[LINK] US going digital TV in 2009

[Craig Sanders]

On Mon, Mar 05, 2007 at 01:59:18PM +1100, Carl Makin wrote:
> I've got MythTV running on a 1Ghz AMD based Linux box using both a
> G5 iMac and an xbox as frontends.  The MythTV server has two cheap
> digital tv cards and can easily record two tv streams at the same time
> as it is serving 2 different video streams to the frontends.

i use vdr. mythtv didn't support DVB cards properly when i set it up.

i'm happy with it, except when i accidentally tell it to record Four
Corners starting at 8:30AM instead of PM, and it fills up my root
partition with gigabytes of ABC daytime children's TV. as i did this
morning.


myth's probably better on a machine plugged directly into a TV, vdr's
better on a back-end server. it can output direct to a TV, i just don't
have it set up that way.

> The biggest problem in Australia is the lack of decent electronic
> program guides.  You can purchase a subscription from IceTV or, as I'm
> doing, piggyback off the OzTivo group's collaborative effort.

i use tv_grab_au from http://immir.com/tv_grab_au

i've been using 1.41 since september - been working perfectly, the sites
it scrapes the data from must have given up trying to obfuscate the
data.

i just noticed that there's a new version 2.14 of tv_grab_au, i'll
check that out and maybe upgrade to it tonight.

anyway, once i've run the tv_grab_au script, i then feed the resulting
xmltv file into xml2vdr. that imports the EPG into VDR. i'm pretty sure
there's an also xmltv2myth and probably even an xmltv2topfield.

all this runs from cron once/day. works seamlessly. i don't even notice
it unless there's a problem, and haven't seen one of those since
September (when i had to upgrade the tv_grab_au script to cope with
changes made to the tv guide site).


> Actually my biggest problem now is how to upgrade the thing.  My wife  
> would kill me if it went away for any appreciable length of time!

debian.  apt-get.  upgrades work.  without breaking things.

ditto for ubuntu/kubuntu/etc..

craig

-- 
craig sanders <cas at taz.net.au>