This Geekend

Posted by stephen on Sunday, 21st May, 2006 @ 17:49

It's been ages since I had a Saturday night where I stay up till the early hours of the morning fiddling with some tech.

So after a week of new toys, the Nokia N80 and the MacBook, I guess I felt positively inspired to do something cool (well, to me anyway). By the way, I'd totally recommend the MacBook to anyone thinking about it, it's incredibly well specified for the price point and they've not cut corners on the build quality, a totally solid and enjoyable machine.

So, on to the geeking.... part inspired by "because I can" and part inspired by saving money every month, this weekend's projects have been VoIP and PVR building.

It occurred to me the other day that my living room would look great with the TV mounted on the wall with the Mac Mini sitting underneath. So I thought about getting a DVB-T USB dongle for the Mini and using my newly found eBay selling abilities to do away with the TiVo and tell NTL I don't want their TV package anymore (saving ?30/month). That way I can record all my free-to-air stuff and download any premium NTL/Sky content (which I do for most shows now anyway).

My new N80 mobile phone has built in wifi networking and is SIP capable. This also got me thinking that if I get a sipgate account I could stop paying NTL ?18 a month for their phone package and simply use the mobile via sipgate as my landline. Early experiments during the week with the mobile haven't been very successful. Using Asterisk@Home I managed to get the sipgate line connected to a virtual PBX, but didn't have anywhere else to send the calls.

And so we come to yesterday and me wondering what I should do with this big, ugly PC that sits under my desk now redundant due to Parallels Desktop and my nice Intel-based Macs. I then remembered that I have a few DVB cards floating around in my cupboard from various times in the past and so I thought to myself I don't need to spend ?99 on a DVB-T PVR solution for my Mac, I could just turn this PC into a Mythbox and shove it in the spare room. As there's a Mythfrontend for Mac, I'd be able to watch my recorded shows from anywhere.

Then I thought, why not put both a DVB-T and DVB-S card in the PC? Then I'll be able to get the Freesat channels too and can record two programmes at once. And so in it went and so began my adventure with MythTV. Following these instructions for getting Myth up and running on Ubuntu, slightly modified by using these more modern packages I was up and running with my little portable aerial in no time.

Add this source of Mythfrontend for the Mac, both in Intel and PPC flavours and I was suddenly able to watch TV from my bedroom (iMac), my living room (Mini) and anywhere in between (MacBook). It's not ideal for live TV I've found. At least not changing channels regularly. There's a good 10 second delay while what seems to be some buffering happens. The MythWeb interface is a nice bonus that offsets this annoyance quite nicely.

So, my ToDo list for my MythTV experience is to drill a hole in the floor of the spare room and run a cable up from downstairs (wireless isn't ideal for video applications), then move the Mythbox into the spare room and setup a more permanent aerial with a stronger signal. My portable aerial provides a weak signal, but as I'm so close to the transmitter the SNR is very good and it doesn't matter so much, but the spare room's on the wrong side of the house.

Next, find and stick another DVB-T card into the box and bung a booster/splitter on the end of the aerial so I can record from multiple TV channels. I've decided to abandon the satellite idea for now as it means I should really mount the satellite properly, there's no good extra channel advantage and I won't get Channel 4 and related services because they're still encrypted. Perhaps I'll point at HotBird again one day and get lots of bizarre foreign channels added to the mix!

I also want to keep an eye on the MythTV lists for progress with the multiple recording options for a single transponder (as 4 - 8 channels are generally transmitted per frequency it's possible to record/watch all of those channels at once with a single tuner card, but Myth doesn't support this yet).

Finally, ring up NTL and TiVo and cancel my subscriptions, then punt the TiVo on eBay or to any interested mates who might like it (it's been heavily upgraded!).

The niceties are rebuilding Mythfrontend from source to add more options for where video comes from, so my downloaded shows and DVDs will all be playable from the Myth interface without needing to drop out to Finder/QuickTime/DVD Player. I guess ideally it'd be great it Myth could integrate into the Movies section of Front Row. Unlikely though I suspect.

While digging around for DVB cards I also rediscovered my Cisco ATA 186 VoIP adapter that lets you plug in a normal telephone to an IP network. It came when I signed up for the awful BT Broadband Voice service a couple of years ago. A quick Spotlight into my email archives found me David's email containing instructions and the generic firmware needed to get this thing working with ordinary SIP services. And with very little effort it was tied into my sipgate service and I can think about cancelling my landline service too eventually.

To take this one step further I'm considering installing Asterisk on the Mythbox and pointing the ATA 186 and my N80 (if I can make it work) to that. Then I'd be able to answer/call on the "land line" with whatever handset is nearest, and it'd just be cool in a totally unnecessary way. Further I could setup an IVR system. Please press 1 to talk to Steve, press 2 to leave a voicemail and other such nonsense.

What I love most of all about this is that, apart from an aerial, I'll be down to purely IP services coming into the house, which is rather in keeping with what I do for a living. Indeed, I'm hoping that playing with all this stuff can also provide some inspiration for products/services for my new company Regenology, whose website (very revision 1) launched this week too.