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%” so that you catch episodes named ‘Program 1 – season finale’. I’ve seen some programs use the subtitle in the name – so EVERY episode has a different name – Come on! This is what the description is for – instead of:

Name: ‘Program 1 – the one where Mr X falls over’

it’s supposed to be:

Name: ‘Program 1′
Description: ‘The one where Mr X falls over’

The starting and finishing on time may be the most frustrating though, since right now I have MythTV configured to start recording 10 minutes early and finish recording 10 minutes after the scheduled finish time. And I still miss the end of some programs!

I can understand that these issues may be planned incompetence rather than innocent mistakes to force you to watch live TV and to pay more attention to the TV guide, but I just don’t have time for it.

Once you get a media center it changes how you watch TV – if I have downtime, I can just browse the recordings to find something I’m in the mood for.

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 little frustrating is that gpodder saves all of its files using hashes instead of human readable filenames (it looks like there may be a solution to this in the next release). This doesn’t really matter if you use a media player that reads the mp3 tags – as most do, including Amarok – but I’ve been surprised by several podcasts that have no mp3 tags at all:

paul@dell1525:~$ wget http://www.stanford.edu/group/edcorner/uploads/podcast/holmes090304.mp3
2009-03-16 21:41:29 (552 KB/s) – `holmes090304.mp3′ saved [27288970/27288970]
paul@dell1525:~$ id3ed -i holmes090304.mp3
holmes090304.mp3: (no tag)
paul@dell1525:~$ id3v2 -l holmes090304.mp3
holmes090304.mp3: No ID3 tag

paul@dell1525:~$ wget http://files.libertyfund.org/econtalk/y2009/Waleswikipedia.mp3
2009-03-16 21:44:35 (530 KB/s) – `Waleswikipedia.mp3′ saved [19987016/19987016]
paul@dell1525:~$ id3ed -i Waleswikipedia.mp3
Waleswikipedia.mp3: (no tag)
paul@dell1525:~$ id3v2 -l Waleswikipedia.mp3
Waleswikipedia.mp3: No ID3 tag

Compare this to a podcast with mp3 tags:

paul@dell1525:~$ id3v2 -l grails_podcast_episode_63.mp3
id3v2 tag info for Podcasts/Grails Podcast/grails_podcast_episode_63.mp3:
TT2 (Title/songname/content description): Grails Podcast Episode 63: Newscast for August 17, 2008
TP1 (Lead performer(s)/Soloist(s)): Glen Smith & Sven Haiges
TP2 (Band/orchestra/accompaniment): Glen Smith & Sven Haiges
TCM (Composer): Glen Smith & Sven Haiges
TAL (Album/Movie/Show title): Grails Podcast
TYE (Year): 2008
TBP (BPM (beats per minute)): 30720
TCO (Content type): Podcast (255)
COM (Comments): (iTunPGAP)[eng]: 0
TEN (Encoded by): iTunes v7.7.1
COM (Comments): (iTunNORM)[eng]: 000001C2 000001C2 00006F76 00006F76 0009BCA7 0009BCA7 0000786C 0000786C 0008439C 0008439C
COM (Comments): (iTunSMPB)[eng]: 00000000 00000210 00000B34 00000000048F933C 00000000 01A793ED 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000
PIC (Attached picture): ()[JPG, 0]: , 17185 bytes

Another feature of gpodder that I appreciate is synchronization to media device OR filesystem. The filesystem synchronization means you can specify a directory to copy to and the filename format. This suits me well (although this doesn’t seem to copy those files without mp3 tags).

I recently lost sound via mplayer on my MythTV mediacenter. This affected any of my video collection that weren’t DVD iso images since mplayer was the configured player for most types. At first I thought it might have been related to doing a system update, but now I think it was related to my tinkering which got interrupted by the kids – and then promptly forgotten about. Days or weeks later, I was surprised to find the sound missing when playing videos (rarely done – I usually watch the recordings or DVDs which use the internal player).

Now that I’ve fixed the issue, the problem is obvious. I have a Gigabyte motherboard and I use the SPDIF output to take the sound via optical cable into my surround sound receiver. In the video setup, I had the default player set to mplayer with the command:

mplayer -ao alsa:device=spdif -fs -zoom -quiet -vo xv %s

This directed sound to the SPDIF output. But, when using MythStream, no sound came out when watching things such as the Apple movie trailers (MythStream doesn’t let you specify settings for mplayer like MythVideo does). Thus the tinkering began. What I needed to do is configure mplayer to always send sound to SPDIF. You can do this by specifying settings in ~/.mplayer/config

ao=alsa:device=spdif

Now, everything is good. Mplayer sound always goes via SPDIF, whether I’m playing it through MythTV (MythVideo) or not.

Note that before I arrived at this solution I’d tried other settings in the mplayer config. When I had the settings wrong I saw the following when running mplayer from the command line:

…
Forced audio codec: hwac3
Cannot find codec for audio format 0×73627276.
Read DOCS/HTML/en/codecs.html!
Audio: no sound
…

This was occurring because I’d been googling for solutions and was lead to try values such as:

ao=alsa:device=hw#0.1
ac=hwac3

in the mplayer config file.

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 means is that I’ll get dual channel access for the 1G stick, and the first 1G of my 2G stick, while the second 1G on the 2G stick is single channel. AWESOME! Thats just what I want! I don’t have to have the same size memory sticks, but I can still benefit from dual channel when possible.

Incidentally, shortly after booting I used top to view whats going on – I saw that ALL 3G is being used and it is still swapping. Right now, it seems a bit better, with 900M free:

top – 08:26:58 up 16:53, 2 users, load average: 0.09, 0.11, 0.16
Tasks: 129 total, 1 running, 128 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 0.3%us, 0.2%sy, 0.0%ni, 98.7%id, 0.0%wa, 0.8%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
Mem: 3088208k total, 2228644k used, 859564k free, 122452k buffers
Swap: 4883720k total, 5508k used, 4878212k free, 1397300k cached

I’m not just using this machine as a media center – I’m using it as a server, running some java apps and databases etc so it’s not just MythTV running here.

(I’m using a Gigabyte GA965P-S3 motherboard, see the hardware page for more information).

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:

1. Unmute the ICE958 channel via alsamixer
2. Configure MythTV to use ALSA:SPDIF and AC3 + DTS to SPDIF passthrough
3. I also had to change my video player command to ‘mplayer -ao alsa:device=spdif -fs -zoom -quiet so -vo xv %s’ so that video with only stereo sound would use the SPDIF

I haven’t set up a remote control yet. The TV card I have doesn’t look like it is supported under LIRC. So I might look at getting a dual tuner sometime, hopefully one that has a supported remote.

The video has a slight defect when fast moving action is displayed – horizontal splits in the picture appear, but it hasn’t proved too bad so far. I haven’t had time to look into this one, hopefully sometime soon I’ll start looking around the forums. I hope the solution isn’t a better video card!