Your software and the alternatives

Have you ever felt like you want to develop a piece of software that is better than everything you have seen and yet you don't have the spare time and resources too. The media client and server I've been working on are designed around the ideals and principals that I feel encompass the ideal goals of a modern home entertainment system. However every so often you see a new piece of software that seems to be lightyears ahead of what you want to do in terms of functionality, particularly in the OpenSource arena. Several times I've felt like possibly giving up my own creation to work on something further along the lines towards a complete home entertainment system with a community of developers already behind it. The problems that keep me from committing myself to working on an OpenSource effort is not being able to follow my ideal design and having to slot into an existing codebase which can potentially be difficult to pick up. I wonder how many other people face similar situations with software they've been developing themselves.

Media box

Hey world, I thought I'd start blogging a bit of information about some of the things I'm actually working on in particular my media box. I'll introduce you to the hardware and software over the course of the next few weeks. Firstly I'd like to introduce the hardware and a bit about my choices. My media box is built using an ASUS Pundit-R barebones system which consists of a case and ASUS motherboard. The system has an integrated ATI video chip that features shader support, it's not state of the art graphics but it's got enough power to make a very slick media box. Inside the box there is also a 2.4Ghz Celeron processor, 512MB DDR-333 RAM, 100Mbit network support, a 4-in-1 memory card reader, PCMCIA slot for easy hardware expansion, a DVD writer, 160GB hard drive. I've also with a lot of force and a bit of modification managed to cram in my Nebula DigiTV DVB-T card to provide digital TV support. As a temporary measure I've used a USB 802.11b wireless adapter to allow me to make a wireless connection to my home network and Interent connection. Ok enough of the stats, maybe you are curious as to the reasons for my choices? I choose the Pundit-R as it had one of the most suitable form factors at least for the limited budget I have, a Shuttle would not sit near a TV with its cube shape, this case although not the smallest is about the same size as a VCR although slightly taller. The motherboard inside the Pundit-R is well specced with 2 PCI slots allowing me to fit some extra hardware for media duties. The memory card reader on the front was an important consideration as I envision being able to plug memory cards directly into the system for instant slideshows or transfer. The PCMCIA slot allows for easy upgrades and gives that little bit more flexibility. My use of a Nebula DigiTV card is that despite its price it is one of the best TV cards out there, with excellent software and one of the few cards you can actually acquire an SDK for, also the remote control is a useful added bonus.

Anyhow that's a brief run down on the hardware for now, look out for more information and hopefully some pictures of the hardware and software.

Analogue TV shuts down in 2008

I just read the proposed digital TV switchover plan for the UK. Starting 2008 (originally they had planned starting the processing in 2006) a region by region switchover will start to take place, the process will happen by ITV francise areas and the HTV Wales region in which I live will be one of the first. Each region will have a single analogue TV service shut down and replaced with a high powered digital multiplex carrying all the analogue services, the remaining analogue channels will remain active for 6 months before being shut down and replaced with the existing multiplexes transmitting at higher power. This process won't be completed on a national scale until 2012. I'd recommend anyone who is considering buying new TV equipment over the next few years to make sure it has a digital TV decoder integrated or can easily have a set-top box added to it, and you should consider migration plans for all the equipment in your house since every TV will be affected. With prices starting from around £30 and still dropping hopefully access to affordable digital TV won't be a problem for anyone leading up to the switchover.

Source of information: http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/article/ds19121.html

Summary of a project (part 2)

Over the next several months I produced software to let me present the contents of all UK DAB and DVB-T multiplexes in a web based format. I also wrote code that would stream a service selected in the web browser to a media playing client on the user’s computer, my main test clients were Winamp for DAB and VideoLAN Client for DVB. My achievements also included doing what I believe was a world first for DAB network streaming and that was to include the DLS text in the stream so anyone using a Shoutcast compatible player was able to see the text that gets transmitted and updated on a DAB radio station.

The DAB side was the part I managed to mature the most. I even managed to implement a system for processing and displaying the Electronic Programme Guide (EPG), however I didn’t get the chance to develop a scheduled recording system to accompany this. I integrated the tuning of the device into the web shell so that you could discover what audio services were available to you and I dealt with multiplex locking so that once one user was using a multiplex subsequent users could not change the multiplex until there were no other users using the multiplex anymore. I had also started to implement code to automatically download the EPG and download other data off the DAB multiplexes including Broadcast Web Sites (BWS) which are mini websites which you can download and display such as a compact version of BBCi.

The DVB element proved difficult to develop and it took quite a long time to get to grips with the complexities of the MPEG2 standard and I had some difficulties interfacing with my TV card. However I did managed to stream the Transport Stream (TS) data to a remote client (albeit very inefficiently).Unfortunately this wasn’t as good as I’d expected since the data wasn’t converted to the DVD and PC friendly Program Stream (PS) format which can be played very easily, I had attempted to convert from TS and PS on the fly but this proved to be quite a difficult challenge which I simply didn’t have time for. Processing the data was quite a difficult task and I had to decode quite a bit of information before I could get a picture of a multiplex’s setup and determine which were the bits of data that constituted a TV channel or a radio station. Because I didn’t get my TV card working with my software until it was nearly deadline time I used a dump of multiplex data I had acquired back when I first got the card and after around 6 months of hard work I was finally able to play back the 7 minutes of data I had recorded which included a Scooby Doo cartoon I had captured during the time, success couldn’t be sweeter than finally watching it play correctly.

In conclusion the project went well in terms of providing the concepts that I wanted to, I managed to produce something that put into practice my theories, was fairly efficient in terms of computer resources used and impressed my University supervisors. What I have failed to do since has been to take this idea to the next level and finish developing it fully (I did start to rewrite it into a better designed system) and find a way to develop it commercially since I graduated. However the idea has not died and if I do not get a chance to develop the technology further I would not be surprised it see it offered by many consumer electronics and software companies in the coming years once they see the possibilities in sharing resources over a network like I have.

Summary of a project (part 1)

During my 3^rd year at the University of Wales, Swansea I undertook a project to create a system for allowing one computer hosting digital radio (DAB) and digital TV (DVB-T) to share anywhere from about 1 to 8 TV or radio channels between multiple network clients. The project was long and difficult and much of the polish I wanted to give it never happened, but during that time I did manage to achieve the aim, something I don’t think had been done in that way before. What I was doing was exploiting one of the key generally unrecognised benefits of digital technology. Many people know that with digital radio and TV that you generally get more services than you did under the old analogue system but not many people know why. This is because not only is the data compressed to reduce the amount of bandwidth required but it is also multiplexed so that it can be transmitted in roughly the same space that a single analogue channel requires. It is this process of multiplexing that interested me, as I discovered when you receive a digital service your hardware isn’t just receiving a single channel it’s receiving a multiplex containing several channels, only your hardware is discarding all but the one you are accessing. I felt that this process of discarding data was wasteful and thought that in a home, office or other environment where there could be several networked computers that situations would arise where two people may want to access different services using the same single piece of hardware. A perfect example of this was when I first got my Psion Wavefinder (a USB DAB device) and used some software with it that allowed me to share stations in the way I described, I was listening to Life while my father listened to Planet Rock and within two hours my father excitedly informed me that he had won two tickets to see Deep Purple live in concert through Planet Rock, something he wouldn’t have been able to do had I not provided the shared access to the device. This got me thinking about the idea seriously.

The rest will be covered in part 2 coming soon.

First Post

Well I've been meaning to get this blog going for a number of months but finally with the encouragement of my friend Liam I thought I'd get started. I'm going to start trying to post sweet and simple entries as frequently as I can so here goes the first one...

I'm Doug a 23 year old multimedia obsessive. For the past several years I have been designing and developing multimedia technology in my spare time. I've been working with digital TV (DVB), digital radio (DAB) and the Internet for quite some time. The aim of this blog is to bring you my thoughts and ideas on the future of multimedia as well as updates on the stuff I'm actually developing now.

Well that'll do for starters, keep watching and I'll trying and post something more interesting soon :-)

Doug