DVB-T Stuff (was Re: [plug] Re: Willing to sell your Wizard box?)

[Trevor Phillips]

On Tue, 24 Aug 2004 16:15:58 +0800, Michael Hunt
<michael at aussie.oddsocks.net> wrote:
>
> So how are things going with the DVB-T card ??? What in particular has
> won your wife over ??? The TV in my study died just before the olympics
> started and the idea of a TV card was floated but promptlyt sunk due to
> cost. :-)

*rofl*
Well, first I struggled with bleeding edge drivers for over a week,
even resorted to Windows to test the hardware for a while (and boy is
the AVerMedia Windows software crappy!). I think I've recompiled
kernels more in the past week than I have the rest of my life! ^_^

Eventually (ie; yesterday) got the drivers loaded, and a frequency
tuned and locked! Yay!

Then the dvbstream app (and mplayer similarly) refused to tune to the
same frequencies. Last night I got it semi-working by running tzap &
dvbstream at the same time - tzap to tune the frequency, and dvbstream
to grab the feed. Except it was Anamorphic-squished, and wouldn't
scale at all.

This morning before work I threw together a shell script to take a
channel name, dissect the channels.conf, and pass the various params
to tzap & dvbstream, so I have a command-line way of triggering
playback (or recording) of a specific channel. At that time, I
couldn't get channels 9 or SBS though - because the storm last night
blew our aerial over!! ;_;

>From work, a little while ago, I VNC'ed in, and tried "xine dvb://" -
and it worked!! So Xine can happily tune & play back. Although
watching TV over VNC is, uh, a little jerky. ^_^;;

So I have the basics working, and now I have to figure out where to go
from here. The box was mostly a dedicated Freevo box - but MythTV has
some really nice TV features! I'll give Freevo a go with the TV-side &
see how it goes.

So, outstanding issues include:
  *Freevo vs MythTV vs other
  *Solving the dvbstream/mplayer frequency tune problem
  *Trying to get the included IR Remote working
  *What to do about 4:3 shows from a 16:9 feed, on a 4:3 television.
(ie; black borders all 'round!). I'll see if I can hotkey a zoom/crop
option. Or look for a cheap widescreen TV (any recommendations?
Sub-$1000?)
  *Clearing disk space for recorded programs & time-shift buffer
  *Fixing sound for HD feeds (haven't looked too much at this issue)
  *Fixing my Roof Antenna

^_^

The picture is very nice though. Although crystal-clear widescreen
"The Wiggles" is rather disturbing...

-- 
Trevor Phillips  - http://jurai.murdoch.edu.au/
Web Technical Administrator  -  IT Services, Murdoch University
"On nights such as this, evil deeds are done. And good deeds, of
course. But mostly evil, on the whole."
      -- (Terry Pratchett, Wyrd Sisters)