Knoppix, Debian, Ubuntu...

Today's tip is for Sky plus users, it's something my wife found by accident. If you press and hold the fast-forward button for a few seconds the fast forward will leap to the end of the recording. Similarly, holding the rewind button will jump to the start of the recording.

This is the kind of feature that is either occasionally useful or occasionally annoying: leaping to the start or end of a recording by accident means you have to rewind/fast forward back where you started from.

My wife was fast-forwarding through the adverts while watching Family Affairs and through some finger trouble managed to crash the Sky Plus box so hard that even power-cycling would not bring it back.

I searched my Sky Plus entries on this site and tried the force reset of pressing the 'backup' button while power cycling. This forced a firmware download and after a worrying delay the box came back to life. It had even kept it's old recordings. Phew.

Only yesterday Sky rang me, trying to sell extended guarantee. I told them I wasn't interested as I had already fixed my box once. Coincidence?

Apart from this glitch the box is still working fine.

I got the key magic codes to program up the play, pause, fast forward, rewind and record buttons of my One4All four (URC 7740). By default these buttons are programmed up for things like 'Box Office', 'Services' etc. Any Sky Plus user will tell you that Play, Pause and Fast Forward are far more useful. There aren't enough buttons on the remote for it to do everything. I might be able to program up a different device code (e.g. use DVD for sky plus and program the buttons differently) but I can't be bothered. Now I won't have to keep the real Sky Plus remote with me just to record programs.

The instructions to reprogram the buttons are:

1. Press the relevant device key

2. Press and hold the MAGIC key until the red light flashes twice.

3. Press 9 9 4. The red-light flashes twice

4. Press the MAGIC key once.

5. Enter the 5-digit function code (provided by customer service, where applicable).

6. Press the key, to which the function will be e.g. A.V. key, the red-light flashes twice.

The useful extra codes for device 1170 (Sky Plus) are:

 00243 Pause 00707 Play 00528 Record 00339 Search Forward 00683 Search Reverse 00526 Sky 

Installed a freeview box at mum's house. It was a Goodmans's thing, £55. This gives about 32 digital tv stations and a load of digital radio stations. Some observations:

• Installed very easily once I remembered to plug the aerial in.

• Came with a SCART cable so TV did not need tuning to the box.

• Was going in minutes

• Extra TV stations like ITV2, Sky news, etc. Not an amazing choice but ok for £55 downpayment and no monthly fees.

• Some stations like UK Gold, E4 and Discovery are in the program guide but you have to pay a monthly subscription.

• Picture was noticibly better quality: much crisper, better contrast, compared to old analogue signal.

• Picture is either 16:9 in 4:3 letterbox or 16:9 full screen. Hence on her 4:3 tv she has to use letterbox.

• Box locked up once while I was showing it to her: had to power cycle. Tried updating firmware but it already had the latest version. Taught mum how to power cycle, just in case.

Sky Plus box seems to be fine after hard disk upgrade. I've been away and we've only watched one episode of 'Family Affairs' but that had no problems at all. During the 30x fast forward the box used to stutter a bit, the poorer the recording the worse the stutter, sometimes pausing for a few seconds. Now the stutter is gone. The recording capacity has doubled, 2 films and 5x30 minute soaps use 15% of the disk space.

I bought a 512M Dimm for PC and plugged it in. No way will the PC recognise it as 512M, insists it is 256M. I tried:

• Flashing BIOS

• Swapping slots

• Putting in a company of 256 and 128M DIMMs

• Swearing at it

• Changing FSB from 133MHz to 100Mhz

• Trying a real video card with it's own memory instead of the on-board one that uses system ram.

No joy. For now I am living with 512M (real 256 + 1/2 512). I blame VIA for their naff chipsets, I kick myself for buying another one.

The playback of recordings on my Sky Plus box was seriously degrading: almost every recording had glitches where playback suddenly jumps back a few seconds and compression artifacts are all over the picture. At it's worst the sound goes or makes lots of noise. This was worse during a particularly dramatic episode of Family Affairs, spoiling my wife's veiwing pleasure.

So I've put the 80G hard disk from my old PC into it. For the record this is a Western Digital WD800BB-75DKA0. I took the following steps:

• Swapped disks

• Powered up box while holding down 'Backup' button on front panel. This caused a download of the firmware, giving an alarming 'Don't remove mains for at least 10 Minutes' display on the TV.

• After looking dead and ignoring the remote for a while it came to life and started downloading listings.

• Went to 'Services' menu and pressed 4 for the 'system setup' menu, '01 Select' for the secret housekeeping menu and 8 to reformat the hard disk.

• Box again went dead for a minute or so.

• On again, using remote, and downloaded listings.

• Turn to BBC 1, press live pause and marvel that it worked.

The secret with this is to stay calm and be patient when the box looks dead.

Now, fingers crossed that the drive lasts longer than the 6 days that the accursed IBM Deskstar survived (P366).

My phone contract was up for renewal after 12 months so I looked into my options. I ended up changing tariff to one that will cost me £16 a month instead of £30, I got a new nokia 6610i for £19.99 and I keep my year old 6610 as a spare. Over the next year I save £150 and I have a new phone. How do they make money on mobiles? New phone has a crappy camera but that's better than no camera.

I am a nokia loyalist: I had a Sony-Ericson T68i for a while but it had very poor reception and was very slow to use. I gave it to someone else and, embarassingly, it stopped working due to a generic problem that they moan about on the online forums.

Other savings:

• £9 for a 16" fan

• One-for-all 4 for £10

• 4 Lith-ion rechargable AAA batteries for £3

At dixons 1/2 price closing down sale.

One-for-all works fine with Sky+ and means just one remote by the bed. Ergonomically it is awful.

Dixons in town were having a closing down sale so I had a browse. They had a Packard Bell system without monitor for just under £130. It is a couple of year old Athlon 1.7GHz thing with DVD/CDR, 256M and 40G hard disk. It was cheap because it had some kind of traumatic accident and the case was severly bent. They told me it worked and gave me a 6 month guarantee so I bought it.

I have put it's guts into the case of my old desktop pc so it is now more presentable.

Pros:

• It feels much faster than my old system, and in fact any system i have used.

• Hopefully it won't lock up randomly like the old one: this is what made me lose confidence in the old system and not want to use it.

• It has freed up extra 128M memory and a CD/RW for my Gentoo box.

• I can build a cheap system with the bits left over for my mum. I can set it to PIO mode so it won't crash and it'll still be faster than what she's got.

• I have a spare Windows XP Home licence

• I have a spare 80G hard disk to fix my sky plus box with

• It's got a keyboard with lots of extra functions. I just found a function button where ctrl should be: function+left takes me to line start.

• Nice mouse

• Lots of software. Microsoft Zoo Tycoon!

Cons:

• Not the most high tech motherboard I could have bought (MS 6511). Still, I found a reference for it on the internet easy enough.

• Only 2 PCI slots: 1 after network card is put in. No ISA (rip).

• Probably USB 1.1 from it's vintage. I have a USB 2 card to put in but then all the PCI slots are gone.

• It starts up quite rapidly but it takes 30 seconds to shut down: very annoying when rebooting.

In a nutshell: I'm happy.

A footnote on why I use Windows and Gentoo. I think Windows is a good GUI and Linux is a good server. X apps are just not as slick as windows apps and setting up Windows server software is a nightmare of tree's and property pages (I'm talking Active Directory, Microsoft Exchange, ISS and ISA, I use them at work and I hate them all).

The IBM DeskStar hard disk I put in my Sky Plus box on Saturday has died (re: Sky Plus Repairs). It has gone into infinite recalibrate mode. I think this confirms the poor reputation of DeskStar hard disks and it does not surprise me that IBM got out of the hard disk market.

In my recollection I have bought three IBM products in my life:

• DeskStar hard disk

• A reconditioned ThinkPad (the butterfly keyboard kind) that spontaneously switches itself off (even when powered from the mains)

• A copy of OS/2. I found it slow and buggy and I went back to windows 3.1.

I'm sure this is just bad luck and many customers are happy with their fine products. I just hope they don't mess too much with linux.

Sky Plus is a wonderful combined satellite receiver and PVR box. It has dual satellite tuners so you can watch a recording while recording two other channels at the same time. Nice.

For a long time my box has been having problems playing back channels whereby the video would stutter, jump back a few seconds, forward again, show lots of compression artifacts and generally be annoying. I put this down to the hard disk failing and some internet research backed this theory up. The box takes a standard IDE drive and many people upgrade it to 120G for 60 hours of recording. The basic box has a 40G/20 hour capacity. I have not really wanted to spend the money on fixing the problem as I am mean, the problem wasn't too bad just irritating and I'm not really interested in having more than 20 hours recording (do people sit down for 60 hour playback binges?).

Last night watching EastEnders the playback was particularly bad and was spoiling my wifes enjoyment. On a flash of inspiration I remembered I had a largish hard disk from my desktop pc going spare, one I stopped using because of a major corruption that nearly lost me my wedding photos. I checked it out and it is indeed a 40G drive, an IBM Deskstar IC35L040AVER07-0 for the record.

The satellite box satellite box uses torx screws and I had a torx screwdriver so I wasn't too worried about doing the swap. The torx screwdriver didn't fit very well and the screws holding the drive in would not budge. I snapped a drill drilling the old screws out. I put the new drive in and did a system reset and it all seems to be working.

Time will tell whether it has solved the original problem or whether using a 7200rpm drive with dubious reliability is going to introduce more problems. Anyway, it was worth a try as the disk was lying around anyway.

Could go serial-ATA and put 80G hard disk in Sky+ box. It may be easier to find a Serial ATA add on board. Problem is I would still need flaky adapter for CD.

Watched 'The Tuxedo' starring Jackie Chan on Sky Box Office. Bisi didn't fall asleep till the end.

Reformatted Sky+ hard disk to try and fix degrading playback performance. If it doesn't work I'll try installing a big new hard disk.

Sky Plus box is playing up. Playback of recordings is terrible. I think it is the hard disk (hunch). I can stick a new disk in and get more capacity as well. Have to research this when I get my new broadband connection tomorrow