There were a few emails asking for details on how tvtime was up and running...
I posted the same on ubuntu forums...
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=626780&highlight=intex
Friday, November 30, 2007
Tivo, nero and my mythtv progress
First, I made decent progress towards my goal of getting mythTV up and running. I had to painstakingly feed in every frequency number of every channel into mythTV (since it still doesnt seem to have a frequency scanner and India doesnt have standard frequencies for cable TV). Once I did that, I am able to flip and tune channels. More importantly, I can now pause live TV :))) Way to go! I am going to watch the second day of the Indo Pak test tomorrow on my mythTV setup. Not going to miss one bit of the action :)
Next and final step towards finishing the basic goal is now to get mythTV to see my xmlTV feed for India. Thats for the weekend. When I do that, I promise another bunch of screenshots and a video showing me playing around with my own DVR. :)
On a separate note, TiVO is going to hit the PC... check this out: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2704,2223963,00.asp
Next and final step towards finishing the basic goal is now to get mythTV to see my xmlTV feed for India. Thats for the weekend. When I do that, I promise another bunch of screenshots and a video showing me playing around with my own DVR. :)
On a separate note, TiVO is going to hit the PC... check this out: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2704,2223963,00.asp
Thursday, November 29, 2007
tvtime running on ubuntu
I finally got this up and running. Required a whole day in front of the computer and on the net. Had to modify the drivers, recompile the kernel twice and finally got it to tune and play channels. I dont have to now shell out the 2200 bucks for a pinnacle card :)
The next challenge is to get myth TV to see all these channels and get xmlTV for India running. I already used tvxb to generate xmltv for a few channels. Now have to painfully go through all the channel websites to get epg data into xmltv for as many channels as possible.
Some screenshots in case the video is not clear:
vacation time!!!
After almost 2 years, I get to go on a long vacation. I have been using this time for so many things, from personal work I have ignored for quite some time to some experiments I have always wanted to do...
One of the things I always wanted to do was to get mythTV running on my pc at home. Having lost touch with active programming ever since ISB, this will hopefully help satisfy the urges of the engineer sleeping.
I have been running dualboot, XP and Ubuntu, Fiesty Fawn at home for quite some time now, preferring Ubuntu mostly because it boots up faster than XP and Firefox comes up much quicker than IE, saving me a lot of the little time I used to get outside work. Even though I have read good reviews of mythbuntu 7.10 on Gutsy Gibbon, I wanted to give compiling and installing mythTV myself first and go to the easier install of 7.10 only if I fail.
The first thing I had to do was to upgrade RAM and get a TV tuner card. While 256 MB should be good enough, I just thought I will upgrade anyway, given I may have to recompile the kernel and also wanted to keep listening to music and browse while I work at home. I have a P4 2.8G system, HP, bought almost 3 years ago. Surprisingly, its seems more than sufficient for most software I need even now, especially with the RAM upgrade to 1.2GB. I got 1GB DDR SDRAM for 2K.
Then possibly the most critical decision, the TV tuner card. I either needed to get a well known card that works well with mythTV and linux or take a risk with a cheaper card. Given that its very tough to get Hauppauge cards anywhere in India (unless you fork out 3K for the card or 10K for a MS MCE upgrade kit), I could pick between Pinnacle PCTV (2.2K) or Intex (only 850 Rs). Pinnacle and Intex are based on the Philips SAA713x chipset. Since the SAA was supported in linux, I got the intex model.
Possibly thats where I have made a mistake. The SAA7134 driver explicitly lists the Pinnacle model in the supported cards list in its driver source. But intex is nowhere to be seen. A little googling threw up one useful link: http://gentoo-wiki.com/HARDWARE_saa7134. This one listed the card and tuner numbers for Intex.
I am now trying various options for the card and tuner numbers to see if any of those will work for my card. Also modifying the driver since I did come close with some of the combinations. I will receive a Gutsy CD in 3-4 days and I am going keep trying until then. If I dont get this to work by then, I would have to fork out the 2.2K for the Pinnacle card and see if mythbuntu 7.10 will fix it for me. Given I want to do so much more with mythTV, especially figuring out xmlTV for the many channels, I hope I get over this step soon.
One of the things I always wanted to do was to get mythTV running on my pc at home. Having lost touch with active programming ever since ISB, this will hopefully help satisfy the urges of the engineer sleeping.
I have been running dualboot, XP and Ubuntu, Fiesty Fawn at home for quite some time now, preferring Ubuntu mostly because it boots up faster than XP and Firefox comes up much quicker than IE, saving me a lot of the little time I used to get outside work. Even though I have read good reviews of mythbuntu 7.10 on Gutsy Gibbon, I wanted to give compiling and installing mythTV myself first and go to the easier install of 7.10 only if I fail.
The first thing I had to do was to upgrade RAM and get a TV tuner card. While 256 MB should be good enough, I just thought I will upgrade anyway, given I may have to recompile the kernel and also wanted to keep listening to music and browse while I work at home. I have a P4 2.8G system, HP, bought almost 3 years ago. Surprisingly, its seems more than sufficient for most software I need even now, especially with the RAM upgrade to 1.2GB. I got 1GB DDR SDRAM for 2K.
Then possibly the most critical decision, the TV tuner card. I either needed to get a well known card that works well with mythTV and linux or take a risk with a cheaper card. Given that its very tough to get Hauppauge cards anywhere in India (unless you fork out 3K for the card or 10K for a MS MCE upgrade kit), I could pick between Pinnacle PCTV (2.2K) or Intex (only 850 Rs). Pinnacle and Intex are based on the Philips SAA713x chipset. Since the SAA was supported in linux, I got the intex model.
Possibly thats where I have made a mistake. The SAA7134 driver explicitly lists the Pinnacle model in the supported cards list in its driver source. But intex is nowhere to be seen. A little googling threw up one useful link: http://gentoo-wiki.com/HARDWARE_saa7134. This one listed the card and tuner numbers for Intex.
I am now trying various options for the card and tuner numbers to see if any of those will work for my card. Also modifying the driver since I did come close with some of the combinations. I will receive a Gutsy CD in 3-4 days and I am going keep trying until then. If I dont get this to work by then, I would have to fork out the 2.2K for the Pinnacle card and see if mythbuntu 7.10 will fix it for me. Given I want to do so much more with mythTV, especially figuring out xmlTV for the many channels, I hope I get over this step soon.
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