Author Archives: Steven

ASUS My Cinema U3100 Mini USB Digital TV Receiver

Leave a Reply

A few days ago I bought one of these for $46 from MSY. It is cheap and versatile and works very well. One reason I bought the U3100 is that it was designed with the ASUS eee PC in mind which runs on Ubuntu Linux. On my project to-do list is to build a MythTV box using Ubuntu so this USB TV tuner should work fine. In the meantime I plugged it in to my main home PC which runs WinXP.

An issue I had was the choice of TV software. I’d read that the supplied EZVCR software was no good so I was glad to see that it also came with TotalMedia 3.5. This installed, detected the TV tuner and found all the expected TV stations without a problem. The only hitch I discovered later relates to playing recorded programmes. It produces unusual mpg files which play fine in TotalMedia but when I play them with VLC or WMP there is no sound. In fact VLC says the file contains no audio stream at all, so the lack of sound is not surprising. The TotalMedia version supplied is free and probably nobbled. The TotalMedia website encourages users to upgrade to the full version for US$30. I don’t think so.

So, what free software to use instead? Mr Google recommended GB-PVR so I gave it a try. It is very good but a bit tricky to set up. A hurdle is that during configuration the ASUS U3000 is listed as supported but not the U3100. Selecting U3000 didn’t work. The GB-PVR wiki has a procedure for adding an unsupported tuner or ‘capture card’ which involves using graphedit to examine the tuner characteristics and adding these details to bda.ini, the config file for digital tuners which use BDA drivers. Before going to the trouble of downloading and installing graphedit I thought I’d try a simpler method first.

I opened bda.ini, found the section for U3000 and copied it, creating a duplicate entry. Then I changed the occurrences in the new entry of U3000 to U3100. I figured that the parameters for U3000 and U3100 would be very similar if not identical and GB-PVR might be happy if it could just find a usable entry for the U3100. Bingo, it worked.

…
[Asus u3100 mini USB]
TUNING_TYPE=DVB-T
FILTER_TUNER=ASUS U3100 Mini BDA Digital Tuner (Dev1 Path0)
FILTER_CAPTURE=ASUS U3100 Mini BDA Digital Capture (Dev1 Path0)
PIN_TUNER_IN=Input 0
PIN_TUNER_OUT=MPEG2 Transport
PIN_CAPTURE_IN=MPEG2 Transport
PIN_CAPTURE_OUT=MPEG2 Transport
…

American Football game

Leave a Reply

Last night we all went to the St George Hockey Centre to watch a game of American Football (Gridiron) between UTS and the Bondi Raiders. It was a really enjoyable evening. The venue was excellent. The ‘Kyeemagh RSL and Community Club’ has behind it a good quality synthetic-surfaced hockey field owned by the St George Randwick Hockey Club. The field is also marked to play American Football.

The street address is 1 Tancred Ave which google maps, and others, says is down near the corner with General Holmes Drive, but it is actually at the other end next to the hockey field. This is obvious on the map below.

We’d never seen a live game before. Callum and Conrad play Madden and Callum is a fan of the Kansas City Chiefs so he watches replays via their website. I was a bit worried that the quality of play would be really low in a local game after the boys were used to watching world-class athletes on the screen. But the quality and level of skills was excellent.

UTS got off to a slow start and after the first quarter we thought that the Raiders might beat them easily. The UTS team seemed younger and lighter and looked like they might get smashed. But as the game progressed UTS gained in confidence. In the fourth quarter Bondi made three bad handing errors which resulted in 3 UTS touch-downs. I think the final score was 37-18. Callum can probably add some more details.

Something totally unexpected was that Barbara met a guy she used to work with years ago. He, Roger, and his mate, Eric, are both big fans of the game and we spent most of the evening with them. Roger and Barbara talking about the good old days. Eric, the boys and me throwing around a football. We swapped phone numbers and plan to meet up again at other games.



View Larger Map