Archive

DVB-T experiences

I recently purchased a Hauppauge WinTV HVR900 hybrid TV stick to check out what all the DVB-T hype is about. It is supported under Linux by the em2880-dvb module which is not (yet) part of the standard kernel. But it's easy enough to get it working and Markus is very helpful in answering questions on his FAQ Page. So after some glitches with the driver were resolved everything works just fine. I didn't try the analog part yet, I'm mainly interested in DVB-T for now.

However I found that the antenna it shipped with didn't receive all available channels and an active (amplified) antenna I tried didn't improve the situation much either. What finally worked is the cheapest of all solutions, an antenna made from a piece of coax cable as described here. Now the reception is fine and I get all channels in my area just fine. If you are located in the Nürnberg/Fürth/Erlangen area as well you can use this channels.conf as reference for your own experiments.

Next I wanted to get streaming over the network to work. The curse of too many computers at home. The easiest app seems to be dvbstream (site down?) by David Chapman, so I settled on this for now. One challange is that it's tuning capabilities are fairly limited when it comes to user comfort. So I wrote a little script that parses channels.conf and tunes dvbstream to the channel specified on the command line. Due to the limited sample I have, there is a bit of guesswork in the script. So if you find that things don't quite work for you, please let me now and I'll see if we can get it working for you as well.

I didn't quite get the result I wanted though. While streaming over the wire works just perfect, it seems like WLAN (802.11g) doesn't provide the enough bandwidth for the stream. Using UDP wors better than RTP but it's still not good enough to watch TV on the laptop. Which is surprising as the stream seems to have less than 500kb/s, which is well below the 54Mb/s 802.11g is supposed to provide.

Bb August 5 2006

My Mom's New Website

My mom is an artist doing pottery and paintings. She's just in the process of setting up a website to show off her work and to advertise her classes and exhibits. Not too much content yet, but you may want to check it out anyway...

(The site is in German, but you can still browse the images)

NCQ RPMs available again

Due to popular demand are the NCQ RPMs I built a while ago available for download again .

Bb 22:51, 6 March 2006 (CET)

A new Site, A new Design

With the move to a new provider I decided to change the backend of my site as well. It's no longer a BLOG stye, but I moved to a Wiki setup. As I don't update my site very often, I believe that this style will fit my needs better.

I tried to preserve most of the old content. At least the parts which I care about are still there. If you miss something, feel feel to drop me a note and I'll add it to the new site. The Articles and Projects links in the navigation bar on the left will take you there.

Thanks for visiting,
BB