Freeview HD via DVB-T Tuner Card, Part 1

Drive by the need to test out a DVB-T capture card for future use in our HTPC (what's the point in having a fancy HDTV without access to HD broadcasts right?), and the desire to replace the 14" CRT TV in my room with something at least slightly more modern, I realised that with all the spare hardware I have, I might as well order up a card and get to it.

Based on my associate Troy's recommendation, I ordered the Hauppauge HVR-4000 Quad Mode tuner card. I got mine from Playtech, where they retail for a little over $200 inc GST. The spec page listed above tells the whole story, but basically it's a PCI card with analog TV, DVB-S (satellite), DVB-T and FM tuners. It comes bundled with Cyberlink PowerCinema software, FM antenna, IR receiver and a Microsoft Media Center clone remote. Batteries ARE in fact included.

First up: it's handy to be aware of some of the local resources available, these will prove invaluable if you run into problems. Geekzone has a fairly busy forum based around DVB-S and DVB-T matters in NZ, with a pretty good signal-to-noise ratio for the most part. Fossie, one of the big posters on the Geekzone forums has put all his info on his blog, and is keeping it updated. This page is very valuable. Cranz has a very detailed site on how to setup MediaPortal. I plodded through it myself, but I link it for reference of others. It's fairly straightforward if you're technically minded and have at least some idea of installing and configuring new hardware.

Current test hardware is an entry level box with:

*ASUS M2N-MX SE Motherboard
-nForce 430 Chipset with GeForce6100 VGA onboard
*AMD Semperon 3200+
-1.8GHz
*1GB DDR2
-PC2-5300 @ 333MHz
*80GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 SATA HDD
*XFX GeForce 7600GS 256MB Dual DVI+TV PCI-E card
*Philips 190C 19" LCD @ 1280x1024

Software:
*Windows XP Pro SP3
*Cyberlink PowerCinema (comes with the Hauppage Card)
*MediaPortal
*GB-PVR

Results so far:

*Trying to use onboard video is fruitless. Even cranking it up to 256MB, pointless. You can just get 720p streams to play, but they are jittery as hell. the 1080i of TV3, no way. Usually results in a lockup.

*With the 7600GS - joy, it works, sometimes a very very slight jitter, but it varies from channel to channel. Long and the short of the above two points, you need a card with good H.264 decoding skills.

*PowerCinema wont give me the AAC LATM sound for some reason. Also, it's a piece of shit, but at least it seems snappier than the other two.

*GB-PVR is a piece of shit. Complex to configure, barely documented, works in a generally stupid way.

*MediaPortal is better, but still a bit tricky to setup, but at least it's got better documentation and a wider community.

*EPG (Electronic Programme Guide). This is the KILLER app of any PVR. Not knowing when shows are on SUCKS for recording purposes, and most PVR software makes it hard for you to record anything unless it's in your guide. The advantage of digital TV is that the guide is built in along with the signal, unlike analog TV, which is a stone cold bitch to get a solid, stable guide source for. In fact, it's unsupported by any official channels here in NZ, and many other places. Thanks Microsoft (and HP/Dell etc) for selling us products we can't make full use of here! Anyway, I digress....with digital TV, you tell your capture card to grab the EPG over-the-air, and all is well in the world! :D Apart from the fact that the quality and depth of detail varies greatly, but I can only hope this improves with time.

*The UI of all 3 bits of software, at default skin settings, are all ugly as fucking sin. Cheap rip offs of WinMCE, which at least as some kind of slickness to it. MediaPortal is your best bet here with a far wider skin range.

*If you're installing on Windows XP, you need THIS hotfix. In WinMCE it's included in a rollup, but not on XPSP2. Note, I used a particular version because doing it the standard way will result in the updated file being replaced by the old version thanks to Windows trying to be secure. :) Once I find the page that told me how to do that again, I'll link it later.

*Codecs: you need to be able to support H.264 and AAC LATM audio.


Next steps: Trying same DVB-T card and 7600GS in more powerful hardware, recording, and trying to wrangle Windows Media Center (XP and Vista versions), and some kind of linux PVR setup into playing the game. Also, remotes, but this should be trivial. I have both the remote that came with the Hauppage (MS clone), and a genuine Microsoft MCE remote here. That, and I've already tried the MS one with MediaPortal, as it has the best support templates it seems.

My personal Firefox hacking

Purely for my own future reference. Use at your own risk!

Bringing Alt-S back!
Modify ui.key.chromeAccess to 5
Modify ui.key.contentAccess to 4

Tab behaviour.
browser.tabs.autoHide -> false
browser.tabs.closeButtons -> 3
browser.tabs.loadBookmarksInBackground -> true
browser.tabs.loadDivertedInBackground -> true
browser.search.openintab -> true

95bFM Summer Series Calendar Feeds

XML
iCal

With summer in full-swing, it's time to get ready for our annual Summer Series, and this year's series promises not to disappoint! With a licensed bar, food and market stalls, kids entertainment and more, there's no reason to miss our first installment of Summer Series 2008!

The first concert of the Summer Series kicks off at Albert Park on Sunday, February 10th from 12pm-7pm with the following fantastic acts:

SJD
The Coshercot Honeys
Unity Pacific
The Shades
Sonz Of Zion
Lawrence Arabia
Timmy Schumacher & MC Kyla

Our second series is also in Albert Park, on Sunday, March 2nd, from 12pm-7pm and the line-up is as follows:

Tyra & The Tornadoes
MC Tiki
Family Cactus
Scribe
An Emerald City
Bulletproof & MC Twincam
New Telepathics

And last but certainly not least, the series will come to a close on Sunday, March 16th from 1pm to 5pm – at Henderson Park in Waitakere.

Tenement Yard
The Managers
Batucada Sound Machine
State Of Mind

Renaissance loses exclusive Apple distribution rights

Suck it you fucks!

Shares in computer distributor Renaissance Corporation have tumbled after the company announced today the immediate loss of exclusivity of distribution rights for Apple products including the hugely popular iPod.

Renaissance shares slumped 12 cents to 58c on the news.

The changes to Apple's New Zealand supply agreements had been foreshadowed last year, but were spelt out by Renaissance today - including likely falls in sales and profits from distribution of Apple goods.

!!!!!!!

10 years after last dealing with them in any major form, my hatred still burns strong. nuke 'em from orbit! i'm shocked they lasted this long.

to elaborate, company i worked for had a huge number of schools pretty much locked in to buying from us in the late 90's. at the time, ren were the only place in town to get compaq gear at academic pricing.

as you'd expect, they pushed HARD to get in. massive pre-sales support, sending reps out to help with presenting to principals/board, loaner/demo equipment, the lot.

yet the problem we struck was as a small business (3 guys plus admin lady), was that our school rollouts were quite intensive. huge amounts of software to install and config, big physical rollouts, and then professional development for the staff. now of course, we couldn't invoice until it was ALL done, pushing us out past normal 30 day credit terms. as a small business, we simply didn't have the kind of cashflow to carry a 100-150k worth of invoice.

everyone else, including places like tech pac/ingram were more than happy to bend over BACKWARDS, 60, 90, 120 days, whatever you like. they realised that all our clients (and not just us, other companies in our market) were getting in at ground level in an area where clients were going from NO IT system to a full on ground up solution. they WANTED their brands in there from the start. hell, we had canon throw down 30 bubblejets once for one single client, just because they wanted them to like them and come back when their photocopier lease rolled over.

now we don't expect our business to be propped up by another, but we (and others) were developing a client purchasing and skill base from NOTHING. most of my old clients (including my current school) started buying anywhere from 6 to 50 PC's, and are now rolling over anywhere from 70 to 250 on 3 yearly cycles. sure, that may be a drop in the bucket compared to corporate accounts.....but hey, whatever.


see, yes, i am bitter actually! how overjoyed we were the day news came down that tech pac would now be doing compaq academic. we took great pleasure in ringing our account manager, canceling the order for 30x 2.5k desktops and 30 x 3.5k laptops we had just faxed through about 2 hours prior and telling them to fuck off.

even tho i'm not in that game anymore, i feel the same joy today! :>

xp/2k3 automatic update restart nagging

start > run > net stop "automatic updates"

transferring your putty settings

Click!

autostitch

i often get asked if i know any good panorama stitching software. well yes, yes i do. autostitch. the work of a pair of University of British Columbia researchers, it claims to be "the world's first fully automatic 2D image stitcher. Capable of stitching full view panoramas without any user input whatsoever". and it's DAMN impressive. check out the free demo version to see how good it is.

here's some i whipped up some time ago:

making thunderbird behave better 2: electric boogaloo

Thunderbird works best with Gmail IMAP after a few tweaks.

Link

Expose for Vista

http://insentient.net/Index.html

making thunderbird behave better with attachements

To make Thunderbird download attachments quicker, and to make it stop fucking corrupting downloads, go to the config (Options -> Advanced -> Config Editor), search for "chunks", and change "mail.server.default.fetch_by_chunks" from true to false. Restart Thunderbird.

This wont change messages already downloaded (attachments will still be fucked). I deleted my local cache of mail and restarted so it would re-download the messages.

Attachments seemed to download a lot faster, and attachments have been opening fine.

Link 1
Link 2
Link 3

Just leveraged the power of Google Calendar to setup some calendar sync feeds for my niglets over at Tag Promotions. Spits out feeds in Google Cal, iCal and XML/RSS. Nifty.

http://tagpromotions.co.nz/feeds/