tv/video
Change in HDD and VLC Video Problems
by jammie on Jan.31, 2009, under tv/video, ubuntu
After coming across a 250gb hard disk I had forgotten about I decided to replace the existing noisy 20gb hard drive in my TV server. Rather than doing a fresh install I tried to do a side to side copy of the system… did not go to well.
In the end I did a fresh minimal install of ubuntu 8.10. On my initial boot I came across a grub ‘error 18′. After some investigation i realised the boot partition was bigger than the size supported by the motherboard. Did another install but this time added in a small 300MB boot partition. Now the system boots happily! Happy days!
The next issue is related to groups. I installed vlc-nox and placed my init script back into its home on the new install. I tried to run it but it failed horribly with VLC complaining about unable to open /dev/video0. After trying a few things (i installed the vlc package amongst other things) i decided to check out the permissions of /dev/video0 and that is where the problem was. The device has permissions of 660 with a owner of root:video. So I added my user to the video group. Rebooted and tv server was back to normal!
So reminder to self: Check permissions first. Then anything else!
pvr-350 – From the STB to my screen
by jammie on Jan.18, 2009, under tv/video, ubuntu
At home I have my virgin STB connected up to a old 450mhz server. I then use this machine to forward the picture onto which ever machine I am using at the time. I found that adding the following line to a script that is run at startup (mine runs within my vlc init.d script) solves all the problems i was seeing with the pvr-350:
v4l2-ctl –set-ctrl temporal_filter=0 –set-input=5
Once this line is in place the ghosting issues i was seeing vanished. The set-input of course tells the pvr to use the scart input.
This post is mainly for a reminder in the case i ever rebuild this box. However there is possibly some chance someone might find this useful!
