Adding SBS Adelaide Manually to TVHeadend

Recently I ordered a new USB Tv-tuner via Aliexpress. As expected it arrived without extra packaging and drivers, but complete with a tiny antenna. After some googing with the USB VID:PID ( Bus 001 Device 016: ID 15f4:0131 HanfTek ) I found some notes about support in Kernel 3.13.

Astrometa Tuner - Also supported by Kernel 3.13

So I upgraded an Eeepc I had sitting around to this kernel and the TV-Tuner card showed up. Next phase of the adventure was to share this new found tuner to the rest of the house via TV-Headend.

[12546.596154] usb 1-1: new high-speed USB device number 16 using ehci-pci
[12546.738398] usb 1-1: New USB device found, idVendor=15f4, idProduct=0131
[12546.738414] usb 1-1: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=0
[12546.738425] usb 1-1: Product: dvbt2
[12546.738435] usb 1-1: Manufacturer: astrometadvbt2
[12546.744405] usb 1-1: dvb_usb_v2: found a 'Astrometa DVB-T2' in warm state
[12546.812321] usb 1-1: dvb_usb_v2: will pass the complete MPEG2 transport stream to the software demuxer
[12546.812379] DVB: registering new adapter (Astrometa DVB-T2)
[12546.816555] usb 1-1: DVB: registering adapter 0 frontend 0 (Realtek RTL2832 (DVB-T))...
[12546.826784] r820t 6-003a: creating new instance
[12546.838662] r820t 6-003a: Rafael Micro r820t successfully identified
[12546.845398] Registered IR keymap rc-empty
[12546.845785] input: Astrometa DVB-T2 as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1d.7/usb1/1-1/rc/rc11/input33
[12546.846154] rc11: Astrometa DVB-T2 as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1d.7/usb1/1-1/rc/rc11
[12546.846621] input: MCE IR Keyboard/Mouse (dvb_usb_rtl28xxu) as /devices/virtual/input/input34
[12546.847310] rc rc11: lirc_dev: driver ir-lirc-codec (dvb_usb_rtl28xxu) registered at minor = 0
[12546.847334] usb 1-1: dvb_usb_v2: schedule remote query interval to 400 msecs
[12546.859647] usb 1-1: dvb_usb_v2: 'Astrometa DVB-T2' successfully initialized and connected

Getting TV-Head end installed via the debian repository was a breeze, just add it to apt-sources after importing the signature. Adding channels is fairly easy as well, go to the TV Adapters page, select the adapter and Add DVB Network by location, in my case this was au_Adelaide. All channels added successfully except SBS Adelaide, which seems to have changed frequencies recently. So I dug up the new frequency - 184.5MHz and decided to add the Mux by hand.

Basic Tv-Tuner page for TV-Headend

Just the centre frequency and bandwidth are required, everything else can be left on "Auto".

Adding SBS Adelaide MUX by hand

Adelaide DVB-T channel list (including retuned SBS)

After the MUX shows up in the list, press play and this will scan the MUX and auto-add channels. These channels however will be nameless and require "Map DVB services to channels" in the main page to be named properly. Afterwards the full channel list including SBS Adelaide looks something like below. From there it is just a matter of hooking it up to VLC or XBMC. Happy Tour-de-France watching and recording ahead.

SBS Via TV-Headend into VLC

VLC ad-inifinitum - Doing graffiti with Video Streaming

I had a very fun night the other day hanging out with guys from the GRL Australia - Perth. They mentioned that they have been trying to get the drawing pad wireless without doing anything too fancy and I thought about VLC screen streaming. It can get pretty nice and recursive if done incorrectly as shown below. If VLC runs off-screen and the graffiti drawing app runs in full-screen then we can easily send off the drawn work to the projector connected to say small computer (Gumstix strikes again) running VLC in full screen mode.

So we have Graffiti App->Screen->VLC->Over Air->VLC->Second Screen/Projector. I would have drawn a nice block diagram but the GRL folk can do that.

Now here is the second interesting part , some projects such as LightTwist and PixelFlex do camera based projector auto-calibration. Why not use the same ideas and build multi-projector graffitis, also we have a camera image to display to the tablet user as the surface on which the graffiti is going and the auto-calibration can ensure what is drawn goes where it's drawn including messy mesh manipulation etc.  giving the feel of real graffiti drawing. So here is another flow:
Camera->VLC->On Air->Drawing Pad->Back ground to Graffiti drawing app.
For now it can be just a static image, eventually proper feedback will help with colour selection and positioning elements of the drawing.