Archive for November, 2007

Channel list reordering

Thursday, November 29th, 2007

Finally implemented this one (got tired of having to scroll/search every time I want to switch between Kanaal2 and VT4 ;) ). Instead of providing a separate setup dialog for rearranging channels I just added an editing mode to the default gui. I also got rid of my sorting proxy model which makes the model more simple yet less flexible. I think it is still flexible enough and that the previous level of flexibility was overkill. ;) The screenshot is on windows with fake data. :) Somehow my application icon got lost in the conversion. It’s crappy (programmer’s art) anyway. ;)

KTvTune channel list editing mode

Obligatory alpha screenshot

Wednesday, November 14th, 2007

KTvTune alpha screenshot

Roadmap / planned features

Wednesday, November 14th, 2007

I wrote a few points down as a way to structure my thoughts. It was never really intended to publish as a road map, but publishing gives everyone an idea where this project is heading. :)

This is a list of things I see being implemented by version 1.0. The order in the list also approximately reflects the order of implementation as basic features seem to correspond to easy implementation. :) (aside from the fact that almost everything in this app is quite trivial ;))

  1. channel setup
    • import from xawtv
    • start from europe-west defaults
    • reordering
  2. simple tuning
    • sequential tuning with mouse wheel
    • direct select with keypad, visually and physically
    • direct select with list; this is channel editor without editing func :)
  3. configurable commands
    • for viewing, recording, playing..
  4. recording
    • configurable rec path
    • scheduled recording with at
    • on the fly recording by streaming the video to file and starting a player on the output file
    • time shifting: same as above, but start paused player :)
    • somehow use vlc’s save stream option somewhere..?
  5. playback of recorded movies
    • show list using the configurable rec path
  6. transcoding
    • show list of all recordings using the the configurable rec path
    • save long lasting recordings as mpeg4 to conserve space
    • use transcode ;)

tuning trouble

Wednesday, November 14th, 2007

I used to borrow a friend’s Hauppauge WinTV card (bt878 chipset) for tv viewing until I finally bought my own Hauppauge WinTV PVR 150 . I went for the PVR series as I figured recording would be much more convient (pvr series comes with a hardware MPEG2 encoder).

In the past I had used the brooktree wintv card under linux which was really a joy since it worked out of the box along with all available soft (after trying xawtv, motv, (whatever-)tv, tvtime, etc.. I settled with KdeTV (formerly kwintv)). It even seemed the card was better supported under linux than under windows. I figured the pvr series would be supported as well as it seemed to be a fairly popular card for HTPCs. Which turned out to be slightly nuanced. :)
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Speeding ticket

Thursday, November 8th, 2007

Only a few weeks ago, I finally bought my first car, yet, I already managed to hit the jackpot… People wanting to do damage control in advance, will be interested in this site. :)