Info about a cool new browser can be found here. Looks pretty nifty to me.

Thank John Cole for the link.

Posted by: Physics Geek at 03:00 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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Are you, like me, either unable to afford Tivo or your cable company's DVR? Sure, the players are now pretty cheap, but the service is still pricey. Suppose that you could build your own personal video recorder(PVR) on a PC that will record digital broadcast signals, and can be scheduled to record your favorite programs. Would that be of interest to you? If so, go here to find out how to do it. Excerpt:

Q: Will I need to upgrade my PC to work as a digital TV PCR?
A: A fairly recent one, with at least a 2-Ghz Pentium 4 or Athlon 2800+ processor or higher, at least 512MB of RAM, and an 80GB or bigger hard drive will probably be fine. For our step-by-step guide, we used a 2.6-GHz Pentium 4 system with 1GB of DDR333 RAM, but an even faster processor would have made some things (such as converting the recorded files to different resolutions) quicker and easier. ATI recommends at least a 1.2-GHz processor and 256MB of memory for its HDTV Wonder card, but frankly, that's a bit low.
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Q: What kind of software will I need to build the digital TV PVR?
A: For this step-by-step, we chose to use KnoppMyth, a combination of Knoppix Linux and the Linux PVR software MythTV. It's the simplest way we've found to build a dedicated digital TV PVR, and MythTV has a huge range of features: It can search for programs by title, actor or description, read RSS news and weather feeds, show your digital photos, and play internet radio stations. Plus, KnoppMyth installs from a single CD, so you don't need to know Linux to install and run it.

Q: I'm not sure I'm ready to build a dedicated Linux box to record digital TV. Is there a Windows alternative?
A: Yes. ATI includes software with its HDTV Wonder card that can view and record digital TV signals, including HDTV ones. You can schedule recordings and pause live TV; the card also includes an analog TV tuner. We've tested it and found it was able to record digital TV signals with relative ease, although it did require a fairly fast PC to be able to record and play back HD video. Another alternative is the AccessDTV Digital Media Receiver, a PCI card that includes software that can record and display digital TV in Windows. We haven't reviewed this device, though.

I have a couple of aging PC's sitting around my house that I've been meaning to tinker with, and this type of project will put them to good use. PVR, here I come.

Posted by: Physics Geek at 02:09 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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