January 29th 2009 - Pinnacle PCTV Pro USB

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hi

Today I bought a Pinnacle PCTV Pro USB TV Capture Card to capture the output of the game consoles, since it has 3 inputs (Antenna, Composite and S-Video) 3 gameconsoles may fit into it :)

There is an issue with the audio, I'm working with 'tvtime' to see the TV

At the beginning by running the following

• $ tvtime --device /dev/video0 --vbidevice /dev/vbi0 --input 0

I can watch TV but no luck with the audio, until I found these two sites which list similar problems and they solve it by running sox - the swiss army knife in audio tools.

The problem basically is the capture card comes with a sound card and the audio from the TV channels is dumped into this new card, since I'm using my primary card I expected all audio went through it, but it ressult it wasn't, so I had to use sox to have a "digital wire" (formally a pipe) connecting the output from the usb audio card with the input of the primary audio card.

the sox usage info was obtained from the following sources

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=622583
http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/debian-ubuntu-linux-configure-pinnacle-pctv-tuner.html

My command to load tvtime and pipe te audio to the correct card is:

• $ tvtime --device /dev/video0 --vbidevice /dev/vbi0 --input 0 & sleep 1 && sox --channels 2 -sw --rate 44200 --type ossdsp /dev/dsp1 --type ossdsp /dev/dsp

• Load tvtime and sleep 1 second, after sleeping (double ampersand) launch sox

So far I have only seen the signal with audio comming from antenna input, even if I connect the RCA audio to the device via RCA-to-3.5mmPlug adapter doesn't make any difference, the sound input is grabbed from the last tunned channel on Antenna input.

I hope to get the audio working from Composite or S-Video input, else I'm just bypassing the sox part

I believe that's all for now

init 0

January 5th, 2009 - GameCube - Phantasy Star Online

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Today I bought a Phantasy Star Online Episode 1 & 2 disc, this game is pretty rare and I got it cheaper, almost like any other used GC game. The disc is in good condition, some minor scratches, but it loads smooth and I played for some hours with it ^-^

I tested the PSOLoad method to run GC-Linux Alpha and it worked!. I had to set the ip address of my machine to static ip and the cube has it's own address, thus they need to be on the same segment

• PC: 192.168.0.1
• GC: 192.168.0.47

After a little reading on the page, I read the NBD and NFS versions of gcLinux may be edited to request an ip address through dhcp, so my logic pointed me to edit the zImage.dol replacing the following text

• ip=192.168.0.47

with this

• ip=dhcp

I padded with spaces (to respect the binary size), the booted the image with PSOLoad and... it worked !!!. I'm very exited to see it worked.

In both cases (static and dynamic ip) the gamecube was able to serve the webpage

• links http://:80/

And I made telnet connections to it (after i read the gclinux page and foud out of user and password)

• telnet 22