BootCamp
Early last year the BBC and the other major free-to-air broadcasters started a trial of terrestrial HDTV broadcasts in south London. While the others have packed up, the BBC is still broadcasting in 1080i and has many of its headline programmes on there - such as Planet Earth - along with a lot of previews and fillers.
I've been keen to get it for a while, as Planet Earth in particular really benefits from the added resolution. However, it is encoded as MPEG-4/H.264, whereas the SDTV channels (and hence the majority of set-top boxes) are sent in MPEG-2. Further, neither EyeTV for the Mac or Windows Media Centre support HDTV in H.264, quite possibly because the US uses MPEG-2 for HD broadcasts. However, with a little hacking I've managed to get it, under Windows at least.
The solution:
H.264 codecs are a little tricky - while CoreAVC is widely recommended, the buggers won't let you buy it at present, effectively making it unavailable. Hence I've fallen back on the trial version of PowerDVD, which is apparently slightly slower but does work.
And so, we can now watch BBC HD. The resolution is superb - 1080i is above the size of most PC screens - and my MacBook Pro CoreDuo 2.0Ghz almost manages to keep up. Hopefully CoreAVC will add that last bit of speed, as it's almost there.
Oddly enough, though, I can't use my external digital receiver/speakers - the DVB stream stops dead when I plug them in. I'm blaming this on the BootCamp drivers at present, but it's odd.
Now, if only Microsoft and Elgato would pull finger...
Hurrah! There I was, watching as Elgato and Miglia fell out, when I stumbled across a link with BDA drivers for the TVMini for Windows. This is somewhat handy, given the version of Windows on my Mac is Media Centre Edition. This is even more handy given I had previous failed to get this working under Windows.
Hurrah for digital telly!
Given the presence of a long weekend and Polly being tird up with work for the majority of it I was left with little choice but to give in to the little demons egging me on and install BootCamp on my MacBook Pro.
This was silly for a couple of reasons. Firstly, BootCamp is beta. And even in these crazy times when beta means everything from 'may open a portal to dimensions best unspecified' to 'a product by Google' one should still be wary of any beta product that plays with your partition map. Secondly, DiskWarrior hasn't been ported to the Intel macs as yet, leaving you in the uncertain hands of fsck-hfs should the worst happen. And lastly, I've got a purpose built games PC sitting right under the laptop - so why bother?
But geekdom got the better of me. And so I ran up BootCamp, partitioned my harddisc and rebooted back into MacOS while I burnt a slipstreamed XP SP2 disc on the games box. Well, that was the plan.
It probably doesn't need stating at this point that it didn't work out. MacOS didn't boot due to an extent problem on the drive. Disk Utility refused to touch it, fsck wouldn't do a damn thing and so I ended up mounting it via FireWire on the PowerBook, pulling off my data and reinstalling MacOS while watching Top Gear.
The good news is that now it's all working, with dual-boot WinXP and MacOS. The downside is it's still a bit raw - hacks are needed for the right click on the laptop, a few nicities don't work and the keyboard mapping is bollocksed. But at least I can play Civ IV on the go now...
