What's New (Q4 2006)
30 December 2006
- CHelix v1.07 has been
released.
29 December 2006
28 December 2006
27 December 2006
- CPdh v1.08 has been
released.
24 December 2006
23 December 2006
22 December 2006
21 December 2006
20 December 2006
19 December 2006
14 December 2006
29 November 2006
- AA+ v1.26 has been
released.
23 November 2006
20 November 2006
18 November 2006
9 November 2006
8 November 2006
5 November 2006
20 October 2006
- In my spare time over the last few weeks, I'm been working on a freeware
Tuner plug-in for Snapstream
Beyond TV which allows you to control a set-top box using a
RedRat3 IR device. For people
who have visited my web site before, you may well known that I have been using
Windows Media Center Edition (and
Showshifter before that),
but one area which I was disappointed with was it use of MS's proprietary dvr-ms
file format. Also it cannot handle multiple channels where the sources are mixed.
Another weakness MCE has IMHO is that you cannot stream live TV from the MCE
device to another PC (My MCE machine is upstairs next to my
Sky+ box but I do most of my TV viewing in my computer room which is downstairs.
I do have the TV signal via coax down in the computer room, but the picture
is pretty poor, plus the audio is only mono). Before anyone emails me saying
"oh yes you can stream from an MCE", AFAIK you can only do this to an Xbox 360
using the
Media Center Extender Software, but I'm not really into games and want it
streamed to one of my computers and not to a TV. Over the last few weeks I have
been playing around with Beyond TV and it addresses all of the shortcomings
as I see it with MCE. Recording is done to a standard MPEG2 file and meta data
for a recording / show is stored in separate xml file, files can be compressed
to DivX and WMV natively, streaming is supported to PC's via their Beyond TV
Link software and their multiple tuner architecture is much more flexible compared
to MCE. Beyond TV also has a
comprehensive SDK for
the developer community. Unfortunately the one area where Beyond TV is weak
(at least for us Europeans) is EPG support. Fortunately I already use and much
prefer DigiGuide which
provides a comprehensive PC based EPG. In addition I have installed a customized
version of the
SnapStream Schedule Plug-in for DigiGuide which allows me to schedule recordings
at my main computer downstairs and send the recording request up to the Beyond
TV PC upstairs (Changes were made to the digiadd.aspx file included in the Schedule
plug-in so that it works correctly with the latest v4.4 of Beyond TV, Let me
know if you want a copy of the changes I made). Finally on the Beyond TV machine,
I installed my new Tuner plug-in (which will be distributed as a MSI file created
using Wix v3).
My plug-in will include a sample RedRat database for the Sky+ box but you are
free of course to use your own database from the
RedRat support
pages. Most of the configuration details will be taken care of by the Wix/MSI
install but full details on further configuration of the plug-in will be
included in the download. The source code for the tuner will also be
included in the download, as well as the Wix v3 files to generate the
install. The documentation for Wix v3 is sorely lacking at the moment, so
you might want to use it as a tutorial for using Wix. To download the
result, click here.
- My book is out! I should be getting my review copies in the next few day.
For those who have pre-ordered the book, you should see your orders being fulfilled
shortly.
13 October 2006