I had a need at home to convert some out VHS movies to digital so I purchased myself a WinTV-PVR-150 MCE.  This would enable me to play video from a VCR, outputting via a SCART cable which split into composite video and audio.  Hardware encoding of the analogue signal enabled the captured input to easily be transfered to a digital file (mpeg2).  As usual from Hauppauge linux support is excellent with the card fully supported out of the box with Hardy.

To take the input from the card and save it into a file I simply needed to do:

     cat /dev/video /path/to/file

To switch between the various inputs on the card I need to use the following commands (v4l2-ctl is available in the ivtv-utils package):

     v4l2-ctl -i 0    for the tuner
     v4l2-ctl -i 1    for svideo
     v4l2-ctl -i 2    for composite

All in all I found the card very easy to use for my purpose, and will now be looking to use it within my Mythbuntu installation.

I’ve mentioned OpenSG on this blog.  It is a scene-graph based API I use at work for rendering of 3D scenes.  As part of these scenes you can create textures on these objects, which are basically pictures.  Well my co-worker, Karina, has produced some code for displaying video on these textures, which is really cool.

We’ve been playing around with video playing over our tiled wall cluster both playing just a video, or wrapping the video around an object such as a sphere.  We’ll be releasing the source code for it soon on our website along with some other cool things we’ve been producing.  But before hand I’d just like to show you a picture of it running the Big Buck Bunny video (which is cool project as well).

The OpenSG packages within Ubuntu Hardy don’t contain any of the contrib directory functionality been built.  These aren’t prebuilt due to them been work in progress or licensing issues.  The ply contribution is restricted due to it’s license to non commercial work only, so it needs to be built outside of the packages distributed.

Normally this would be built and stored within the libOSGSystem.so library, requiring the the library to be built again, which takes a while :)  So instead I’ll show you how to build it as a separate library for you to link against in your applications.

Within the directory containing the source code, the following command will build it as a shared library called libOSGPly.so.

g++ OSGply.cpp  OSGPLYSceneFileType.cpp -I/usr/include/OpenSG/ `pkg-config OSGSystem
 --libs --cflags` -shared -fPIC -o libOSGPly.so

This then needs to be copied to your system path so the linker can find it, so:

sudo cp libOSGPly.so /usr/lib/.

The header files then require installation, so:

sudo cp *.h /usr/include/OpenSG/.

Now all you need to do is add -lOSGPly to your linker options to use the library.

I’m sure the same trick can be used with the other contrib features if you wish to enable them easily.

I’ve a small problem with my mythtv-backend in that it will crash once or twice a week without giving a clue as to the problem, even when running it through gdb.  When restarting, it would work fine again therefore there was the need to detect a crash and restart when it happens.

This is currently been worked on for the next version of Mythbuntu through the use of upstart scripts, however I was needing a soultion before then.  This lead to the development of the script below, which checks to see if it’s running, and restart it if it’s not.

The script is limited in that you need to manually start it after the machine has booted.  I run the script within a screen console (so I can detatch it) using watch to run the script every 60 seconds.

So in screen:

sudo watch -n 60 ./keep-myth-server-alive.sh

The script:

#!/bin/bash

# Copyright (C) 2008
#       David Morris (david.morris@greenacre.no-ip.com)
#
# This program is free software; you can
# redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms
# of the GNU General Public License as published by
# the Free Software Foundation, version 2 or later.
#

if [  `ps -ef | grep -c mythbackend` == '1' ];
then
sudo /etc/init.d/mythtv-backend start

fi

I’ve paid a bit of attention to the iPlayer development that has been occuring for linux over the last few months, with flash and mp4 versions. http://po-ru.com/ provides a ruby download script for the mp4 when passed the PID.

Now I’ve been thinking we can easily make this into a standalone player which users can browse on a desktop through the use of a GTK applications, or as a plugin for mythtv.  To this end, I’ve hacked up a python scraper to generate the iPlayer listings and I’m publishing it here in the hope it’ll be of help to people.

It returns:

• URL with the PID
• URL for the thumbnail
• Title of show
• Date show was aired
• Duration of show
• Synopsis of show

I’ve create the core module and a small script to demonstrate how it can be called.  What you choose to do with the data once it’s returned is left to yourselves.

There is a new planet in the solar system of OSS, mythtv Planet. If you want your feeds to be added then send an email do Daviey to be added at addme@planetmythtv.com. Alternatively give him a poke on IRC. daviey [on] irc.freenode.net.

Well I’ve cut my first teeth now with regard to Ubuntu packaging and had my 1st package accepted into the hardy release

The package I used was cpptest which is a portable and powerful, yet simple, unit testing framework for handling automated tests in C++. I used this testing framework for my Masters work and decided to simplify the tool chain for others to build and use my work.

It’s great after around 3 -4 weeks of learning around my job to have it accepted and I’m looking forward to getting my other two packages in the queue accepted for hardy. I’d like to thanks the MOTU’s which have helped me get this package done through reviewing it namely sistpoty, persia, apachelogger and norsetto.

I’ve had a few searches for this hitting my blog and seen people having problems with it as well. I just redid mine on Ubuntu Gutsy and this should work the same. Here is what I did

sudo dpkg-reconfigure lirc

I then chose the userspace driver

sudo nano /etc/modprobe.d/lirc

Here I commented out blacklisting of the `lirc_atiusb’ module.

Once this is done you can load it with

sudo modprobe lirc_atiusb

You’ll then need to install the lircrc file to /home/<myth user>/.mythtv/lircrc

Restart and it should all work fine. I’ve attached my config files for you to check against as well. If you need more help post here or find me (davemorris) on irc.freenode.net

irw is a great little program to run in a terminal to see what buttons your pressing and tsee what they are mapped to.
/etc/modprobe.d/lirc

/etc/lirc/lircd.conf

/home/<mythtv user>/.mythtv/lircrc

Interactive Salon is a touring exhibition about new technologies and concepts for communication with visitors, in the context of cultural heritage.

The exhibition is showcasing projects from European research institutes, universities and museums that have been invited to demonstrate how new technology and concepts can improve visitors’ experiences in art, culture, and historical museums, science centers, and cultural heritage sites.

Webpage : http://www.tii.se/projects/interactivesalon

Visit the exhibition at the Jubilee Library, Jubilee Square, Brighton 27-29 November 2007

Just found and read this opinion piece by Allin Cottrell, and as a user of LaTeX I find myself agreeing with it all.

After some intrest in #ubuntu-uk I’ve upload this example package which can be built via the makefile (once latex is installed of course)  Also this LaTeX blog might be useful.