January 2007 Archives

Well, tonights experiment has shown that a 1GHz Via EPIA-M motherboard with 512MB RAM/200GB IDE HD isn't quite fast enough to run MythTV with a USB2 DVB-T stick on a 1280x768 screen. It's close, but there are too many noticeable wibbles in the display. Stock Debian etch install with MythTV packages from http://www.debian-multimedia.org/. Back to VDR it is, until I get round to buying a Core 2 Duo based box.

Speaking of which, does anyone have any recommendations for a HTPC case? I currently have a Silverstone LC02, which is nice but I'd need a new riser card to cope with a ADD2 DVI card and a bit more room internally would be nice. I'd love an Antec Fusion but it's just slightly too wide to fit into my TV unit. The Silverstone GD01 looks pretty good, but is about twice the price of the Antec. sigh.

When I built my PVR a few years I bought a OneForAll URC-7562 6in1 remote control; with a surround sound amp, TV, NTL cable box, DVD and PVR the number of remotes around the place was getting a bit ridiculous. The main reason for choosing this remote was its ability to control the NTL box, which uses some odd IrDA based format apparently that even lirc has difficulty making sense of and learning remotes mostly ignore. It also had the ability to be upgraded remotely by phoning up a support line and they'd squirt some noise down the phone that the remote would understand. I had call to use this to enable my Scan DVD player when I first got the remote and it worked fine and I was quite impressed.

However the remote also features another neat way to do upgrades. It has a 6 pin header in the battery compartment that is know as the JP1. This exposes the I2C bus that the configuration EEPROM lives on and there is a good amount of information out there about understanding the memory layout and adding support for new remotes etc. I'd been meaning to build the adapter to connect up since getting the remote but until recently hadn't really had a reason. However although my new TV is vaguely supported I'd really like to be able to remap the keys more sanely. So last weekend I discovered I had the appropriate bits lying around and built one.

Unfortunately most of the software is for Windows; there's a Java app that will generate the appropriate data to feed to the remote, but the main communication tool is a Windows app. I found a couple of old Linux tools, but then I had a thought: it's just i2c. Why not tie it into the proper i2c subsystem? Turns out the i2c-parport driver makes this sort of thing easy; all you add is a single entry defining the appropriate parallel port lines to wiggle and it all magically works.

So now I can talk to my remote using the eeprom driver talking to the i2c subsystem which talks to the remote over the parallel port adaptor I built. Which feels wonderfully sick. :) Now I need to actually have a closer look at getting all the buttons working for my new TV...

Look, I know xkcd is great. I have the RSS feed hooked up to Liferea. I do not need people to continually produce blog posts with the latest cartoon in them. This seems to happen every bloody time there's a new cartoon, usually from at least 3 people (and not always the same ones).

I was pleased to recently discover that NTL are actually rolling out HD to non Telewest areas (somewhat belatedly; their press release here is from last November). I can't find any indication of when it might launch in Norwich, but there are various reports of people who have install dates lined up around the country, so I assume soon. All well and good. Until you realise that the only HD content they have is BBC HD (and some OnDemand stuff, but no idea what that is yet) - there's no agreement at present for the Sky HD content and no signs of one from the information I could find. Suddenly it doesn't really seem worth it; TV Drive looks like a nice PVR, but I've got one already TYVM.

Apparently it's a new year. I spent the first week of it in San Francisco, on honeymoon. I spent Christmas with my parents in NI. After ending up driving there (and getting the Holyhead/Dublin ferry) because I was flying home during the period when fog was affecting UK airports. FlyBE cancelled my flight from Norwich on the Thursday, but in their usual fashion it took them several hours after it was due to take off to do so. I hate that. They knew it was unlikely to take off when I was checking in, they cancelled all other flights around it but they kept the Dublin flight until the last minute. I think this is because it had the most people on it and they wanted to try to avoid having to refund people, but it would have been much easier for those of us supposed to be travelling on it if they'd just accepted their losses earlier.

Not a lot happening so far this year aside from the trip to the US. I'm without car (Katherine brings it back tomorrow - we flew from Belfast to Heathrow to get the flight to San Francisco so the car got left at my parents'). I might have bought a 32" HD LCD TV, but more on that if it actually arrives. James Puderer sent me a patch for supporting the Dream Cheeky USB missile launcher as well as the M&S one already in usblauncher. Get version 0.0.3 here if you have one of these.

A belated Happy New Year, folks.