Someone posted this link on the VanLUG mailing list. Very interesting!
Sony - Open Source Code - English
The following products incorporate software covered by the terms of the GNU General Public License and/or GNU Lesser General Public License, as specified in the software listing below.
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Been looking forward to this coming out. Now all I need is an HD source. 
HD PVR Product overview
HD PVR is the world’s first High-Definition video recorder for making real-time H.264 compressed recordings at resolutions up to 1080i. HD-PVR records component video (YCrCb) from cable TV and satellite set top boxes, with a built-in IR blaster to automatically change TV channels for scheduled recordings. Audio is recorded using AAC or Dolby Digital.
Enter service menu by first unplugging set, then while holding both input button and volume down button, plug TV back in. Within about 5 seconds, the set will power up (without pressing the “on” button); keep holding the input and volume down buttons until a small “K” appears in a box on the left side of the screen. Then press and hold the channel down and vol down buttons at the same time to enter the service menu.
I’m assuming that my Sharp will use the same procedure, even though it isn’t a 46″.
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I loaded up Future Shop’s web page this morning to check out TV deals. They have a great idea on their front page, a slider that you move depending on a person’s tech savvy, and it will suggest gifts on the right scale. Great idea! I cranked it up to 100% to see what it suggested. The first thing was the Monster AVS 2000:
Monster’s AVS 2000 is a serious product for serious home theater enthusiasts. It has been hailed as a truly innovative and invaluable product by reviewers and the buying public. The AVS 2000 is designed to stabilize power line fluctuations and maintain constant voltage to your home theatre for maximum performance.
As usual, Monster is scamming people with overpriced equipment that they don’t need.
At first glance, it might seem like it is a good idea, since your house voltage does fluctuate depending on the load, but rarely between 80-140V. Generally it will be between 115-120V. BC Hydro is automatically monitoring and adjusting the power on the grid to keep it within spec.
Even if the power does change, it won’t make any difference to your electronic equipment, because they all convert the 120V AC power into whatever DC power they need. For example your computer’s power supply has -12, -5, 5, and 12V. I’m not sure about TVs but I can guarantee that they aren’t running off 120V directly. All of your equipment is carefully engineered to be able to run off relatively dirty 120V because the designers already know that this power will fluctuate. There is huge amount of study done on power supplies, the first thing that we did at UBC in the lab was to build our own!
Let’s look at some of the results people have had with their equipment. Positive Feedback Issue 6 says this:
As numerous folks have reported, audio and video benefits from the use of a power conditioner in a number of ways. There is less low-level hash and noise, the absence of which makes the audio signal appear to arrive from a darker, inkier background, and video images from a cleaner, crisper screen. Details are heard and seen that were masked before. Tonal density (audio and video) is more saturated, and seems richer and more natural.
Video is crisper? Really? Interesting. Now how did they test this… well they hooked it all up after spending $1500 US, and wow, the sound and video improved. What kind of equipment did they use to make the voltage fluctuate? Oh, they didn’t. How did they test the audio? Hmm, with their ears. No test equipment in sight. No double-blind tests, nothing.
Save your money and buy a line conditioner from a real power company. You can get a 2400W conditioner from TrippLite for $400. It’s the same rating, 20A, and the same number of outlets. I have no relation to TrippLite, they were just the first one to come up on a Google search.
Or, if you are cheap like me, just ignore the click in the audio when your fridge turns on.
Wow, it was hot last night! So hot, I had to shut down the PVR:
Message from syslogd@ebi at Wed Jul 11 18:39:42 2007 …
ebi kernel: CPU0: Temperature above threshold
It seems like my plants are doing ok. There is a danger of the tomatoes dropping their blossoms before fruit has formed, but I don’t think that has happened.
And on a blogging note, there aren’t many times that I can have a post that’s in both the MythTV and Gardening categories!
B.C. swelters under record highs
Seven all-time temperature highs were set across British Columbia on Wednesday, with most of the records falling in the Fraser Valley, the Greater Vancouver area and on Vancouver Island.
Having upgraded MythTV, the new timestretch feature defaults to 1.0x, which isn’t what I want. Here’s how to fix that:
From a shell prompt:
mysql -u mythtv -p mythconverg;
Where ‘mythtv’ is the username used to access the database. It will prompt you for a password. After typing in the password successfully, type the following command at the mysql prompt:
update record set tsdefault = 1.1;
That’s it!
EDIT: Hmmm maybe not. There is also a timescale column in the recorded table:
update recorded set timescale = 1.1;
Hooray, House is back!
I was getting really tired of the baseball playoffs.
Of course, this means that the PVR won’t tape L&O: CI. Crap. I guess it’s time for another tuner card.
Last night I upgraded the kernel and all of the related drivers on the mythtv box. Updating IVTV from the 0.4 series to 0.7 series broke things with the tuners, because they were renamed from Tuner 0 to Tuner 1. In the mythbackend logs, the error was related in the ChannelBase category. It was a weird error because it could still read from /dev/video0, but it couldn’t set the channel.
I deleted the tuner, added the new one as Tuner 1, and restarted mythbackend. Worked fine after that.
There is still a weird problem with the audio, where it doesn’t work the first time the frontend is started, but it works every time after that. Must be an ALSA issue.
The Wall Street Journal has an article about Netflix queues. It discusses the rental habits of people, especially how they watch high brow vs low brow movies.
It’s a paradox of abundance,” said Siva Vaidhyanathan, a professor of culture and communication at New York University. If people aren’t pressured to see a movie in a specific time frame, he said, viewers tend to put it lower on their priority list. “When you have every choice in front of you, you have less urgency about any particular choice,” he added.
I experience the same thing with my MythTV box. With channels like Turner Classic Movies, there are a ton of 3.5+ star movies that are on all the time that I would like to see, so I tape them. Actually sitting down to watch them is a different story though. I have a ton of movies that are waiting for me to watch, like Gone With The Wind, or Yojimbo, that I just don’t get around to. On the other hand, if I have spare time I will end up watching 5 episodes of Food Jammers or Iron Chef, which take just as long if not longer than a movie.
Jim Carrey’s appearance on Conan O’Brien has to be one of the funniest late night shows I have ever seen. The two of them were bouncing back and forth and it just got better after every joke. Normally I find Jim Carrey annoying (Fire Marshall Bill) but this time he didn’t just depend on his rubber face to get the laughs. He was on to promote Fun with Dick and Jane, which looks like a pretty good movie. I think a lot of people will end up seeing it when they can’t get in to King Kong, but they’ll end up enjoying it.
And then, just when you thought it couldn’t get any better, Isaac Hayes is the musical guest, and he does a ‘Shaft’ tribute to Conan. The Max Weinburg 7 played with the band, and you could tell that they were having a great time with the music.