zen.org Communal Weblog

Discoveries tonight as I sit over-tired but not willing to go to sleep, partially from perusing the 2004 Weblog Awards:

• ScrappleFace, hilarious news stories so closely resembling current headlines so as to make you really wonder if they’re made up
• IMAO, also looks at headlines but it points out the flaws in the real thing
• cartoon characters redrawn just as their skeletons (this from weirdassshit.com)
• Iraq the Model, not humor but instead a fascinating blog about the real life in Iraq and their real hopes as it tries to reshape itself

Ni-ni.

I succeeded in getting the (better) ivtv framebuffer driver working, but my previous impressions of the mpeg were wrong. Still looking choppy, and to top it all off I wasn’t getting any frequencies to work. Harrumph. This has taken way, way too long. I should stop using such old stuff, depending on my further research to progressively move things slowly forward to more stable and reliable versions.

I found a cool writeup by Jarod Wilson of how to set up MythTV on a system running Fedora. I’ve already got Fedora Core 2 on CD on the shelf in the office, so I think I’ll bail on the KnoppMyth idea for now and give those instructions a run with a fresh install. I’d even been considering doing Win98 + the software bundled with the card to qualify the card as functioning correctly, but then as I was passing the Wasters in the Fourth Great Circle of Hell I pulled myself out and came up with an alternative that I can live with.

Next update will be the initial results of doing everything under Fedora, based initially on Jarod’s notes. Fingers crossed.

Only by reading thru some messages in the forum on SourceForge did I discover that the 0.1.9 version released January 13 2004 isn’t the actual stopping point in development. Over at ivtv.no-ip.com are the real ongoing copies, including 0.2.0-rc3 from December 12th and an alpha-level (I presume) version 0.3.0. WOW. Its install.txt file even concurred with something I’ve read elsewhere: ivtv shouldn’t need any special parameters for its module anymore. It should figure out my system’s PAL nature, among other things.

I put the new 0.2.0-rc3 stuff in place, and a test of

cat /dev/video0 > /tmp/my.mpg

resulted in about 6 seconds of snow when I watched it on another machine. No sound yet either. However, it had consistent snow, no frame loss that I could see. Oh, hope of hopes. I’ll add a channel, give it a try, and report back. Later today I’ll try to write up the details of exactly what I’ve done and how I put the new version in place on top of the KnoppMyth I’m running. But I wanted to at least share this positive news, and the detail that isn’t yet appearing on the SourceForge project page or even on the ivtv parent page. A real shame when you figure there have to be plenty of other people suffering the way I am—including one person who wrote me just this morning.