Making a Television

Posted on 2003/02/18 17:36:18 (February 2003).

It always seems to be that I have the greatest enthusiasm for new projects when I don't have any time for them. This is a perfect example - I have decided I want to make a television. OK well that's not strictly true, I'm not going to be doing any soldering or fiddling about with any electronics. It's all in software. Over a year ago now I bought a Hauppauge WinTV Nova-T card. With all the scope for bells and whistles Digital TV offers I was looking forward to a great entertainment system. Sadly, it never quite materialised. As always seems to be the case (especially where TV cards are concerned), the software really badly lets down the hardware, and despite numerous requests Hauppauge have consistently refused to release an API for Windows. Odd, as with better software (which the open source community would no doubt develop for free given a chance) they'd be sure to sell more of their cards. Then I stumbled across the Linux DVB driver. So, under Linux the card could be programmed. Great I thought! It was far from easy to install, but I got there in the end. Given this API, surely someone must have already written a lovely little app that does everything I want. Not so. There's VDR which goes some of the way, but won't actually work with my particular type of card (it needs one of the "full featured" cards). I find it quite odd that given this API no-one has already written a decent Digital TV viewer under linux, especially given that there are freely available MPEG-2 video and audio decoders (libmpeg2 and libmad). So it looks like I'll have to write it all myself. Unfortunately I find Linux extremely awkward to develop for so it is a bit of an uphill struggle, and, as always seems to be the case, I don't really have the time.

I am interested to know if you have got anywhere with this. I have recently acquired a Nova-T (budget) card, and I'm currently using dvbstream piped to netcat, and then netcat piped to mplayer on the remote machine, which is horribly manual, and requires me to look up the channel parameters every time. So, I'm now thinking about how to go about writing a good set of tools for this. I, too, have little time on my hands.

Posted by Pete Ryland at 2003/05/19 15:24:57.

this is not a television, it is a lemon. the camel guide was good

Posted by mr.b at 2003/12/04 09:52:14.

From comment 1, Have you written a shell script to do all the piping? Maybe have a shell script for each channel..... i am no expert

Posted by Dylan at 2004/01/17 22:35:22.

From comment 1, Have you written a shell script to do all the piping? Maybe have a shell script for each channel..... i am no expert

Posted by Dylan at 2004/01/17 22:35:35.

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