Difference: LaborIntensiveTv (5 vs. 6)

Revision 630 Jun 2003 - TobyCabot

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META TOPICPARENT	name="WebHome"

Most folks buy their TV's at places like Sears or Best Buy, and there's a lot to be said for plunking your credit card down and driving home with a functional television set. But that's not my style. I've been using a Commodore 64 color monitor hooked up to a VCR since the late 80's and it's worked great. On the other hand, VCR's are going the way of the dodo and a 13" television with weak mono sound isn't much fun so I should probably upgrade.

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Bill of materials:

HP A2094A monitor - a 20" RGB monitor from an old HP X terminal. Picture tube is a Sony Trinitron.

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Generic Intel 815-based motherboard with a 900MHz PIII.

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Intel 815-based motherboard with a 900MHz PIII.

AverTV tuner card. The only component I've had to buy so far, $20 at Compusa.

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Sound card (not sure which one yet)

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Sound card (not sure which one yet but the 815 motherboard has built-in sound)

As a proof of concept I think I'll try to get my office computer to work with the TV card. The only problem is that my office computer is a diskless workstation so I've been using pre-built kernels from the LTSP project at http://www.ltsp.org/, and their kernels don't have all of the drivers that I need.

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http://tvtime.sf.net/

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2003-06-20 - Spent a couple of hours fooling around with the setup. Was able to get the capture part working just fine (had to compile i2c as a module, also v4l stuff which is very old in the kernel). I can run xawtv and capture snapshots and they look fine. Display is FUBAR - I've installed X and DRI and it seems to run OK, but it splashes pixels all over the display. Looks almost as if you took the red, green and blue parts of the pixels and put them side by side instead of combining them into a single pixel. Guess I'll need some help.

In the mean time I figured out that the cable no longer provides basic signals (it did when we moved in) so I have to use a powered antenna to play around, which works poorly since I've got all of the gear in the basement. Comcast wants $45/mo for basic cable which seems amazingly expensive to me. I would get a $20 discount on the cable modem but I don't care since my company pays that.

-- TobyCabot - 30 May 2003

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