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.