I tend to fall into the same behaviour everytime I get a cold.
I’m okay during the day, but I can’t sleep at night. I typically
end up going to sleep between 5 and 7am (usually with more than
a little help from our friend benadryl). Luckily, I’m not
typically a early riser, so noone cares too much if I then
decide to sleep to noon and come into work late.

So monday night, I picked up a new small bookcase during
the day, and then ended up rearranging my books starting
about 4am. They are sort of organized now, by the
Aklikins Decimal System.

At which point, I noticed I have 14 shelves of non-fiction
(including 4 shelves of computer books) and 1 shelf of
fiction. Actually, more like half a shelf of fiction
and half a shelf of sort of fiction (for example, david
sedaris and sarah vowel books, etc…). I’m not
really the literary type it seems.

Tuesday I decided I was gonna play with a Myth Tv setup. So
I picked up a wintv pvr-250 capture card on the way
home. I’ve only got the one working machine, so I
just installed it on my 9ish desktop. I used the
packages from atrpms
to install it. After sorting out some package
conflicts (why oh why must every 3rd party package
repo vendor decide to package up mplayer and related
tools in completly different ways…), managed to
get it up and going.

Killed an hour trying to figure out why it wasn’t
getting any video (hint: mythsetup configures mythbackend,
and it helps to restart that after you change the config…).

Killed another 45 minutes or so getting the remote to
work (apparently the latest lirc release breaks the
hauppage remote I had, so had to downgrade that).

But then it seemed to work. Tv/web/news/image/video/audio
seem to work okay. The dvd stuff didnt work, but I
didnt even look at the config.

All in all, kind of spiffy. Except for one problem.
It’s slow. Considering its an 2ghz athlon with half
a gig of ram, it should be at least as fast as an
underpowered tivo, but that doesn’t seem to be the
case. In particular, changing “screens” is much
slower than I’d like, and flippy channels has about
a 3 second pause. Enough to be annoying.

And it seems to be storing the video in “nuppelVideo”
format, which seems odd to me, seeing as the card
has a native mpeg-2 encoder. But maybe thats just
what it does.

the xmltv listing don’t seem to be as accurate
as the tivo data either.