[clug] is it me or transact?

[Alastair D'Silva]

On Tue, 2004-07-27 at 11:56, david at qednet.biz wrote:
> off-topic but related...
> 
> Is anybody watching local (Canberra) digital TV with a digital RF card? If
> so what cards? What hassles?
> 

I'm using a pair of Avermedia DVB-T cards and MythTV. Sensitivity kinda
sucks, so I'm feeding them with the biggest antenna I could get in, and
a signal amplifier/splitter.

MythTV is still somewhat buggy - the backend has a tendancy to randomly
crash, so I have a cron job that checks it and restarts it if necessary.

MythTV depends on XMLTV, which in turn requires a third party module to
work for Australian TV (tv_grab_au). The publically available one is
0.5, which works with Yahoo. The old version (0.1) was yanked due to
much bitching by eBroadcast, but is superior as it gives your program
descriptions, categories, etc. eBroadcast have since altered their
format, rendering it useless, but I've patched a version myself if
anyone wants it.

Setting up MythTV for DVB is a bit of a pain - I suggest contacting me
if you are going to do it and I'll provide you with a dump of my
channels table.

The recorded files are raw MPEG2 streams, so you can throw that at
pretty much any client under the sun. MythTV (obviously), Windows Media
Player, mplayer, Xbox media center (damn American spelling), etc all
play it without any problems.

If you want to decode HDTV, you need a *lot* of grunt. From what I've
heard, you'll need around a 3GHz machine to decode it pureply in
software. Of course, overclocked Celery's are cheap, and video
compression/decompression isn't greatly disadvantaged by the smaller
cache.

Oh, and . . . the more RAM the better. Especially if you want to
transcode video.


PS. I can supply the cards, signal splitters, antennas, etc if you want
to play with it yourself.

PPS. Bob, could you contact me off list for the Xbox eject fix? I've
lost your contact details.


-- 
Alastair D'Silva		mob: 0423 762 819
Networking Consultant		fax: 0433 141 032
New Millennium Networking	web: http://www.newmillennium.net.au