Java Thinking

I've just started using Grooveshark.com for listening to music. Running in the browser, its a great cross platform solution - no installs necessary. I'm just running the browser on my MythTV media center, with the sound via the TV. The quality seems great, even though I've got it on the lower quality, and I'm hoping its just what I need to find some new and interesting music.

The problem with Australian Digital TV or at least, using a media center in Australia is: The standard def and high def channels are almost the same, but not quite. The high def channels have subtly different programs such as special documentaries. The EIT is a mess - spelling mistakes, program name changes (series premire, season finale, double episode etc), and not starting/finishing on time. The consequence of (1) is that you can't just go and say 'record all' - you've then got to go edit that rule to say 'only on this channel', otherwise you'll end up with 2 recordings of the same program, one standard def, one high def. You wouldn't actually want to delete one of the channels, because the differences can be interesting. The EIT issue is more serious - instead of being able to say 'record all occurances of "Program 1" only on this channel' you need to change this to not be so exact on the program name and use "%Program 1%...

I've been wanting a way to use playlists on my media center either from within MythTV or with any other player. The reason is I have a bunch of short videos (music and documentaries) that I'd like to be able to play consecutively. It turns out to be a case of just RTFM . You can create playlists for MPlayer from directory listings, and then associate playlists with a particular mplayer command. To generate the playlist from all files in a directory, I use the following: dir * | sed 's/\\//g' > all_videos.pls The sed part of this command removes the \ from escaped spaces... i.e. a file 'Hello world' is output from the dir command as 'Hello\ world' - the space is escaped. We need to generate a file without these escaped spaces for it to work properly. I use the following mplayer command associated with the pls extension: mplayer -shuffle -fs -zoom -quiet -vo xv -playlist %s

I'm getting closer to a podcatching solution with gpodder . Gpodder is a simple and easy to use podcatcher - and importantly, it can be invoked from the command line in a non-interactive mode. This is important because of my internet plan - I get twice as much download quota on off-peak times as I do on on-peak. So, I can shedule a cron job to fire gpodder up at 1am and download the latest podcasts. Great, because I'm not going to consume precious on-peak bandwidth. Now that I've got the latest podcasts handy, I can listen to them on my media center using Amarok . This isn't the only option, but it works for me because the interface lets me 'group by album' - which is conveniently groups most podcasts - and display those added today/1 week/1 month/... Amarok also lets me configure Xine to output to SPDIF - important, because my media center is only connected via SPDIF to my surround sound receiver. Without this option, I wouldn't be able to hear anything. A...

I've noticed that my MythTV ( Mythbuntu 8.10) machine was using 100% of its 1G and swapping. (Incidently, I was running the Blootube widescreen theme, and just switching to the MythCenter theme resulted in a snappier experience). So, I went to buy more memory - and found that 1G cost AUD23 and a 2G stick was AUD45. Nice. I went for the 2G but when a friend commented that mixing a 1G + 2G I'd miss out on dual channel. Bummer, but I'll live with it. When I first installed the RAM, I put the new 2G chip in the same channel (A) as the existing 1G. Booting the PC reported 3G in single channel mode, but it wouldn't boot! It simply reported a CRC error and stopped! I took out the 1G stick, leaving just the 2G and booted okay. Hmmm, so now I put the 1G back, but in one of the channel B slots so the 2 sticks were in different channels. Now, when booting it reported 3G in Flex mode! I'd never heard of this so I looked it up. It all gets explained very well here , and what it...

I've just noticed printing not working on my mediacenter. Its not something I do often, so I assume it stopped after the upgrade. There was no printing configuration under settings, so I installed: sudo apt-get install system-config-printer-gnome This gave me UI feedback that the printer was not working. I could see an error in /var/log/cups/error_log: E [18/Jan/2009:00:47:46 +1100] Filter "rastertogutenprint.5.0" for printer "PSC_2100_Series" not available: No such file or directory I found the answer by googling at http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-520453.html : sudo aptitude purge gs-esp sudo aptitude install cupsys cupsys-driver-gutenprint foomatic-db-gutenprint foomatic-filters fontconfig libtiff4 libfreetype6 gs-esp I had to go into Settings/Printing/Server/Settings to re-enable remote printing. Sorted.

I've installed MythTV frontend on my laptop so now I can view TV and recordings, and play music across the network. I had to change the backend setup to serve from the ip address instead of 'localhost', and I also changed bind-address in /etc/mysql/my.conf to use the ip address. I'm not sure if I had to change mysql, but I assume so. I've also edited fstab to mount my media over the network so that the path on the frontend machine is exactly the same as on the backend (this was recommended in the post I found about setting the remote frontend up): //mythtv/media /home/paul/media/ cifs credentials=/etc/samba/user,noexec 0 0 My /etc/samba/smb.conf has a corresponding entry to share the directory: [media] path = /home/paul/media available = yes browsable = yes public = yes writable = no

The files Mythtv records are saved with a timestamp as a file name, making it pretty hard to figure out which file is which. To easily identify the files, you can use mythrename.pl - I couldn't find it in my Mythbuntu installation, so I had to download it from http://svn.mythtv.org/svn/trunk/mythtv/contrib/user_jobs/ . It ran okay, without any dependency problems. This post has some useful comments on how to run it. The idea is that you can schedule it with cron to run at regular intervals so as to stay current. I'm running it so it doesn't actually rename the original files, but it makes sensibly named symbolic links to the originals: mythrename.pl --format "\%T/\%Y-\%m-\%d \%H\%i \%- \%T \%-\%S" --link /home/paul/TVShows For help with the options, see the wiki page or run with the --help option.

Last November I upgraded my desktop PC. Recently I've repurposed it as a media center running MythTV (and also for print serving/file serving etc). The hardware is as follows: Sonata III 500 W case Gigabyte GA965P-S3 motherboard Core2 Duo E6550 CPU Gigabyte 8400GS Nvidia video card WinFast DTV1000 digital tuner card 320MB SATA disk Kingston 1Gig DDR2 800MHz memory Since then, I've added a 1Terabyte SATA disk - prices keep coming down every week. You can get a 1T disk for just over AUD200 now. I installed MythBuntu 8.04 and found it a very simple process. I had to configure it for TwinView (Clone) so I've got the same output on my TV as I have on the LCD monitor. Then I had to get sound via the SPDIF optical output. To do this you have to: Unmute the ICE958 channel via alsamixer Configure MythTV to use ALSA:SPDIF and AC3 + DTS to SPDIF passthrough I also had to change my video player command to 'mplayer -ao alsa:device=spdif -fs -zoom -quiet so -vo xv...