1 year.. no updates.. eek..

So I sign in today, to be greeted by Blogspot telling me I've been awol for an entire year. Zoinks!

While I'd like to claim I was kidnapped by aliens who needed a lot of floppy disks read, the truth is sadly less impressive.. I've been kidnapped by Canadians who want to learn how to pronounce 'soldering' correctly. Well, almost, I've emigrated to Canada, which is in no small part the reason for the lack of postings.

The good news is things are now settling down here, and I'm hoping soon to get back into working on the Pi+HD PVR code, and have a play around with some new shinies acquired this side of the pond.

Expect normal infrequent blog updates to resume in the nearish future!!

Playing with the Hauppauge Colossus..

I've been using the HD PVR usb unit a lot recently with the Raspberry Pi, but I recently found a great deal on a Hauppauge Colossus, which is like the PCI-e relation to the usb unit.. higher bitrates, no oddball stability issues like the usb unit had, but also sadly not going to work with a Pi..

I've used a Colossus in my HTPC since release, so I knew what to expect, but hit an interesting snag with the latest drivers Colossus_1_8_31093_WHQL.zip, which although adding some VERY interesting options to the format settings dialog, also seemed to remove any way to adjust the bitrate.

Thankfully, Hauppauge have been busy developing their own capture app, which does still have a bitrate control, and altering it there lets the value stick so Showbiz is able to use it. Not ideal.. but ok as a workaround for now.. I've emailed support to ask how it's supposed to work ;p

The new options dialog looks impressive, having video scaling, framerate scaling, source info, mpeg profile level, audio encoding options, and hardware info.. (I'll add a screenshot here once I've stopped my next test capture.. ).. I've not seen most of these on the dialog before, so they offer a lot more control than previously.

Why not just use the Hauppauge capture app ? because at least for me, recording 1080i with 2 channel audio meant huge audio breakups & video pausing while recording.. not great for a capture app. Plus no way to access those extra options! maybe they'll fix that later, but I get the feeling the app is aimed more at streaming captures of console gaming.

Raspberry Pi and the HD PVR.. streaming and recording, Part III

It's been a little under 2 months since I posted last, and I've been busy working on a new build of the code, with a web interface, and other such useful things. I kept meaning to post about it, but kept going back to add yet another little tweak.

So, finally, it's time to release the latest version! read on to find out how to use it..

Raspberry Pi and the HD PVR.. streaming and recording, Part II

It's working =)

Finally got to the bottom of the drop outs / glitches.. Some were my fault in the code, some were due to a dodgy cable feeding the HD PVR from the set top box. With the replacement cable in place, I had it stream for 12 hours straight with no reported dropouts.. that's close to a record for this unit =).

With the new cable in place however, I could still make it glitch, but only when recording.. the very time you didn't want glitches ;p This was while writing data to a network share, mounted via cifs, and the glitches became more frequent if the same network share was used via another client.. all of which got me thinking...

Raspberry Pi and the HD PVR.. streaming and recording

Success! sort of...

I've finished rebuilding the C app, to read from the HDPVR and offer the data via a simple HTTP interface, and embedded a little control to toggle recording on & off. With the HDPVR running around 8mbit, I'm able to stream to about 5 clients simultaneously, which is pretty good going.

The downside is dropouts are still present.. (Update: not anymore!!) I'm hoping its just the HDPVR's fault, as these units are known to glitch occasionally & require a reopen.. even so I'm not going to call it a day yet, I'll have a bash at compiling MythTV and seeing how it's recording code gets on with the device.

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..

Woodworking for the Software Engineer...

So.. I've been a bit busy recently, and the fun technical progress with arduinos, maples, serial FRAMs, and floppy autoloaders has been somewhat on hold.. plus there was that whole christmas thing ;p

What have I been up to ?

Then you put it back together..

It's done.. =)

I've completed reassembly of the CopyPro CP2000, with a new mainboard, consisting of a chunk of MDF, with an Arduino, Motor Board, Stripboard & breadboard, and Kryoflux attached to it..

All in the same space of the original..

First, you take it apart...

Well.. my little project to read in my entire Amiga Floppy archive took another step forward, when an Ebay search found a 'CopyPro 2000'.. leading to the purchase of a bunch of related bits & bobs..

So now I'm waiting on a motor controller, some connectors, stripboard, I've been slightly busy attempting to read datasheets..

What is a CopyPro 2000? why is it useful? Read on..

Arduinos Floppy Drives, and Maples..

Time for some serious geekery documenting =)

This tale starts with my other half getting intrigued by an arduino.. and picking up an Uno, with a whole exploratory box full of parts, and little projects to build. Then shortly after that, getting an arduino nano, and an ethernet module, with the aim of solving our garage door opening problems..

This led to me to start looking at arduinos & MIDI, and lcd's, and thus I ended up with an arduino Mega. Then I got a little sidetracked, and started looking at how to read floppy disks, and things just kinda spiralled from there..

Busy busy busy

Well.. life presses on.. and somehow I find it's almost a month since I posted here last..

I mean.. just how? it's not like I visited another planet, or entered a tech free lifestyle growing corn & making bread.. is it?

Well, here's some of what I've been up to..

Compressing Postcodes..

The UK has postcodes, which are of a similar purpose to zip codes in the US. You put a postcode, and a house number on an envelope, and in theory that's pretty much all that's needed to get the letter to the destination.

I've never really put much thought into how they were constructed, until I met a stack of data that was indexed using postcodes as the lookup, very handy, but it was causing the data size to exceed a limit which meant I couldn't embed the data into a blog post ;-)

I went hunting, and found a document explaining the structure here. I ran a quick scan over my data, discovering I had 121 postcode areas present in my list, some 129 sub bits of them, and some 4000 or so last bits =) Eg, PO1 3AX, PO being what I'd call an area, 1 being the sub bit, and 3AX being the last bit.

I started playing around a bit and here's what I ended up with...

on Hosting, and other such things..

I remember walking along the seafront, back in the mid 1990's, trying to explain these things called 'mp3s' to a few non technical friends. Attempting to explain that here's a way to fit an 'acceptable' quality version of an audio track into something that would fit on a couple of floppy disks. How important it was that the size was small enough to be transferable within an 'acceptable' timeframe, and that most people really didn't care for CD-quality (most of them still using cassette tape for Cars, Walkman's etc).

I remember saying this will really change things, that I wasn't sure how the music industry would cope with their content becoming available in the same way software was, with all the positives and negatives that brought with it.

Well.. here we are.. almost 20 years later, and there has been Winamp, Napster, Peer2Peer, Lawsuits, iTunes, YouTube... we're currently in a time where we are able to share information with millions of people, just by making a blog post, like this one.. so I figured I'd try hosting some of my music, and was a little surprised by the process.

Portable recording in stereo ?

I've got this other blog, where I wibble on about musical stuff, and after watching Dr Who the other night, I ended up with a nice enough bit of noise that some people might call it 'music'.

"Excellent!!" I thought.. "I shall share this with the entire world!!!"

Of course, that means somehow getting the noise from the piano, into the intertubes. I'm smart enough to know that my piano is a) digital, and b) has line out jacks. And I know I have a big pile of cables, some of which may even be adequate to use with said jacks.. I've also got a netbook thing, which has some sort of audio built in.

How hard can it be? about an hours worth harder than it should have been! There may have been simpler ways to do this.. but here's the tale of how I ended up sorting it out...