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.

Given my fondness for doing things the hard way I've decided to hack together a computer-powered television set using parts that I've mostly already got lying around the house.

Bill of materials:

• HP A2094A monitor - a 20" RGB monitor from an old HP X terminal. Picture tube is a Sony Trinitron.
• Intel 815-based motherboard with a 900MHz PIII.
• AverTV tuner card. The only component I've had to buy so far, $20 at Compusa.
• 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.

Change of plan: I found a project called MythTV http://www.mythtv.org/ which can run in client-server mode. This will allow me to run the tuner in a server in the basement and the display on a workstation in the den.

I wanted to put the tuner card in my 1U VA Linux server but for some reason the card wasn't seen by the operating system. Maybe the little right-angle riser card was broken? In any case it worked just fine in my Intel 815 mobo which will allow me to get it working but then I'll have to move it to my other server, I guess. That's the price you pay for a 1U form factor.

Building MythTV was somewhat challenging. It has lots of dependencies but they're spelled out on the website. This is one of those times where Debian is a good and bad thing. Good because it's so easy to find and install software, bad because many people expect files to be where Red Hat puts them and Debian often puts them somewhere else.

On the other hand, why build when you can apt-get? http://dijkstra.csh.rit.edu:8088/~mdz/debian/dists/unstable/mythtv/

Here's a command-line recorder: http://www.stack.nl/~brama/vcr/

http://tvtime.sf.net/

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.

2003-09-05 - I've switched over to RCN and signed up for cable tv and made a little more progress. The display problem above must be an X Windows configuration problem because I can run xawtv on the server but display it on my diskless workstation and the picture is fine (although not the most crisp since it's going over the network). It's pretty cool to see that X can stream TV over the network.

-- TobyCabot - 30 May 2003