Rupert Goodwins' Diary

Thursday 6/6/2002

It's come to my attention that some sort of soccer event is going on. Coincidently, I've obtained a Hauppauge digital terrestrial TV receiver card for my PC, and even though ITV Digital is off the air, there's lots of free-to-air stuff to watch. Including lots and lots of footie.

The full review will be coming up next week -- but the card is rather odd. It doesn't look like a video capture card to Windows; instead, it's configured as a network card with a private IP address. It then delivers a MPEG-2 videostream to that IP address; the software that shows the picture decodes this.

Which means, I muse, that if you can route that IP address out to the LAN then it can be shared by fellow office workers, who can watch digital telly on their PCs. I make the mistake of musing this aloud, to the noticeable excitement of several comrades within earshot.

So far, though, it's been a miserable experience. Lots of advice and promising software gathered from the Internet has resulted in lots of crashes, peculiar registry hacks and swearing. And as my PC's being used to generate the video for the projector which is showing the football to everyone, if I leave it in a state of brokenness for any length of time I can expect the same sort of treatment as James VI meted out to heretics.

Computers. Pah.