Tech Toys
This is the first official entry at my blog. There was a dummy placeholder that I created to get the hang of GoDaddy's blog system so I could help a friend with his blog. This blog might be of more interest than the astrology one a certain Mr. Perry has directed people to.
Oh Boy, Toys!
My Christmas gift to myself this year was a cool tech toy, the HDHomeRun Networked Digital TV Tuner from SiiconDust . This little box hooks up to your TV antenna or cable and can receive either ATSC over the air signals or cable QAM signals. Living in a valley in Martinez there are no over the air signals but I do have Comcast cable. There are two tuners on the box and it is capable of sending two programs at once over the network for recording.
This is definitely a geek toy buy SiliconDust did have a booth a CES this year probably trying to drum up a deal with someone like Pinnacle or ATI, etc. for the box. The product arrived with no documentation or software but included a note to download software and instructions on the web site. I had already downloaded the Windows and Linux archives so was ready to go.
I already have a DVICO FusionHD Gold card on my video editing machine which can tune in QAM channels and I have been using it for around two years to record shows. The neat thing about the HDHomeRun is that other than recording two shows at once I will work in Linux and with my laptop. The unit is small and light so I can take it on the road with me. Not that I'm a big TV junkie but the networks tend to plot against us by putting there better shows up against each other so multiple recording options are nice. And I hate to watch commercials (more on that later). And yes it can work with a crossover cable so you don't necessarily need a network.
The downloadable software works on Windows requires .Net 2.0 which was already installed though I had to install it on my laptop and works with VideoLan. There is a button on the software which will bring up VideoLan and display the channel you have selected. Recording the show was a little trickier but mainly consisted of bringing up another instance of VLC and setting it to record the stream. Under Linux you compile the command line interface program and run it to control the device. However if you just want to record a show then you can just open VLC and set it to record then send the stream using the CLI.
My next exploit was to set up MythTV on my Linux box which it running Ubuntu 6.10. That was a bigger challenge than I expected. There is a bad problem with a lot of Linux developers: they love to write programs but pretty weak on writing documentation. They skip steps. Anyway after many installs uninstalls and perusing the net and trying to make sense out of Ubuntu's MythTV installation instructions (which I would call incomplete) I finally got it working.
Unfortunately I am a little underwhelmed. Maybe if I had a lot of shows to record it might be handy but most likely I will write my own little GUI to automate the scheduling of programs for recording. The FusionHD interface is relatively simple and straight forward and the HDHomeRun needs something similar. Installing MythTV is a bit more daunting than it needs to be but I can understand why they developed it that way.
Then today I decided to fix this box's Sun Java installation which never worked. After I record programs when I play them back on my 53" HD set I use my AVeL Linkplayer2. This machine already had the AVeL Linux server on it but it never ran because a conflict between 3 versions of Java on the system. In this case Ubuntu's quick little tutorial instructed me to do an additional command that select the Sun version as the default and AVeL's server worked fine. So does MythTV's so I have my choice of two servers from this machine.
Now about those commercials. One of the handy programs I have on Windows is HDTV2MPEG. This free little utility can scan an HD transport stream, find the commercials and select where they are for deletion. You can either delete what they've selected or check the areas around the commercials as the program can't detect HD commercials just 4:3 SD commercials. IOW, it scans for the pillarboxing. It is easy to cut out the few HD commercials if there are any. Run the program and you have a version without commercials. But wait there's more....
Turns out when you do those cuts then the MPEG timecode gets off. This can result in a long pause or sound being off sometimes after a commercial. The next solution is to run the resultant file through a QuickFix using the commercial program VideoReDo which is a very handy tool. This corrects the timecode.
A lot of work? Well one can always fast forward using the AVeL remote if you can figure out what percent of the file to skip over. With the HDTV2MPEG cut version sometimes just skipping 1% will take you beyond the commercial cut. After all who has an hour to waste when the content of a TV show is only 43 minutes?
Links to stuff mentioned:
HDHomeRun: http://www.silicondust.com/
FusionHD: http://www.dvico.com
AVeL Linkplayer2: http://www.iodata.com/usa/
HDTV2MPEG: http://www.eecs.umich.edu/~balazer/HDTVtoMPEG2/index.html
VideoReDo: http://videoredo.com
Oh Boy, Toys!
My Christmas gift to myself this year was a cool tech toy, the HDHomeRun Networked Digital TV Tuner from SiiconDust . This little box hooks up to your TV antenna or cable and can receive either ATSC over the air signals or cable QAM signals. Living in a valley in Martinez there are no over the air signals but I do have Comcast cable. There are two tuners on the box and it is capable of sending two programs at once over the network for recording.
This is definitely a geek toy buy SiliconDust did have a booth a CES this year probably trying to drum up a deal with someone like Pinnacle or ATI, etc. for the box. The product arrived with no documentation or software but included a note to download software and instructions on the web site. I had already downloaded the Windows and Linux archives so was ready to go.
I already have a DVICO FusionHD Gold card on my video editing machine which can tune in QAM channels and I have been using it for around two years to record shows. The neat thing about the HDHomeRun is that other than recording two shows at once I will work in Linux and with my laptop. The unit is small and light so I can take it on the road with me. Not that I'm a big TV junkie but the networks tend to plot against us by putting there better shows up against each other so multiple recording options are nice. And I hate to watch commercials (more on that later). And yes it can work with a crossover cable so you don't necessarily need a network.
The downloadable software works on Windows requires .Net 2.0 which was already installed though I had to install it on my laptop and works with VideoLan. There is a button on the software which will bring up VideoLan and display the channel you have selected. Recording the show was a little trickier but mainly consisted of bringing up another instance of VLC and setting it to record the stream. Under Linux you compile the command line interface program and run it to control the device. However if you just want to record a show then you can just open VLC and set it to record then send the stream using the CLI.
My next exploit was to set up MythTV on my Linux box which it running Ubuntu 6.10. That was a bigger challenge than I expected. There is a bad problem with a lot of Linux developers: they love to write programs but pretty weak on writing documentation. They skip steps. Anyway after many installs uninstalls and perusing the net and trying to make sense out of Ubuntu's MythTV installation instructions (which I would call incomplete) I finally got it working.
Unfortunately I am a little underwhelmed. Maybe if I had a lot of shows to record it might be handy but most likely I will write my own little GUI to automate the scheduling of programs for recording. The FusionHD interface is relatively simple and straight forward and the HDHomeRun needs something similar. Installing MythTV is a bit more daunting than it needs to be but I can understand why they developed it that way.
Then today I decided to fix this box's Sun Java installation which never worked. After I record programs when I play them back on my 53" HD set I use my AVeL Linkplayer2. This machine already had the AVeL Linux server on it but it never ran because a conflict between 3 versions of Java on the system. In this case Ubuntu's quick little tutorial instructed me to do an additional command that select the Sun version as the default and AVeL's server worked fine. So does MythTV's so I have my choice of two servers from this machine.
Now about those commercials. One of the handy programs I have on Windows is HDTV2MPEG. This free little utility can scan an HD transport stream, find the commercials and select where they are for deletion. You can either delete what they've selected or check the areas around the commercials as the program can't detect HD commercials just 4:3 SD commercials. IOW, it scans for the pillarboxing. It is easy to cut out the few HD commercials if there are any. Run the program and you have a version without commercials. But wait there's more....
Turns out when you do those cuts then the MPEG timecode gets off. This can result in a long pause or sound being off sometimes after a commercial. The next solution is to run the resultant file through a QuickFix using the commercial program VideoReDo which is a very handy tool. This corrects the timecode.
A lot of work? Well one can always fast forward using the AVeL remote if you can figure out what percent of the file to skip over. With the HDTV2MPEG cut version sometimes just skipping 1% will take you beyond the commercial cut. After all who has an hour to waste when the content of a TV show is only 43 minutes?
Links to stuff mentioned:
HDHomeRun: http://www.silicondust.com/
FusionHD: http://www.dvico.com
AVeL Linkplayer2: http://www.iodata.com/usa/
HDTV2MPEG: http://www.eecs.umich.edu/~balazer/HDTVtoMPEG2/index.html
VideoReDo: http://videoredo.com
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