data – Made by Mikal

Breaking: Zap2IT turning off guide data for the US?

Post author:mikal
Post published:June 21, 2007
Post category:Mythtv

MythTVnews.com is reporting that Tribune Media Services (TMS), the providers of the Zap2IT guide data used by MythTV in the US, will turn that guide data off on 1 September 2007. I haven't had a lot of time to look into this further, mainly because I am giving a talk this morning. I'll have a better look at lunch time (PDT) and write some more about this. I think there's no need for panic, as a new guide data source will be found, but this is unexpected.

On freely available guide data

Post author:mikal
Post published:April 18, 2006
Post category:Mythtv

One of the flaws with Microsoft's Media Center flavour of Windows XP when it was released in Australia, was that it suffered from the same inherent flaw as every other PVR option in Australia. No guide data. It really says something about Australia's television networks that they don't want to help people with even vaguely modern computing setups watch their content -- it's a situation which reminds me a lot of the RIAA's stand over tactics, and I think it's equally doomed. That's one of the joys of my MythTV setup in the US -- the guide data is trivially available in return for doing a simple four or five question survey every three months or so. What could be easier than that? Well, when I was using a TiVo in Australia the OzTiVo folk had a solution to these problems, and were working with the XMLTV / MythTV people to make it more generic. I hadn't been paying much attention to it until today when I was randomly surfing on the topic, but it's interesting to see that they also now provide instructions for how to import their guide data into a Windows Media Center PC. It's cool to…

ImageMagick book – Chapter 3: Compression and Other Metadata

Post author:mikal
Post published:August 13, 2005
Post category:Imagemagick

Writing the summary of Chapter 2 seemed to work as a warmup for me the other day, so I thought I would write about Chapter 3 as a warm up for working some more on Chapter 7. I also need to look at reviewer comments for Chapters 2, 3, and 4 sometime today, so it seems like a good idea as well because it will help me remember what I am trying to cover in the chapter. Chapter 3 is all about the different things you can do with compression with ImageMagick, as well as other forms of image metadata. So, I start out by talking about lossy versus lossless compression (there's an interesting tangent to this discussion which I need to add as a sidebar to the chapter during this editing process, but I'll leave that to another post here), I give some examples of the accumulative nature of the loss from lossy compressions. We then move on to compare the size of a bunch of images using different compression algorithms, which gives a good introduction to discussing which image format is the right choice for given scenarios. (As an aside that I will follow here, that was probably…