A TV set for the Macbook
It's been since I moved to my flat in Oslo that I have cable TV (provided by Get), but without a TV it wasn't that exciting :P
So, long story short, I bought an Elgato EyeTV Hybrid device with Elgato EyeTV 3 software bundled in the package.
It's a USB TV tuner that has an analogic TV tuner, a digital tuner for DVB-T, and a digital converter for DVB-C also.
The thing I needed most was the DVB-C support, and not many devices have it.
I'm really happy with this little new toy, the quality in digital on the cable is great, the analog channels are not so bad after all, as for the terrestrial digital (DVB-T) I tried with the antenna included in the package, the quality of course depends on the position of the antenna and the strenght and quality of the signal, so sometimes you can experience signal interruptions, but the quality is good also.
I'm looking forward to test DVB-T in South Africa and Italy; here in Norway you can find those channels also on the cable (both digital and analog).
Of course just installing the software and enjoy the shows was too simple :)
I wanted an EPG for the channels available on the cable.
Some digital channels broadcast already their EPG, but some others and all the analogic ones not.
In the Channels section of the EyeTV application, it's possible to set how to get the EPG for every channel; one of the options is xmltv.
XMLTV is a XML format for describing TV listings, and there are some resources around updated daily.
After some researching I found this for Norway: http://mspc.no/xmltv/ which keeps a file with the guide for each channel for 30 days.
So I just needed a way to make something useful out of all those files.
xmltv is an open source project for managing TV listings from several countries in XMLTV format.
It turned out that is actually written in Perl and uses several CPAN modules and some scripts.
There is a collection of grabbers for different countries and the one for Norway uses the sources from
http://mspc.no/xmltv/ for building a single EPG file with all the configured channels.
So, how to load this EPG into EyeTV?
That was tricky to find out, no way to load the data from EyeTV, so Google pointed me to this article: http://benblaughs.blogspot.com/2008/03/using-xmltv-feeds-with-eyetv.html.
Looking at the script I found out how it can be done: just load the file when you run the EyeTV application.
From the command line type:open -a EyeTV.app my_epg_listing.xml
and presto! the EPG are available :)
Spring... or summer?!
In the past weeks the weather was great, sunny and warm; and now the days are becoming longer and longer, we already have light from 5 to 21:30!
Anyway, it's been a long time since my last post, many things happened and now it's time to write something...
First of all I'm blogging from my new MacBook, I bought it in Italy when I was there for Christmas.
I'm quite happy about it, no big issues for now.
Recently I bought a bycicle also and now it's a pleasure run along the river in the morning while commuting to work.
When it's time to go back home it's another story, but I'm quite satisfied with my performances (24 gears help though).
This week, or the next one, I'm going to buy a second hand Pentax K10D DSLR from Peter and finally stop waste money to buy films and develop ugly photos... a new era will arise :)
Next 17-18 May I'll skip the norwegian national day and spend the weekend in London instead with 3 other italians, it will be fun and hopefully I'll have the occasion to train a bit with the reflex.
Hmm... looks like I'm spending lots of money lately! \o/
I would like to write some more specific posts about this things, so stay tuned!