I mentioned that MediaPortal is open source. Well, there’s some truth to that, but there’s also the fact that what MediaPortal is doing is tightly tied to a big stack of software that isn’t open source.

Microsoft TV technologies forms the bulk of the hard core of the system. Microsoft has apparently spent some significant effort on laying a foundation for TV on their platform; from my look at what’s there, it’s pretty extensive. I’m guessing the effort went into their Media Center Edition and its associated applications, then they distributed the core components for use in XP, allowing various other parties to build user interfaces around the services.

Hauppauge/Conexant supply another bit of closed-source in their drivers. Hard to see what’s going on in there, although maybe we’ll get a peek when Linux drivers come. And I say, they will come. Go Hans!

I started looking into the underlying software as I discovered various problems in the various applications I tried with the card. I figured I might as well see what the effort would be to write my own bits to cover the holes. Some things are not that hard to do. For example, you can grab GraphEdit and build a graph in about two minutes (I mean, after learning some about how DirectShow graphs work, which I did in the process of getting MediaPortal to recognize my card) that will run and give you audio and video.

I used that to verify that it was at least possible to play PS2 again. See, the interesting thing about an MPEG-encoding card is that it takes a couple seconds for the signal to crawl through the MPEG pipe and back out to get to your screen. A couple-second lag makes playing real-time video games rather impossible. But, I was able to configure a little filter graph that bypassed the MPEG encoding/decoding, instead using UYVY format (and don’t ask me what that is, all I know is that it doesn’t have interframe compression and so doesn’t suffer from the time lag), run it, and see no perceptible lag. So, it’s theoretically possible to play PS2 still, and in a pinch I can use GraphEdit to do so, but I’m hoping that MediaPortal or DScaler can be used in that way too.

Geesh, that was a boring post. Sorry.

I mentioned TSReader at the end of my last post. I was pleasantly surprised to find such a program, and that the ‘lite’ version was free for non-commercial use. I’m no television engineer, I just play with my TV. Playing with TSReader gave me some insight into the structure of digital TV, MPEG, the software stack that puts the signal through to the screen, etc. I grabbed “DTV Survival Guide” from the library to give me a bit more detail on what’s going on, without diving too deep technically. I’ll tell ya if I find out anything particularly cool.

OK, so I mentioned that I was not completely thrilled with the Hauppauge bundled software. I won’t get into why:

• one part of the install failed, “MPEG SW decoders”. Not knowing the architecture of this system as I now do, and seeing that it was an optional component, I figured, not a big deal. Well, knowing what I know now, I’d change the label to “You don’t need this, except if you want any of the other software to work, like to watch TV or record it or something. Good luck installing it!”. Turns out that the sub-installer just doesn’t work if you have a TMP envvar set (only took an hour with ProcMon to figure that out), and, well, that’s bad.
• the TV app isn’t too great
• scheduling recordings is… I did I say I wasn’t going to get into this.

I went off in search of some other options. Luckily, the market is rife with options. Let’s see:

• Beyond TV: not bad. If I hadn’t found a cheaper solution, I might have dropped the $60 on this. Critically, it provided the confirmation that the hardware and drivers actually work.
• Power Cinema: didn’t actually look past the $100-$120 price tag, but I have had reasonable success with Cyberlink products in the past.
• Windows MCE: not gonna go get a new OS to watch TV, if that’s even possible outside of pre-built computers. I accidentally have it on my laptop, but that doesn’t do me much good.
• Meedio: already gone.
• MeediOS: not here yet.

Well, it goes on, but I don’t seem to have links to many others. Anyway, none of that matters, because I finally found MediaPortal. Wicked-cool! Open source (even if in C# and tied tightly to Windows), pretty, very active community, lots of plugins, lots of builtins, PVR, DVD, EPG, all the good stuff you expect, and free. Granted, it was unstable while I was setting it up, and it didn’t support my card initially. But my patience was not exceeded and was rewarded: I got it working on my card according to the developers’ instructions (and submitted my work so y’all HVR-1600 people don’t have to do it after the next release), and it just started stabilizing after a while.

Not to say that it’s everything a person could want or bug-free, but I’ve gotten a lot farther with it than with any other free solution, and as far as with Beyond TV, so I’m quite happy.

That gets me to the point of basic end-user functionality, which is good. My hardware works, I think the drivers are actually stable, and I don’t have to wretch my back working around bugs in the software.

In the process of figuring all these things out, I also found some tools that are kinda nice. This is where things get fun, right?

• VideoReDo, despite its somewhat odd interface, is a quite capable cut/join MPEG editor, with support for all the sorts of MPEG that get thrown around (.mpg, .ts, .dvr-ms, res up to and beyond full HD), surprisingly capable automatic ad-cutting, etc. Possibly worth the $50, but I’m keeping my eye out for an OSS solution of similar quality, that, yeah, runs on Windows.
• Speaking of cutting commercials, a neat OSS tool is Comskip. Good cleaning fun.
• This is bleeding into my next post a bit, but TSReader is a very in-depth tool for looking at DTV streams and being very impressed with all the numbers and stuff. From $0 to $400.

Speaking of my next post, see ya then.