MythTV and Recording from a SkyHD box.

At the moment my setup is as follows, a MythTV box runing Ubuntu Linux 11, with to Hauppauge Nova-S Plus S1 PCI Satellite cards. and 2TB of space.

It records (Mostly in SD since the BBC swapped to the S2 standard) quite happily day to day but I like to record the F1 to watch in the off season, so since this moved to Sky (boo hiss!!!) I need a way to get the recordings from the Sky box and on to MythTV.

3 Options present themselves

Option 1

Use Compisite out on the SkyHD box to the Composite in on one of Nova-S cards.
Upsides:Free
Downsides:Poor Quality

Option 2

open the SkyHD box take out the hard drive, nab the encrypted gp file, decrypt and ta da
Upsides:Free, HD
Downsides:Labourious

Option 3

use a HDMI in type recording device
Upsides:Easy, HD
Downsides:Not free, what if Sky switch on the HDCP encryption?

To begin with I'll go with Option 1 and see what the quality is like:

Capture Via Composite from Sky HD Box

Not bad, watchable. But this is where i start to run into problems with sound. While the picture works a treat /dev/video0 there is no sound. Debugging the sound was a total pain in the whatsists and this blog entry is really here so I have somewhere to log the steps I went through.

Step 1, list all the audio in devices:

maff@mythbox:~$ arecord -l

**** List of CAPTURE Hardware Devices ****

card 0: SB [HDA ATI SB], device 0: ALC889 Analog [ALC889 Analog]

  Subdevices: 1/1

  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

card 0: SB [HDA ATI SB], device 2: ALC889 Analog [ALC889 Analog]

  Subdevices: 2/2

  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

  Subdevice #1: subdevice #1

card 2: CX8801 [Conexant CX8801], device 0: CX88 Digital [CX88 Digital]

  Subdevices: 1/1

  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

card 3: CX8801_1 [Conexant CX8801], device 0: CX88 Digital [CX88 Digital]

  Subdevices: 1/1

  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

maff@mythbox:~$

And this is where the fun and games begins, you can see the two sat cards CX8801 and CX8801_1. CX8801 is always /dev/video0 and CX8801_1 /dev/video1 however some times, say every other boot, the sound in is HW:2,0 and some times HW:3,0. Weird. Ok how about I plug the sound into mic in on the PC, thats unlikely to change. HW:0,0

To test this, a quick arecord remembering to specify sample rate of 48000 as this is what MythTV needs:

arecord -D hw:0,0 -r 48000 -f S16_LE -c2 foobar.wav

and play it back:
vlc foobar.wav

success!

excellent, so back the mythtv-setup bash in hw:0,0 in the card config, save back to mythtv and....

silence.

arse.

so whats the difference, arecord can get audio from hw:0,0 but not mythtv, turns out Mythtv needs an ALSA prefix in order to work so should be set to ALSA:hw:0,0 and finally sound!

Awesome, hopefully next time it craps out and goes silent I'll now have somewhere to look and find out what I did.

Bigpower is down!

Worry not, I'm on the case.

Maff

Cyprus steak sauce.

Tablespoon of margarine into medium heat ovenable frying pan.
Add a roughly chopped onion.
3 cloves of garlic crushed.
1 sliced courgette.
2 tomatoes, roughly chopped.
Salt, 1 tsp of paprika. 1 tsp of coriander.
Cook until onions soft.
Add 5 thinly sliced button mushrooms.
Add 1 tablespoon of plain flour, stir in.
Add 1/2 glass of Merlot. Stir in.
Add 1 tablespoon of tomato puree. Stir in.
Add water until sauce is consistancy of pouring cream.

Add rare steak and cover with sauce. Bung in oven at gas mark 5 for 30 minutes.
Eat

37% through Dracula by Stoker, Bram on Kindle for Android! http://www.amazon.com/kindleforandroid/

Link of the Week

This tickled me, with two little people at home learning the English language a certain amount of guessing of spellings goes on, I can only image the random collection of letters that spawned the thought in the head of the owner of textaligncentaur.com.

Awesomeness!

Blogging from a smartphone.

How easy is it?
Well, its easy enough, but damn is it slow. Which tard put the "," on a different tab to the text on android?
Next, a picture:
Well, I've taken a if of fat bloke ... can't figure out where in the text it comes.
Ok, test publish, lets see what happens.






Addendum:
I've left all the spelling mistakes and layout above as is from the phone to get an idea of what its like.

Xbox Live - Loyalty bonus! 40% off.

Got the renewal for my xbox live through a couple of days back, and thought i'd spend a moment at lunch sorting it out. Theres a couple of options to pay Microsoft for something Sony give you for free, the first is 12 month cards from most retailers, Tesco, Play.com, Amazon  all want about £35. The second options if direct from MS and cut out the middle-man and for only £5 more.... go figure.  Anyway being the lazy sod i am i had subscribed direct, paying the extra because I was to bone idle to order from play.com and then wait for the card to arrive, however with they way money is at the moment prudence overcame lazynes...

First job, cancel the the auto year on year renewal, which you cant do online, there should be some sort of law that says if you can subscribe to something online, you should be able to cancel it online (i.e. avoid the sales pitch and them trying to stop you doing what you intended). So I phoned MS got through to an Irish chap with minimal hold music and explained what I wanted, he starts clicking away and then says "Can I ask why?" at first i thought I'd give him the "Its free from Sony" but I stuck with the honest reply "Its cheaper to buy it from play.com" ... "oh right" he says, "would you be interested in getting it from us if i could beat plays price?" and that apparently is how it is, just like Car Insurance, AA Cover and Sky subscriptions Microsft and Xbox live are up for a bit of "Negotiation".

"Youve been with us a while and you build up a loyalty bonus" he continued "Which means you're entitled to 40% discount, so thats £23.98, do you want to stay on at that price?" and so I did.

Its worth remembering in these days of non tangible goods... if they can get anything out of you at all its worth more to them than you buggering off to a competitor.

So anyone else renewing....0800 587 1102 give em a bell.