Greetings TV junkies. I have recently made an update to my bash script used for executing Comskip under Wine in Linux and OS X.

Comskip scans H264 and Mpeg-2 files for commercial segments and outputs the information into a variety of formats for use in a number of PVR and encoding applications. Personally, I use SageTV under Linux and would recommend it whole-heartedly.

The improvements in this version of the script include the ability to change the number of total processes allowed to run based on file type. This is useful as H264 commercial detection takes more resources than Mpeg-2.

The comments in the script should provide enough guidance for usage.

Download here.

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In case you’ve been wondering, and I know you are all very concerned about this; CommandIR shipped me a replacement module which has solved my issues. It was simple to plug it in and have it work with Jaunty. They have great install instructions on their site as well. Thanks CommandIR!

I noticed an Engadget article this morning announcing the MPH TV service will first arrive in force in our nation’s capitol. I am excited about the prospect of creating an auto based DVR solution for the kiddos.  Anyone know of a standalone adapter with the Microtune MT2067?

Do you collect miscellaneous computer parts? Sometimes they actually come in handy! I found a HP eHome transceiver in my bin and hooked it up to the server and I now have 2 set top boxes firing again. It relieves some of the familial pressure, but I need to get all four set top boxes in rotation. Fortunately most of the recorded programming is OTA high definition, though.

I did receive a response back from CommandIR this morning, and I responded with an invitation to work together over the phone, irc, instant messaging, chat and any other form of real time communication I could think of. Let’s see if they respond favorably.

Unfortunately my Command IR II Internal has decided to go on the fritz. I have been working, VERY SLOWLY, with the CommandIR support person who will only deal via email even though I have called in as well.

In order to troubleshoot this problem I have installed multiple versions of Linux distributions and followed their instructions to the letter. I am now in search of another IR Blaster which doesn’t have SLOW or poor support options. This is a drastic difference compared to the comments they sent me last year when I purchased the unit and posted about it on this blog.

Janne’s HD PVR driver has been merged into the V4L-DVB tree. This means it will go into the mainline kernel and into distros as they are updated. Thanks to Janne and all the testers for their work in getting the device to a usable state! The release notes are below.

V4L2 Driver for the Hauppauge HD PVR usb capture device

From: Janne Grunau <j@jannau.net>

The device encodes component video up to 1080i to a MPEG-TS stream with
H.264 video and stereo AAC audio. Newer firmwares accept also AC3
(up to 5.1) audio over optical SPDIF without reencoding.
Firmware upgrade is unimplemeted but rather unimportant since
the firmware sits on a flash chip.

The I2C adapter to drive the integrated infrared receiver/sender is
currently disabled due to a conflict with cx18-based devices.

Hi there blogosphere, I am sorry I haven’t posted in a while. Things have, as of late, been running really well with SageTV but there’s been quite a few changes.

SageTV is in RC stages of its 6.5 version of the product. The biggest change for this version is the addition of their new HD-200 product support. This device is capable of playing back internet, local network, and SageTV fed content at resolutions of up to 1080p via component or HDMI. The internet and local aspects do not require the use of SageTV’s server component. I’ll go into more detail in a separate post. My home setup now has 6 HD extenders for watching TV. I recently removed my last PC being used for playback.

Aside from firmware issues which plague Windows users as well, my HDPVR has been running well in Linux. This device allows you to capture TV from component outputs up to 1080i on your cable or sat provider set top box. There are a few minor things to tweak when building the drivers. I will go into more detail, you guessed it, in a separate post.

HVR-1600 drivers have never been better! I use 3 of these PCI cards to capture OTA HD signals and standard definition cable box channels. I’ll cover recent changes in a separate post shortly. If you have this card, you’ll want to do a pull from v4l-dvb’s mercurial!

Lastly, in the next few days I will be setting up a method to automatically convert my favorite TV shows to iPod Touch format and mark chapters at commercial break points. The TV shows will be downloaded into iTunes via an RSS feed from a server on my local network. I’ll document the process and provide the scripts make this work.

Thanks for reading!

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Why o why would I do this to myself? The other day I decided it would be a good idea to update to the latest testing drivers for my HVR-1600 cards. Not the brightest move, for sure. Fortunately for me, Project Runway runs all the time. The wife was not to terribly pleased..

PS – Don’t do this during season premiere kickoff week either.

Over the weekend I decided to migrate from Ubuntu 64-bit to ArchLinux 64-bit. My reasoning was fairly simple. ArchLinux is designed to be a Linux distro which only includes what you need to run and you add on what you want to run.

My server sits in a dark room in the basement and all management is carried out via SSH on the console. As such I don’t make use of X, KDE/Gnome, and other packages. I also don’t want all of it installed for me either. When I finished the total footprint for the install was only 460MB!

The problem with running 64-bit is that SageTV is a 32-bit program. You need to install required 32-bit libraries for the application to function. Suffice it to say there is a solution and all the juicy details are after the break.

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I began installing 32-bit libraries via the pacman interface and after a few files, LDD was still not working right. In my search for the answer I stumbled upon a new project in the developer list. It seems that it is meeting with some resistance due to ArchLinux’s approach to the 64-bit OS, but I agree with its principles. Determined to make use of this, I uninstalled all previously installed libraries, added multilib to my repositories, and pulled down the 3 required libraries for SageTV to function. (glibc, gcc, zlib)

There are other libraries which are missing from the multilib repository. They are

libTSnative.so
libiec61883.so.0
libraw1394.so.8
libavc1394.so.0
librom1394.so.0

I have sent a note to Thomas asking for instructions on setting up the compile environment. Hopefully, I will be able to add them soon.

AOL released a new version of AIM Express to beta this week. Because it is a web application written in Adobe Flash, it runs great inside of WebView.

WebView is a WebKit (Safari) based page viewer which is configurable to load a single web page. I wrote this application to be able to tune into AOL Radio when it became available in Safari/WebKit. You can grab it here. Link to AIM Express is: http://o.aolcdn.com/aim/gromit/gm/aim_express/080815.1/WidgetMain.html

One of these days I’ll add back in the keyboard shortcuts for paste (if anyone besides me uses this thing) but for now use ctrl-click or right click in the preferences dialog to paste it in. WebView has been updated to version .2 to include Tiger support.

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