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

Tue, 22 Aug 2006

Hard Disk Busted

Well the mythtv box has been running fine for 8 months or so but I noticed a couple of bad sectors appearing on one of my 300GB disks. Unfortunately they didn't get remapped transparently by spare sectors as modern hard disks are supposed to. The only thing for it was to remove the disk from the LVM set.

Since I am too cheap to use RAID (it's only TV after all) I backed up all the interesting stuff then deleted and recreated the volume. Luckily cacti caught all the action:

The discontinuities on Saturday morning was me trying to blow away the bad sectors with dd a la the Bad Blocks Howto without success. On Monday morning I deleted all the shows that I didn't want to backup, then recreated the logical volume. Then copied all the backups on to the new, 300GB smaller volume.

I don't think that hard disks should fail after 8 months, and the store is taking the broken one back without any fuss.

Thu, 30 Mar 2006

PyMedS

John-Mark Gurney has picked up my old abandoned media server code and make it work a bit better. Check it out here.

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...

Wed, 02 Nov 2005

External Antenna

Woot - finally after years of procrastination we have an external UHF/VHF antenna. I am hoping that when the sun goes down, the traditional time when the television reception starts to get crappy, we will not have to worry about wiggling those stupid rabbit's ears around. I haven't tried out the DVB-T reception. That should improve as well.

Tue, 01 Nov 2005

New MythTV Box

My wife convinced me that a new mythtv box would be the way to go, as my old desktop is slowly dying, and my attempts at a small, separate front end didn't work so well (hello Zensonic). I withdrew a wad of cash on Saturday morning and headed down to the bi-weekly computer fair. I ended up buying the following:

• ASUS A8N-E (socket 939, dual-channel DDR, PCI-e)
• AMD64 3000+
• 1GB dual channel DDR400
• Gigabyte 6600GT PCI-e (DVI out, funky heat pipe cooling)
• 1x 120GB PATA disk for OS
• 1x 250GB SATA disk for recordings (will add another 2x or 3x of these later)

I moved the DVD burner and the two DVICO FusionHDTV-Lite cards across from the old machine.

I also splurged on a Sonata II 450W quiet case and power supply which, I have to say, is pretty neat. For the extra $100 or so over the price of a regular case, you get a quiet power supply which is good in itself, and also funky things like drive rails and a backplane that holds the PCI cards without any metal having to be bent. That was a strange experience given that I usually buy dodgy cases.

I'm sure the last time I built a PC that installing the operating system was the hardest bit. This time I popped in a Ubuntu CD (after swapping around the IDE cable - I installed it upside down) and Linux practically installed itself while I was cleaning up the boxes and ripped open plastic bags. Didn't get a chance to install MythTV just yet. Maybe later on in the week.

Tue, 27 Sep 2005

Video Editing With Linux

I watched a friend use the TMPGEnc MPEG Editor to remove commercials from a MPEG file recorded on his Topfield the other day and was duly impressed. I was curious whether this can be done under Linux or not, as I tried and failed to get the TMPGEnc editor running under Wine.

As usual, there are many half-assed programs on sourceforge that don't work very well or haven't been updated in ages, but GOPchop sounded like it would do the trick. It's not available in Debian, and the prebuilt deb on the site had various dependency problems, but it wasn't too hard to build by hand. I removed some leading and trailing junk from some TV I recorded last night in a couple of minutes. The only slow bit was waiting for the MPEG file to be loaded and scanned, and then writing out the MPEG file containing the cuts.

I guess this isn't really "editing" in the professional sense of the word, but removing commercials and trimming MPEG2 files is really all I need to do at the moment. Next step of my PVR is to have a slightly better interface than running dvbstream in an xterm and hitting Ctrl-C when the program has finished.

Sun, 18 Sep 2005

Dual DVB-T Cards Working

I've finally figured out why I haven't been able to get both tuners streaming mpeg2 simultaneously. Predictably enough, it wasn't a bug in the FusionHDTV drivers, but rather in my script to tune and transmit a DVB transport stream using tzap and dvbstream. Running two copies of the tuner script use about 22% of my 800MHz CPU which leaves plenty of cycles available for running a media server and other things.

I can think of a couple of good ideas for implementing a live tv type of arrangement on the Z400 using some tricks in the media server. I still need to fix up the existing Python media server code and upload it somewhere, then to get video files playing.

Tue, 06 Sep 2005

Media Server Playing MP3s

Woot! After yet another hiatus I have been doing some more poking around on the Python UPnP Media Server. Mainly this was because of some particularly bad analog reception the other day resulting in unwatchable stuff on the tivo. I do actually have two DVB-T PCI cards sitting in my desktop machine but without a Linux media server there is no way to watch any of the recorded data without the family huddling around a computer screen or laptop.

Anyway, in my previous coding session I was able to construct replies sufficient to browse a directory heirachy on the Z400 but it wouldn't actually play any media. It turns out that the Z400 refuses to play any media files that are present at the very top level of the directory heirachy. I made a dummy folder and then stuck a DIDL object.item.audioItem.musicTrack in it, and it works! I am now listening to a really old mp3 podcast of an interview with Severed Heads that was played on Radio National months ago through my own media server.

In the bad news department, the hard drive on my laptop was making some odd noises this morning when restoring a suspended VMware image. There were a whole bunch of the dreaded UncorrectableError messages in the log file. The hard disk is probably going to crash sometime soon. I'd better check in my changes before it does.

Thu, 07 Jul 2005

XMLTV

I've been working on some scripts to manipulate guide data for the PVR. At the moment there's a client to fetch guide data from http://minnie.tuhs.org/tivo-bin/tvguide.pl and a script and database schema to insert the database into a sqlite database. Next step is to write some CGI scripts to browse and manage guide data.

I have this idea that RSS will be an interesting format to express recording information as well as sharing data with other XMLTV users. As with these things, ideas present themselves along the way.

Chris has bought one of the HDTV-Lite DVB cards and has set up MythTV. I think he agrees with me about the excess of user interface crack in the DVB card and channel configuration. (-: