Redirecting error output on windows console

I thought I already blogged this, but I can’t find it back, so let me try one more try as I seem to need this from time to time and then fail to remember the correct syntax! 🙂

The scenario is: you have this huge error output on your console (for example a very long compiler error). Since it is quite long, console history is not big enough to see the beginning. You could of course increase the history size, but it’s not a real solution. Everyone knows how to redirect console output to a file, simply like this:

type myhugefile.txt > output.txt

This is all nice and dandy, except, it doesn’t capture the error output (stderr) (which is exactly what we’re interested in ;)). You have to do some win32 console-fu as follows:

mingw32-make 1> output.txt 2>&1

This tells the shell to redirect standard output (stdout) to output.txt and redirect error output to standard output.

You can read all this information in a nice collegebook format on MS’s KB.

Half-life 2. Finally.

yes, I know my hardware is not the most recent, but so is Half-life 2. Yet, it seems I won’t manage to play it although I finally bought it! 🙂 Have a look at the following nice free disk space requirements..:
Orange box disk space requirements
/me faints 😉

even when I only want to install Portal (which I wanted to try out badly), I still need 6260 MB !!?? what have they done with that game?! it looked so nice and small (and I heard play time was not that much either ;))

Guess I’ll do have to buy that extra disk first now!

Btw, I bought it through steam, but got almost zero price benefit (given that the dollar is quite weak now) over a boxed version here in Belgium. Still, I wanted to try it and I wanted to play _now_ 😉 (I guess, after hours of downloading ;))

Essential Kate tweak

If you like opening all your documents in a single instance of Kate, replace the command line “kate %U” used in KDE’s file binding by “kate -u %U”. This is actually quite well documented in Kate’s manpage as well as on the faq on the homepage, yet somehow I thought it is useful to note this one down as it is not accessible from the GUI.

You can find KDE’s file bindings here: control center > KDE components -> file associations. From then on, every file you like to open with kate through the context menu will use those settings, even when it’s not a txt.

Channel list reordering

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

Roadmap / planned features

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

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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