Video killed the radio star

[nmg]

Soon after the garklet was born, a little over three years ago, ias sent me out with a shopping list, as follows:

• Lansinoh
• Cotton wool

I decided to get these from the big John Lewis in town, on the ostensible grounds that it was marginally closer to the car park than Boots. This also meant that I could browse the AV department. One thing lead to another, and I ended up leaving with the following items:

• Lansinoh
• Cotton wool
• A Humax 9200-T PVR

Apart from making a shopping basket that clearly shouts "new dad" (nipple cream + superfluous technology), the PVR has been a godsend, not least because we've been able to pause live TV when putting the garklet to bed. The garklet clearly now assumes that a) you can pause live TV, b) you can rewind live TV, and c) you can watch Chuggington at any time. When he's older, he'll probably disbelieve me when I tell about the days when there were only three channels. Maybe I should hang on to my nan's old channel-preset-less black and white portable?

Unfortunately, it's been starting to look a little tired. We'd missed the over-the-air updates to the PVR's software, so we don't have any nifty features like series link. It's also a royal pain to get data off the PVR; you can plug in a USB cable, but it perversely refuses to mount as a mass storage device, and the necessary client software is Windows-only, and both sluggish and error-prone. Most seriously, it has started to crash every couple of days, so there's no guarantee that recordings will actually happen.

I'd been eyeing up its successor, the 9300-T, on the grounds that a) it had an HDMI output (no more fuzzy SCART on the 1080p flatscreen) and b) it had a larger disc. ias expressed a few reservations, so I'd also looked at other devices (the Topfield PVR, for example).

julesfm pointed out that there was a third route, namely a tuner in a desktop computer. After playing with his EyeTV for a bit, I took the plunge with an EyeTV Diversity on a Mac Mini Server (lovely machine - 2.56GHz dual core with 2x500Gb discs and 4Gb RAM). This also has given us a DVD playing solution - something we've been missing since a Certain Toddler lost the remote for our DVD player.

So far, our experience has been pretty good (pattern-matching recording schedules are ace), but there have been a couple of hiccoughs which are probably worth documenting:

• EyeTV Remote. While EyeTV 3 has a reasonable ten foot interface, it seems a bit overkill to rely on a wireless keyboard and mouse to change channels on the TV. EyeTV comes with a fairly ugly but serviceable remote. What they don't make clear is that this doesn't speak to the Mac Mini, but to the IR receiver on the EyeTV tuner itself. Which is plugged into a USB port on the back of the Mac Mini. While I could stick it on a USB cable and have it draped over the front of the Mac Mini (Jules recommended cable ties), this offended my aesthetic sense.
• Apple Remote on Snow Leopard. In theory, you can also control EyeTV 3 using the standard Apple Remote (and who doesn't have three or four of these kicking about?) Unfortunately, Apple managed to break the Apple Remote for third party applications under Snow Leopard. There are a couple of workarounds, most notably those produced by IOSpirit: RemoteBuddy and Candelair. I've been using the former, having first tried the latter. Both worked well, but I was persuaded by the extra functionality of RemoteBuddy (namely the iPhone AJAX interface).
• No MHEG-5 support. This is a bit of a pain. MHEG-5 probably means nothing to most of you, but you've probably all come across the 'red button' services on Freeview; MHEG-5 is the data format that drives these services. Unfortunately, Elgato (the manufacturers of EyeTV) regard this as a legacy format, and have shown little interest in supporting it.
• No audio over HDMI. Again, this is a bit of a pain. The Mac Mini has both Mini-DVI and Apple Mini Display Port sockets, and you can get dongles for both to convert them to HDMI. Unfortunately, these only convert the picture, and not the sound. We've currently got the Mac Mini hooked up to the hifi on the grounds that I didn't want to run yet another cable to the TV (the Mini has digital optical out, so I could have plugged that directly into the TV had I the right cable, but still - two cables). The Apple Store in town were pretty useless, but I did find that Kanex are selling MDP to HDMI adapters with audio. They're out of stock on the digital optical adapter, but I've ordered the USB audio adapter and should hopefully find out how well it works before Christmas.

All in all, it seems pretty solid, but the hammering it'll get over Christmas will be the real test.

Comments

[rufusuk.livejournal.com]

I'll be very interested to hear how you guys get on, as this is what we're running as well, although with an EyeTV DTT rather than the Diversity (dunno if there's any difference there).

We had some problems initially when the Mac just completely failed to record stuff, and John ended up installing Cappuccino to prevent the Mac going in to any kind of sleep or standby mode. Since then it's been way more reliable, but we still get some oddities when it starts recording, but stops again immediately, leaving us with 0 seconds of our chosen show recorded. We haven't got to the bottom of that yet.

So we're still using our Sky+ as a backup, although we need to bite the bullet and cancel that, and rely on the BBC iPlayer instead I think. I'm toying with the idea of getting the Elgato FreeSat adapter at that point, and seeing if FreeSat is any more reliable than Freeview...

If you have or are considering an iPhone, the Rowmote Pro app is the best kind of remote control we've found for the setup, although it's still a bit more clumsy than a standard remote.

Keep us posted, will be great to share tips :)

[andrewducker]

I rather liked the Tivo I used to have. Having it built into the current cable box is very nice. Means I need a second box to play downloads though.

[tlrmx.org (from livejournal.com)]

Hanging on to the old TV set won't provide any opportunity to teach because it will simply stop working in a couple of years, of course you can hook it up to a modulator, but at that point it works like a really crappy tuner-less display, which also does not teach the lesson.

My solution is probably not suitable for even 1% of the population, I hand-rolled software to record DVB-T. As with a TIVO user, for me TV is now something that queues up over time and I watch whatever I want when I have free time, except in my case I can watch it on my laptop on a train. Right now, for example, there's a file named The_Simpsons-38327_018-20091125-1800-0.mpeg which is episode 18 of a season of The Simpsons recorded back in November. But at least if I miss a TV show it's because of a bug in /my/ software* and so there's no-one to blame but myself.

* Or rarely, because someone fucked up the metadata. That moment in Series 2 of The Wire when Officer Russell goes into the shipping container and sees what is inside? BBC 2 had been asserting that the current show was "BBC News" with the associated URI for two whole minutes by that point, so my software quite reasonably stopped recording. The BBC denied knowledge of any fault, even though presumably everyone with Freeview+ got burned the same way. But I ran tests for a month, way back when I wrote the metadata handler and concluded that the metadata is now more reliable than a TV Guide, overall.

[hsw.livejournal.com]

Alex has a setup involving a Mac Mini and Eye TV. You'd need to talk to him if you wanted to check if he's solved any of the problems you have had, but it's worked pretty well for us, once I got the hang of it. also, it lives in a cupboard with a Wii remote bluetooth remote, which confuses everyone, but means it's not accessible to the Boy.

H