Coming soon to an Intertube near you:
Neil Patrick Harris! Nathan Fillion! Felicia Day! and, of course, Joss Whedon!
First episode goes live (and free!) on July 15th; second and third are each two days later, and the whole thing goes away (ok, behind a “give us money!” link) at midnight on July 20th.
It seems that our approval of a TV show is the kiss-of-death. Cancelled:
To be fair, other than Journeyman, these were all interesting ideas that suffered from bad writing, or bad acting, or both. I think Journeyman was a bit too unusual for main stream audiences; it would have succeeded on SciFi or another smaller network, I think.
On the other hand, renewed:
So I guess our track record really isn’t that bad… :-)
From the site:
We are looking to push the envelope of episodic television by offering Season Two of Firefly in a groundbreaking new format. Each episode (or the entire season) would be made available for purchase in Standard or Hi-Definition.
Head over there and fill out a survey. And while you’re at it, check out Sanctuary , a show that was developed first on the web, and has now been picked up as a 13-episode series by the SCI-FI Channel. Anything is possible…
Space is showing all 22 episodes of Stargate:SG1 Season 6 on Christmas night/Boxing Day.
With my MythTV box, 22 hours is about 48Gb, which I should have free by then, since every other show will be in re-runs.
Of course, I’ll still have to find time to watch them… :-)
Update: I made enough space by deleting old shows, and moving about eight hours of stuff to an old 20Gb harddrive. I’m exactly halfway through watching season six now. Season seven sure makes more sense when you’ve seen this stuff!
I could never have done this with the VCR, at least not without staying up all night to change tapes. Woo hoo!
[…] 5 pm After talking with Luisa last night about the Media Box, and more specifically how
Harald was able to whip together his MythTV box so quickly,
I bought myself a […]
Pingback by ReidNews » Hauppage PVR-350 — 1/18/2005 @ 7:24 pm
For the Star Trek Geeks in the crowd:
More for the star trek geeks, Star Trek Barbie is now a bluetooth device that works with your mobile phone.
Comment by Bluetoothdoll — 8/19/2005 @ 5:21 pm
So I bought the PVR-250 (on sale at Best Buy" :-), and slapped it into my P933 to play. The install was easy, and the hardware looks nicely designed. But the software that comes with the card sucks. I don’t know how hardware guys manage so consistently to ship their products with truly crappy software. Simple stuff like you can’t tab between fields, if you set a record time before you change the date the time quietly resets itself (because you can’t record in the past, I guess), and so on. It’s very pretty though; if they had put all that skinning effort into usability…
Anyway, that’s not important, since I also downloaded KnoppMyth in order to try out MythTV. I picked KnoppMyth figuring that I could find out if it worked and I liked the system, and then I could build from scratch if necessary later on. I’m glad I did; building a MythTV system from scratch is not for the faint of heart (and this from me, who likes tinkering with Linux :-).
First problem was getting the TV-Out on my Matrox G400 to work properly. After several tries with various different X drivers and configurations, I finally discovered the real problem: the KnoppMyth kernel comes with the vesafb framebuffer driver compiled in, so my Matrox G400 modules were never getting loaded. One kernel rebuild (and several hours) later, I had TV out.
The next problem was the network. My on-the-motherboard, Intel-based network interface (from the 82801 chipset?) kept “freezing”, with a timeout: “eth0: wait_for_cmd_done timeout!”. Lots of googling revealed that this is a known problem that apparently still hasn’t been fixed. Fortunately, There is an Intel provided e100 driver that supports this chipset, and that one works. Download, build the module, and install.
Next was sound. After every reboot, the audio out would be muted, and I would have to login remotely and use alsamixer to manually unmute the Headphone audio out and then pump the volume up. Again, it turns out that this a known problem, and that the usual fix (alsactl save/alsactl restore) doesn’t work, because the ALSA software doesn’t save information about the Headphone output? Strange, but one again I found a workaround. Running
/usr/bin/amixer sset Headphone unmute 100
would unmute the Headphone output and set the volume to max; I stuck this in /etc/init.d/local so that it would run on every reboot.
Finally, the machine kept crashing with out-of-memory errors. I never did figure this one out, because I made two changes at the same time. I downloaded and installed the latest ivtv drivers, and I also discovered that the MythTV cache file I had configured was larger than the cache filesystem (this would cause mmap() based access to fail with the aforementioned out of memory errors :-). I’m not sure which fixed the problem, but the box has been up and recording for a week now with no problems.
Now to figure out all of this transcoding stuff…
(Oh ya, and Richard Dean Anderson was very young when MacGyver was produced :-)
Most of the popular new PVR cards sold for Windows XP MC, known as “Blackbird”, haven’t hard drivers to use with Linux/Myth.
We have been working on these drivers and released an alpha version at http://plutohome.com. Pluto even has a self-booting kick-start CD that will automatically install & configure everything for you, including a ready-to-go Myth system. It’s the fastest and easiest way to get a MythTV PVR up and running, and also installs Xine, Asterisk and our own software to give you the most advanced media & entertainment, home automation, security, telecom & computing system, controllable with your Symbian Bluetooth mobile phone, as well as PDA’s and Webpads.
We’re working hard to harden the drivers as quickly as possible and would like as much feedback as possible. These 2nd generation cards are lower in price and offer better picture quality than the current models supported in IVTV, so be sure to check them out. A list of all the compatible cards, known as “Blackbird” cards, is found on our website.
visit: plutohome.com, click ‘support’, ‘support site’, and choose “CX88 Blackbird Drivers” from the projects menu
Comment by john — 4/4/2005 @ 5:14 am
[…] Recompile the kernel without the vesafb driver (which I remembered thanks to my old posting: PVR 250 and MythTV) […]
Pingback by The Blog of Harald » mythtv upgrade — 9/8/2007 @ 9:31 pm
This one has been sitting in my to-post pile for two weeks now. *sigh.
So this website, by means of a Kevin-Bacon-style relationship of crossovers, has logically linked one hundred and sixty-two television series as existing in the same universe of continuity… and therefore are all the creation of the autistic Tommy Westphall.
Check it out…
I remember being skeptical a few years ago when I heard about the technology, but it sure has taken off!
I missed the season premiere of Joan of Arcadia. I fumbled the VCR programming and taped from 7:59 until 8:01. (Note to self: build MythTV based Media PC ;-).
Prompted by a recent entry on Reid’s blog, I seached the web, found a torrent, downloaded Azureus, and about 2 hours later had a copy of the episode on my disk. In testing, I found that I had to find a copy of a XviD binary, which was also straightforward (thanks to Google :-). We plan to watch the episode after the kids go to bed tonight.
There are days when I say “I hate computers”, but today has been a good day for technology!
You may still hate computers… I have yet to be caught by bit-torrent, but on the other P2P networks it is distressingly common for a G-rated type file name to actually contain XXX stuff. I think I make my wife paranoid by hiding the screen and turning off the sound when I first fire up a music video or whatever. I’ve seen quite a few things I would never have wanted to on the P2P networks, but so far nothing of the highly illegal type [knock wood, thank God, etc.]
Comment by Jeff K — 10/3/2004 @ 9:31 pm
I must admit that I’ve never had trouble with bad files, either on P2P networks or with torrents. Maybe I’m just lucky? In any case, the episode of Joan was fabulous quality, and contained no ‘icky’ bits…
I’ve also recently started using Azureus, which has all the features I’ve wanted for a while. Unfortunately, I managed to K-O some in-progress, multi-gig downloads by turning on a setting somewhere that “imports” torrents, making them non-usable by other BitTorrent apps. Actually, not so much of a problem, as my slow downloads in Azureus were being caused I think by not enabling UDP communication. I still haven’t found where I can tell it how many ports it can use — I have over 100 set aside. The doc mentions how this app doesn’t need many ports like other apps somewhere, but I’m still not 100% sure it wouldn’t help.
P.S. Your site looks iccky today. Did the CSS file go missing?
Oh, never mind about the iccky CSS comment; all looks well now. I must have caught the site at a bad time or something!
Encounter at Farpoint is on Spike TV tonight. I had forgotten just how bad ST:TNG was at the begining! I think the only reason we kept watching it was that it was the first Star Trek we had seen in decades.
Well, that and John DeLancie as Q :-)
In related news, TV makes men hunkier and women chunkier.
Apparently due to “quirks” in our vision processing, 2D pictures of people look larger to us than corresponding 3D images. Strange…
In order of my preference:
II: The Wrath of Khan
VIII: First Contact
IV: The Voyage Home
VI: The Undiscovered Country
IX: Insurrection
VII: Generations
III: The Search for Spock
X: Nemesis
V: (I can’t even remember the title now)
I: The Motion(less) Picture
Yes, I liked Nemesis enough to place it above Star Trek V. Ugh…
Just caught Big Bang Theory last week for the first time – hilarious! :) Nerds are becoming very fashionable these days…
Comment by Laurie — 5/16/2008 @ 8:43 am
We’ve loved that show since the first two eps. And I know more than one person who fits each of the many stereotypes they’ve displayed; Scary!
Comment by chk — 5/16/2008 @ 8:51 am