04.16.07
Posted in HTPC at 8:51 pm by are
* First: I have a Kiss dp-558 with a modified firmware. This allows me to remotely (from my laptop) switch channels, and a lot more.
* Second: TV-Browser (http://www.tvbrowser.org/) is a TV-Guide. It’s incredibly cool, and has plugin support.
I have combined these two with the “Switch Plugin”. I can click on a channel and choose “Switch to” and my Kiss switches to the channel. But this isn’t what is so cool.
* The cool:
You can mark a program in TV-Browser with the “reminder plugin”. You then setup the plugin to send the reminded program to the “Switch plugin”. You mark all the programs you want to watch that evening…and then TV-Browser will change the channel automaticly when the program starts.
It’s the ultimate tool for the extreme lazy tv watcher.
Enjoy.
The Switch plugin in TV-Browser can execute an external program, so you don’t really need a Kiss, but anything that you can send command to…like a remote, will do.
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04.17.06
Posted in Programming, Linux, HTPC, Projects at 2:51 am by are
I upgraded MythTV from 0.17_cvs to 0.19 yesterday. It went smoothly, just a simple “emerge mythtv” and a long wait.
Well…it seemed smooth, until my pc hung and I had to reboot.
After it got up again, everything seemed fine, but when a recording started MythTV segfaulted. Now the hunt begins.
In the syslog I saw:
go7007: unsupported ioctl -1069263306
wis-sony-tuner: tuning to frequency 175.2500 (VHF_H)
Aha, something wrong with the new mythtv tuning…maybe. I tried the Plextor TV402 gorecord program (comes with the driver). It worked like a charm. So nothing wrong with the hardware or tvcard drivers. I’ll have to find out what the ioctl number means.
So I dive into the MythTV sourcecode. Looking at different files. Browsing the linux headers, and finally i find out that the macro _IOC_NR(nr) will decode the number. I then patch the go7007 (tvcard driver) code so the syslog output now is:
go7007: unsupported ioctl -1069263306, type: 86, nr: 54
wis-sony-tuner: tuning to frequency 175.2500 (VHF_H)
So, type 86 nr 54…is not supported. Maybe that’s why it segfaults.
I grep the mythtv sourcecode, but find nothing. I also start mythbackend with –verbose all. It seems it crashes directly after a sql query. hmm.
I then compile mythtv again, now in debugging mode.
I then start “gdb mythbackend”
After it crashes I type “trace” and get a backtrace of the calls. And voila…I see where it crashes.
MythTV has four recording profiles. In the frontend you can change their names…but if you do, mythtv does not work anymore, because the profilenames is hardcoded in the source. So changeing it back to the default profilenames, everything works again.
The mythtv bugreport is here: http://svn.mythtv.org/trac/ticket/1691
(And this was the short story. Finding out how to use gdb, and browse the linux source etc etc takes time…lots of it…and compiling mythtv is not a fast task…god bless distcc)
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04.06.06
Posted in Linux, Freevo, HTPC at 1:17 pm by are
The hot thing these days is HTPC. A pc in your livingroom that looks like a stereo hifi component, and you use it for playing music and movies etc.
The advanced users also use it to record tv-programmes.
My HTPC is not the kind that looks like a stereo component. This is because they are usually very small, and usually very noicy.
I sold the old MSI Mega 865 because it was noicy and it was so small I could not extend it (and the remote and FM radio did not work in linux). Now I got the “Arctic cooling Silentium 2″. I cannot hear it, and my livingroom is once again quiet.
Inside my HTPC i got:
*Intel(R) Celeron(R) CPU 2.40GHz (it’s cheap)
*400Gb Hdd
*450Gb external Hdd (usb)
*Plextor ConvertX TV402 external USB tv-tuner (works in linux)
*Zalman CNPS7700-Cu cpu fan (the biggest fan I have ever seen)
I use mythtv to capture tv-shows with the convertX, and Freevo for playing music and movies etc. Mythtv is only running the mythtvbackend that does the recording, while I use mythweb to schedule recordings.
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Posted in Linux, Freevo, HTPC at 1:02 pm by are
My old HTPC was a MSI Mega 865 but the support for Linux was crap. I eventually got the linux kernel to control the fans.
For those of you who has the MSI Mega 865 and uses Linux, here is how I got the fans to work:
The 865 uses the Super I/O smbusSMSC47M15x chipset. This is not supported by Linux. (at least not when I had it on 2.6.9 kernel)
Replace the /usr/src/linux/drivers/i2c/chips/smsc47m1.c with this file.
Then do:
echo 8 > /sys/bus/i2c/devices/1-0800/fan1_div
echo 8 > /sys/bus/i2c/devices/1-0800/fan2_div
echo 180 > /sys/bus/i2c/devices/1-0800/fan2_pwm
echo 210 > /sys/bus/i2c/devices/1-0800/fan1_pwm
and the fans will go really slow.
Do “cat /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THRM/temperature” to see the core temperature rise… 
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