Raspberry Pi and the HD PVR.. coping with dropouts..

The HD PVR is a great bit of kit, but it does have one slight drawback.. it's either lazy, or it's easily distracted ;p You request data from it.. and wheee... it comes back in nice h264 format, great you think, and go make a cup of tea, bake some cookies, etc.. and come back to find the recording just.. stopped?!!

Read on for a quick guide of what I've tried so far.. and what hasn't worked ;p

Raspberry Pi and the HD PVR

I had a spare USB Hauppauge HD PVR, and a Raspberry Pi.. and had meant to get around to trying this for quite some time. There were even a few posts in the Hauppauge forums where people were wondering if the device would work well with the Pi.

The HD PVR is a component video capture device, good for up to 1080i, with optical or stereo audio input, it has a hardware encoder onboard, so the video is sent to the Pi already encoded as an h264 transport stream. I'm using the original HD PVR 1212 here, there are newer Gaming oriented versions, and an HD PVR2 now.. but I don't know the state of the linux drivers for those.

Once the Pi has the data, it can stream it, record it, or possibly use it as a tuner for a pvr backend.. Read on if you want to follow what I've tried so far..

Bye Bye Sky!

Its 2012.. and I'm swapping from satellite tv.. to cable tv.. why am I mumbling about this here? because there's a vaguely interesting story.. and possibly some useful info for any Sky users.

Reading the Sky Planner...

Easy one this.. Press Guide, then Green, and "Hey Presto" you are at your planner. Just use the old Mark One Eyeball to make sense of all that data.

Of course, if you want to do something with that data.. say track which Films you have recorded, how long they were, and how much space they took up.. you'll need to link the Mark One Eyeball to some form of data storage, ideally accessible as at least text.

After you've written down the content of your planner a few times, you'll realise that a) it's dull, and b) it's very dull. The solution is obviously to automate it.. but how??

WHS: The referenced account is locked out

After a brief, but entirely planned power outage that lasted for a good few hours, I discovered that the home PCs could no longer 'see' the home server.

Symptoms were an unhappy grey looking house in the systray, and any attempt to access the shares resulted in a cryptic message saying "the referenced account is locked out".. Remote desktop to the server worked, as did opening the server console.. 

Thankfully, there was a very easy fix...

Moving set top boxes..

My current Media PC records from 2 Freesat tuners, 2 Freeview tuners, and an HD Satellite Set Top box via a Hauppauge Colossus. This setup has served me well for quite a few years now, and there was no real reason to change it, until Cable broadband arrived in my area.

Why should Cable broadband mean changing the media pc? Well, the DSL line can only get 4mbps, which isn't a great speed, but Cable can offer me 50mbps. Once you pay the nice Cable people for a fast line like that, it doesn't become that much more to add Cable TV to the bill. And I kinda figured I'd add the Cable set top as a 6th tuner to the media pc...

Converting all my Amiga Disks..

The time has come to finally get rid of all my 3.5"DD floppy disks.. they are taking up valuable cupboard space that I need back for shinier and more recent items. I know that some of them have data on that I'd like to keep, source I wrote back in the late 80's / early 90's.. midi files, soundtracker / octamed tunes.. The problem is figuring out which disks..

You see since I stopped using the Amiga regularly (this sounds like a meeting of Amiga Anonymous, of which I'm sure there'd be many many members ;p).. I've "looked after" the disks by storing them in some large wooden crates, I've got 6 of these crates, each holding around 500 disks, plus a couple of large shoe boxes, and an old 80 capacity smoked plastic lid box, each crammed as full as can be.. all in all there's somewhere around 5000 disks.. That's rather a lot to go through.. especially when you didn't label many of them appropriately..