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  • Robert 22:07 on February 4, 2009 Permalink | Reply  

    100Mb/s glassfibre to my home 

    In our Nijmegen area glassfibre has recently been installed. Last weekend the new connection to our home was activated. According to the specification the speed should be 100Mbps both ways, i.e. up and down. That is the same speed that I (and most people probably) have on my desk at the university. I have done some preliminary tests that I want to report on.

    According to http://speedtest.net, the down speed is ~95Mbps and the up speed is ~60Mbps. I have repeated that a couple of times, and the throughput varies over the day. These numbers are the best ones observed.

    I have also tested using ftp, sending/receiving a 100MB file to/from the ftp server of the Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging. This results in 7.22MB/s or 60Mbps upstream and 7.77MB/s or 65Mbps downstream (see below for details).

    The same test from my PowerBook G4, which is connected over 802.11g wireless to an Airport Extreme router, resulted in 2.5MB/s or ~20Mbps upstream and 1.56MB/s or 13Mbps downstream. The bottleneck here clearly is the wireless connection, and not the glassfibre.


    ftp> put testfile.bin
    local: testfile.bin remote: testfile.bin
    200 PORT command successful. Consider using PASV.
    150 Ok to send data.
    100% |*************************************| 100 MB 7.23 MB/s 00:00 ETA
    226 File receive OK.
    104857600 bytes sent in 00:13 (7.22 MB/s)

    ftp> get testfile.bin
    local: testfile.bin remote: testfile.bin
    200 PORT command successful. Consider using PASV.
    150 Opening BINARY mode data connection for testfile.bin (104857600 bytes).
    100% |*************************************| 100 MB 7.79 MB/s 00:00 ETA
    226 File send OK.
    104857600 bytes received in 00:12 (7.77 MB/s)

    Overall I am pretty happy with these initial results of 60Mbps up and downstream in a realistic test, i.e. 60% of the theoretical throughput. I am not sure whether I have been able to connect to a server that does not introduce a bottleneck itself, and there is some variance in the tests itself that is due to other traffic over the network. I might post some more tests later.

    More information can be found on http://www.glazenkamp.nl

     

  • Robert 23:18 on October 6, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    Moved homepage 

    My personal homepage has been moved from the http://oase.uci.ru.nl server to a new webserver. My homepage on the new webserver can be reached as http://robertoostenveld.ruhosting.nl.

    Some other and older homepage addresses that all should point to this site are

    The preferred way of accessing and referring to my website is by linking to http://oostenveld.net. This is the URL that I hope to maintain over a prolonged time.

     

  • Robert 22:25 on January 22, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Mac Mini with EyeTV 

    After a long period of doubt, last December I finaly decided to buy a Mac Mini as home entertainment system. It arrived soon and sofar it completely lives up to my expectations. I am using it together with a NEC LCD screen at the moment (which will be replaced by a 23″ Apple Cinema Display soon) and Elgato EyeTV. The EyeTV software can be controlled with the Apple remote, and resembles the FrontRow interface. However, EyeTV is not completely integrated with FrontRow: the two full-screen menus are seperate from each other. A small nuisance is that pressing the “menu” button on the remove short opens FrontRow, pressing it long opens the full-screen EyeTV menu interface opens. When watching TV, I sometimes accidentally press short instead of long, resulting in the FrontRow menu opening instead of the EyeTV menu.

    I am using EyeTV together with a Plextor M402U Convert-X tuner. The Plextor tuner is one of few tuners that connects through USB and that is also compatible with both Linux and Mac OS X. I originally bought the tuner to be used with my old Dell laptop and Linux PVR software like MythTV. After fiddling around for multiple evenings, I got it to work but I found the software not of sufficient quality. The Dell laptop works fine with linux, but it did not convince me to be usefull on a daily basis. I did not even dare to try to convince my girlfriend . What a difference when I installed Elgato EyeTV op my Apple PowerBook: just plug-and-play and it works like a charm. Also the electronic program guide in EyeTV (using tvtv) works well. Actually, I consider this EPG to be quite important for serious PVR use.

    To test out the dual tuner support in EyeTV, I borrowed a second tuner from a German friend: a Miglia TV-Mini. It is a DVB-T tuner for digital through-the-air broadcasts. In the Netherlands these broadcasts are carried out by Digitenne. I had previously read somewhere on the internet that Digitenne would not work at all with such a device, since all all stations (including Nederland 1, 2 and 3) would be scrambled. However, after doing the auto-setup, it did find a list of ~30 TV and ~20 radio channels! It gives a very sharp picture and has less of a delay than the Plextor tuner. So also digital trough-the-air TV works fine with the MacMini/EyeTV setup. Note that most of the channels are actually scrambled, only the public stations (Nederland 1, 2, 3 and TV Gelderland) are not scrambled. Regarding radio, the same applies: only Radio 1-5, the Concertzender and Radio Gelderland are available unscrambled. The others are listed with a “$” sign behind them, but this is already more that I had expected. To decode the scrambled signals you probably have to get a Digitenne subscription for the smartcard. This Miglia TVMini is a USB-stick sized decoder and cannot be used with a smartcard for decoding, but there are other tuners that can (e.g. Elgato 410).

    To conclude, I am very happy with my Mac Mini. It works great for watching movies and listening to music (both using FrontRow) and for watching and recording TV using EyeTV and the Plextor tuner. The dual tuner support is still in beta stage (I am using EyeTV version 2.3.1) but the first impression is OK. I only hope that Apple will open up the FrontRow interface so that other high-quality products like EyeTV can be integrated in it, which would even improve the user experience as a “audio-visual media appliance” instead of as computer.

     

    • Dan Weber 03:51 on June 1, 2007 Permalink

      Hi there,

      I noticed you said M402U. I have one of those and I want to give it to a friend of mine who only uses macs and plextor doesn’t explicitly support them on the mac. You say it will work directly out of the box with eyetv assuming it’s a valid eyetv license?

      Dan

    • Robert 20:20 on June 4, 2007 Permalink

      In the USA, it seems one can buy the Plextor TV tuner bundeled with EyeTV software for the Mac (see http://www.plextor.com/english/products/TV402UMac.htm). In the Netherlands where I bought mine, the Mac version is not available and it always comes with Windows software. But the hardware is not different. I seperately purchased a license for EyeTV from http://www.elgato.com, and it works fine with my M402U.

      Note that the version numbers on the Plextor website have changed. I don’t know whether the hardware also changed.

      Robert

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