[Klug-general] May Meeting Synopsis

[Colin McCarthy]

For those that could not attend our meeting on Saturday in Ashford
here's a brief synopsis.
It is also available on the website with pictures.  I will upload Karl
B's presentation once I get around the upload limit :-)


May Ashford Meeting Synopsis

This was our first meeting in Ashford and which the following people attended.

Karl Buckland
Mike Evans
Andrew (Spode) Miller
Paul Littlefield
Peter Child
Chris Jefferies – a new member delurking
Paul Harding – an old member delurking
Colin McCarthy

Thanks to Chris and Paul for continuing our record for having people
delurk at each meeting this year.  Who wants to delurk at the next
meeting?

MythTV TechTalk by Karl Buckland

Karl first impressed us with some new fancy OpenOffice 3D transitions.
You can install them yourself from this guide.
http://tombuntu.com/index.php/2008/05/05/install-3d-transitions-for-openoffice-24/

Karl then explained about his own backend Mythtv system which has 3 TV
cards, allowing TV to be recorded, streamed and controlled from
frontend units around his house.

Karl explained about commercial detention and schedule recording to
record complete seasons of a show.  A TVGuide is available as well,
via feeds from the Radio Times in XML.

The power of MythTV is that is has lots of plugins and is UPnP complaint.

Karl explained about the hardware, which he described as scalable and
modular, Advised that its best to get a Hauppauge WinTV-PRV PCI card.
remote control , and then storage!

MythTV is easy to install as there are packages available for all
popular distros.

Karl then did a live demo of the system showing the configuration
screens, how to watch recorded TV, and also downloaded TV, and showed
how to schedule recordings.

MythtTV has many helpful resources – MythtTV wiki mythtv.org and a
mailing list. The website parker1.co.uk has great UK specific howto's
about setting up MythtTV on Ubuntu.

A long discussion followed about all the features and usage scenarios.
It was suggested to check what Hauppauge card you get because they do
have different chipsets.

We then all broke into separate conversations which were about tiny
tiny PC's (Paul has one to show us at the next meeting), Mike's new
Dell Ubuntu laptop and the pleasures of coffee in the morning.

Hope everyone enjoyed it, and more come to the next one.

Colin