Digital Television
MediaPortal Decryption Support for Anysee Plus Coming?
15 January 2008 in Digital Television | Comments (0)
It seems like AnySee released by mistake the software development kit (SDK) for the card reader in their E 30 Plus and E 30C Plus products. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to download it since AnySee removed the SDK quite quickly. Luckily, someone at the MediaPortal forums got a hold of it which means that AnySee’s card reader can soon be supported by MediaPortal and maybe even support decryption/descrambling the pay-per-view channels.
This can be a great thing, since AnySee’s own programs have stability problems — the DVB-C version more than the DVB-T version, from what I have noticed — and sometimes the programs can stop decrypting/descrambling the pay-channels due to some weird CATR-errors (which probably means card reader error, or something).
As, “Da Silva” mentioned in the same topic in the MediaPortal forums, ProgDVB supports AnySee’s card readers if one downloads some DLL-files from a link he gave. I tried using those files with ProgDVB and, sure, it works. But, and it is a big but from my point-of-view, if you haven’t paid for the Elcom codec provided by ProgDVB, then the video is too choppy and unsynchronized with the sound when using other codecs. Furthermore, ProgDVB uses almost all of the CPU time on my computer, which makes it impossible to do anything else when it is running. So, it might be that ProgDVB will require a more powerful dual-core processor than what my single core processor can deliver.
Mythbuntu Beats Vista Media Center in PVR Usefulness
23 October 2007 in Digital Television | Comments (2)
What do you get when you combine open source MythTV personal video recorder software and open source Ubuntu? Why, it’s Mythbuntu! While it sounds like a potential next episode of Mythbusters, it is in reality the new pre-packaged, free operating system that includes MythTV for that TV viewing, recording, and time-shifting goodness that only open-source can bring you.
Sure, the graphical user interface isn’t as pretty as Windows Vista’s own Media Center has. But, Vista Media Center can’t record any broadcast copy-protected flagged TV shows (see “The Broadcast Flag Says “No Recording For You”” from Digital Media Thoughts) and it only supports a limited amount of TV tuners. Of the TV tuners, Europeans cannot use a digital cable or satellite TV tuner but only a terrestrial TV tuner with Vista.
On the other hand, with Mythbuntu all the rules Vista follows are thrown out the window. You can record and stream any TV show you like, also remove commercials automagically if that’s wanted by you. All you have to do is download the ISO disc image from Mythbuntu’s website, burn it onto a CD and install it on your TV tuning PC. (Yes, you should have a TV tuner for you PC from before.)
You might also want to make sure that the tuner is supported, but that is a bit hard since they are talking about which tuning chips are supported and not (understandibly) listing the branded tuners (as Hauppauge, Terratec, ATI) that are supported. There are supposedly lots to configure on the MythTV software side, so that is a big potential tarpit for any novice users to try (meaning, if your a newbie, take it easy with MythTV).
I haven’t tried Mythbuntu just yet, but I will try to get it running on my old, craptastic PC and see if it can do something better than Windows… like work with cable TV…
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