Multimedia 2.0
Sunday 16 September 2007 ◷ 00:30
For ages I've had a tv-tuner card in my PC, which was kind of fun for watching TV in a small window and take some screenshots. But capturing was CPU intensive and took a lot of diskspace. Then I upgraded to a 3.0GHz P4 with a 500GB disk and possibilities were there, but in the fresh debian install I kind of lost the tuner ability. Took a couple of months to find out that was mainly because of a bug in the accelleration mode of the Intel Xwindow driver, and the whole bt848 linux stuff was OK. Hacked away at some mplayer tv playing and capturing to make it possible to cron capturing of tv shows but that got a bit messy. I tried Freevo but that didn't work, tvtime has superiour image quality, and finally I installed MythTV. It's a bit of a hassle to get it all set up but then it just did something I hadn't even dared to ask it to do: I can watch TV sitting on my couch! Ok, that sounds not very spectacular (just like when I backup my oggs to DDS3 and realised I had music on tape), so let me explain: The tv-card is in a linux server in another room and I'm sitting on the couch with my iBook on my lap. With the MythTV backend running on the linux server and the MythTV client on OS X on the iBook I can stream full-screen TV content over WiFi from the server to my iBook, so I can watch TV wirelessly within the range of my wireless lan. Which is pretty cool.
For my music collection I already had something like that going, mtdaap. DAAP is the protocol iTunes uses to share a library on the network, so with my collection of oggs on the linux server I can play then through iTunes on my iBook. But since that was about the only thing I used my iBook for when I was working on my linux workstation it would be nicer to have a native linux daap client, even if synergy server and client make my mouse and keyboard go to both desktops. Amarok didn't do it, but Banshee is the bomb! It had a minor but fatal bug because the installer didn't create the AudioScrobbler plugin directory auttomatically, but now I listen to my ogg collection through a daap protocol. That keeps the stats of the tracks in the daap server up to date, and I also have a last.fm profile that gets updated when listening through Banshee.