Some months back I was showing off a multimedia PC I have built, that I named BAtv. The first two letters are the initials of the street in which the house is from which I have moved away last weekend. The box had the aim to provide a richer, centralized multimedia experience that should also include standard TV. The technically the box worked, but several drawbacks did not make it worthwhile.
The banner I used when I presented the BAtv box on the earlier version of my homepage
The big and main drawback was basically the TV card which could only take in an aerial signal and had no MPEG encoder on it, which caused a 4-5 second delay in displaying the image. Subsequently it took 4-5 seconds until a switch of a channel or every other remote activity became visible, as the card fed directly from the in-house TV receiver from the provider NTL. Another drawback was the playback of some movies, which simply did not work at all sometimes or incorrectly. Although the movie database worked perfectly fine, so did the retrieval of TV programme information.
The main start screen of BAtv - a bit of AppleTV
Well, I gonna give it another shot then. Over the weekend I will re-construct the box, but firstly use more up-to-date software such as Fedora 8, and the latest MythTV release. However, as I don’t watch TV that much, I gonna leave TV out. For me I have discovered, it’s about movies, movies, and movies. So I gonna center Take 2 around movies. I gonna give it a new UI, and then make it available for download.
The new name is SEtv (System Error TV). Stay iTuned.
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