The Shoes of the Fisherman's Wife Are Some Jive-Ass Slippers

Thu, 19 Jan 2006

Python Media Server Abandoned

Some people have been asking about my Python Media Server code. The story is that I have ceased development on it due to continuing bad experiences (bad wireless support, bad playback of MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 files, media server bugs) with the Zensonic Z400. I have since given up and have set up a MythTV setup instead.

The code, such as it is, can be downloaded here in case anyone is interested. It has been licensed under the MIT license.

Tue, 17 Jan 2006

New Tuner

Well wouldn't you know it, two tuners for a PVR just isn't enough. Who would have guessed. I bought a third tuner yesterday, a DNTV Live! LP as the FusionHDTV Lite cards don't seem to be available anymore. Chris mentioned that the driver for these cards, at least in kernel 2.6.12, doesn't detect the card properly.

Jan 17 18:02:24 localhost kernel: cx88[0]/2: found at 0000:05:06.2, rev: 5, irq: 16, latency: 32, mmio: 0xc9000000
Jan 17 18:02:24 localhost kernel: cx88[0]/2: cx2388x based dvb card
Jan 17 18:02:24 localhost kernel: mt352_read_register: readreg error (reg=127, ret==-121)
Jan 17 18:02:24 localhost kernel: cx88[0]: frontend initialization failed
Jan 17 18:02:24 localhost kernel: ACPI: PCI interrupt for device 0000:05:06.2 disabled
Jan 17 18:02:24 localhost kernel: cx88-dvb: probe of 0000:05:06.2 failed with error -1
Jan 17 18:02:38 localhost kernel: cx2388x dvb driver version 0.0.4 loaded

I think he had to patch the driver and recompile, but google finds a better way. Just add a line to a new file in /etc/modprobe.d and everything is OK.

options cx88xx card=19

Myth picked up the new tuner after a 30 second trip to the configuration utility. However due to some possible kernel upgrade wierdness I discovered I had lost sound. I needed to change the sound output device from /dev/dsp to ALSA:default and the mixer device from /dev/mixer to default. I guess some of the old OSS device files are no longer supported and have been replaced by ALSA ones.

Next I'll be thinking that 250GB is not enough to hold my recordings...

Fri, 13 Jan 2006

Planet Mirror Looking for Staff

The guys at Planet Mirror are looking for staff. From their ad:

Planet Mirror is one of the premier download resources in the world. Daily we exceed over 1 Million downloads to 500,000 people and push out over 2TB of traffic (yes, Terabytes). We have over 15 TB of RAID5 storage covering 1000+ archives and 5 million files.

Holy crap! 2TB of traffic per day! That is some serious bandwidth. I wonder what the statistics are for the average download size? The mean download is 50MB per person, but it's probably skewed bimodally by users downloading either many small files or a smaller number of ISO images.