Navaho Gunleg

For the last couple of days (you might’ve noticed the lack of new posts here), I have been playing around with MythTV, the open source PVR. It is a very decent implementation too, allowing plugins for various additional functionality, such as an image gallery or the possibility to play your downloaded pr0n, err I mean, home-video recordings. There’s a news reader in it as well, so support for videologs would be a fairly trivial addition.

As MythTV is ’scalable’ (you don’t have to run it all on one machine), I have got one machine set-up upstairs to grab the TV signal, and use my laptop (connected to the A/V receiver in the living room) to watch TV. I have been watching the snooker championships on Eurosport using its timeshifting capabilities to pause whenever I needed to go to the toilet, and fast-forward whenever I encountered another damn commercial-break. The latest version in SVN even properly decodes the teletext signal of the Hauppauge PVR-150 that I use, so that’s pretty cool (it even records this signal, so one can even enable the subtitles while timeshifting).

I tried getting it to compile on the PS2 Linux Kit but, sadly, QT 3.2+ is required and that just won’t build libraries that do not make programs crash when you start them — varying from segmentation-faults to illegal instructions.

The lack of a recent compiler on the PS2 Linux Kit sucks ass too — I had to make some minor modifictions in MythTV’s code that GCC 2.95.2 didn’t really understand.

So that all kinda sucks. I might attempt a down-port to QT 2.1.0, which is available on the PS2. Then again, maybe I won’t.

Anyways, of course, I’ll be shoving all the PVR functionality into one big fat Intel or AMD based multimedia machine that’s gonna replace the DVD player, the tuner and VCR that currently occupy way too much space and use way too much electricity and are way obsolete anyways.

Now excuse while I go play and download some Wake On LAN utilities so I can boot that computer upstairs without having to leave my seat…

MythTV, PVR