The Future

The current version of my recording system is very stable and providing the means of major TV reception to my family. No major bugs have been fixed nor major new features have been added in the last few months.

Transition to digital broadcast

Key TV stations air 1-minute spots advertising the termination of analog terrestrial broadcast in Japan on July 24, 2011. The current version of my recording system does not support digital terrestrial broadcast reception and therefore will stop working on that day.

Since the authorities do not allow digital TV broadcast signals to pass universal buses like PCI, the only practical way to receive and record digital broadcast on my system is to use a separate digital broadcast tuner STB and feed its analog output to the existing TV capture card's composite or S-Video input (and audio input also). The same is true for BS (broadcast satellite) reception.

This is not only stupid but also gives me a number of challenges:

Purchase one (or two) digital tuner from Japan. It's not cheap yet. An entry model sells for around 30,000 yen (~$260US) or usually more.
Set up LIRC or similar IR support on a local Linux box. Purchase or build an IR receiver (for development only) and as many IR emitters as the number of digital tuners.
Using the above IR setup installed locally, decode the digital tuner's IR remote control codes, and write IR control subsystem on top of the existing software.
Install the same software and hardware (digital tuner(s), IR emitter(s)) in the existing system in Japan.

NMP Server

The Wizd NMP server program is very good, as it is; but mainly due to its non-OOP architecture, it's not easy to add new features or improve existinh features. I have added several new features such as metadata display, but it was a pain to traverse the entire code tree in order to insert just one small thing. The top wish-list item is to enbale file management on the TV screen that currently requires a PC web interface, but adding such a significant to the Wizd code is something I really do not want to do.

A plan is to rewrite the whole thing using Perl's plug-in manner, but it's not trivial...