The Strawberry Project

OK, so it wasn’t quite as straight forward as I anticipated beyond the transfer of content from the 9200T to the Mac. As it turns out, the end DVD product of carefully transcoded MPEG TS to MPEG-2 ended up being particularly clippy.

The finger of blame is pointing squarely at Roxio for compressing the video down again, though it has to be said that these are unsubstantiated rumours at this point.

Anyhoo - one thing I did notice on the TS output from the Humax was that occasionally some of the BBC channels swiitched audio channels in their output. Whilst this has never been a problem on the DVB receivers we have, it would seem that fusspot applications on the desktop take a particular exception to audio appearing on channel 2 and not on 1. VLC can switch between the channels but defaults to 1 and so Bob The Builder is suddenly broadcast in silence.

Some might say that this a ‘Good Thing’^TM.

I’m inclined to agree. [sssh - don't tell the kids]

Next stop is MPEG Streamclip to see what’s possible there.

Our Humax 9200 is far from being full on the 160Gb disk that it holds, however, the Library function doesn’t make for an easy read through pages of Bob The Builder episodes. The request was made to sort out getting content off the PVR and on to a spare disk attached to a Mac.

Luckily, the 9200T has a USB 2.0 connector on the front of it that is normally used to shove mp3s and pictures down the line to it from your PC - and therein lies the problem. To date, Humax have a somewhat limited (read non-existant) support profile for Mac users, and so whilst PC users have had some success in getting hold of Humax MPEG TS files, Mac users have been left wanting.

A groundswell of support for Mac software started out earlier in 2006 on the DigitalSpy forums, which has resulted in the release of HumaxGUI for Mac. the Universal binary is a QT-based application (with QT bindings already compiled in, so no need to compile QT for OS X, thankfully).

The GUI allows you to connect via USB to your Humax 9200 and see the contents of D1 (MP3s/Pictures) and D2 (MPEG TS Video files), working like a standard FTP client. Hoorah! The downside at the moment is that the transfer rate is pretty slow. My current transfers are running through at about 1Mb/sec and require the PVR to be in standby - but I guess it’s a start. Perhaps it’s something to do overnight when there’s nothing worth recording.

Anyway, after moving files across to your Mac, you may want to take a look at them / play back or even output to DVD for long-term storage. Quicktime won’t play the TS files as they stand, so you’ll have to grab a copy of VLC for OS X if you just want ot play them back.

The next step of shifting the data out to DVD is a little more involved. None of the likely DVD burning tools you can think of will do anything with the TS files, and so you’ll need to transcode them in to something else. I initially tried VLC to do this, but failed miserably and failed to take into account the warning that file-to-file transcoding isn’t VLC’s speciality. A little more reading led me to ProjectX - a java Demux application that runs happily on OS X and is available on Sourceforge.

ProjectX allows you to edit the TS files to add start/stop clips and chapter bookmarks - pretty handy when you don’t want the links between programmes that the Freeview EPG tends to record. Output is available in a number of formats, but for this HOWTO, I’ve stuck to m2p (mpeg2) format.

So far it looks as though Roxio Popcorn is out for burning to DVD, but the full Toast Titanium is happy to play along and compress multiple files to a single layer DVD.

More anon.

IBM Watson Research Centre undertake research in collaboration and collaborative tools (mainly under the Lotus brand). IBM have been working on a project, affectionately entitled ‘Dogear‘ (as in the somewhat destructive practice of folding over pages in books ), which is basically [pauses for a moment to check whether IBM lawyers are around, mindful of the fact that a lot of devlopment effort has been expended on this] del.icio.us for the Enterprise. Obviously this is a masterstroke of understatement in terms of the effort that has gone in to the project, so bear with me whilst I run through what they’ve done in a more positive analysis

For those with an ACM login, you can read an article in Queue, and Watson Research Centre Research Papers are here for those who are academically inclined.

Usual obsessive listening happening late in the afternoon. Today it’s Clem Snide with “Fontanelle” from Soft Spot. It is entirely impossible to mislike Clem Snide. I challenge anyone to prove otherwise. Now if only I wasn’t cylcing home, I could carry on listening.

FINALLY, we have signed off on the contract for The Strawberry Project and have burried the hatchet with our delivery partners at IBM. Now the real work can begin - well, once the CMS project has gone live and we’ve all caught up on some sleep