The 'Myth' of HDTV

Myth Mac just got promoted

2009-06-07T06:10:00.000-07:00

My MythTV frontend on a Mac Mini experiment just moved up to a new level. My downstairs, full-time, home-built, ubuntu frontend died. The mac just got promoted from a part-time upstairs frontend, to a full time downstairs big tv frontend. I have been a bit hesitant really promoting the mythtv on a mac experiment, but now that I've had it downstairs and up front for about a week, I can say that I'm very impressed. Here are some of the things I like about the mini:

Small
Silent
I can run far more useful applications with the same remote as mythtv than I could with my Linux box
did i say small?

The third bullet (all the applications I can run) deserves some attention, and I'm going to do a separate post on just that topic. Here are a few things I don't like (so far...)

I haven't been able to resize the screen to non-native resolutions without getting skippy playback. Which means.. overscan.. and lots of it.
The mac remote has 6 buttons (3 are overloaded, so there are really 9). That's enough for 95% of the everyday use, but not for more advanced tasks.

As I mentioned above, the possibilities are broad and wide when it comes to now integrating MythTV with other Mac multimedia apps. Here is a short list.

Hulu Desktop
Frontrow
Itunes
Netflix Watch Now
Better games

As I begin putting all this together into one monster media machine, I'll make sure to document the pitfalls, how-to's etc... along the way for anybody who wants to go down this path.

One Trillion bytes

2009-05-04T13:27:00.000-07:00

A co-worker recently sent me a link to an interesting site about what a trillion dollars looks like. A trillion dollars is cool and all, but since this is a technology blog, I thought I'd take a cut at:

What does one TRILLION bytes look like?

All this talk about "google" and "data"...

A billion bytes...

A hundred billion bytes...

Eight hundred billion bytes...

One TRILLION bytes...

What does that look like? I mean, these various numbers are tossed around like the amount of data stored on bill gates secret linux file server, so I thought I'd take Acorn out for a test drive and try to get a sense of what exactly a trillion bytes looks like.

We'll start with a 720k floppy. Currently the largest, most useless physical media device in general circulation. Most everyone has seen them, anybody who remembers Billy Beer have owned them. Guaranteed to lose data wherever they go.

A box of fur covered floppies is sits nicely on a desk and contains 7,200 Kbytes!. Fits in your pocket awkwardly but is more than enough for day or two of shamefully decadent 'image downloading'.

Let's put all these thousands of bytes into perspective, shall we?

Believe it or not, this next little pile is 9,676,800 bytes (150 5.25" floppies). You could stuff that into your go bag and walk around with it.

While a measly 9,676,800 bytes looked a little unimpressive, 96,768,000 bytes is a little more respectable. It fits neatly into 4 contiguous 8x10 standard cubicles

And One Gigabyte... now we're really getting somewhere... enough to store over 8 minutes of high-definition television.

Next we'll look at ONE TRILLION bytes. This is that number we've been hearing so much about. What is a trillion bytes? Well, it's a million million. It's a thousand billion. It's a one followed by 12 zeros.

You ready for this?

It's pretty surprising.

Go ahead...

Scroll down...

Ladies and gentlemen... I give you 1 trillion bytes...

Notice those platters are triple stacked baby.
...

So the next time you hear someone toss around the phrase "dude... I just got a new 1 Terabyte drive..."... that's all they're talking about.

TextMate OpenSong Bundle

2009-04-05T07:40:00.000-07:00

Our Music Worship Team at church uses OpenSong, opensource Worship Planning software, but one of my frustrations has been that it's music editor is not the best. I've also been getting a bit deeper into TextMate; more specifically, bundles. I've recently put together an OpenSong bundle which primarily allows for better syntax highlighting, but also has a 'new file' snippet for creating a new OpenSong file.

OpenSong.tmbundle.zip

It's a work in progress, so as I modify it, I'll be sure to keep it updated.

Streaming HD wirelessly

2009-03-29T05:57:00.001-07:00

As I had mentioned in a preview post, I've been working on a mac mini MythTV frontend. The only current issue I have is streaming HD content over 802.11n. My first attempt worked great as long as I didn't move the mini to a different room than the router. I'm learning a bit more about wireless networking as I go along here, essentially, my 'old' router operates in the 2.4 Ghz range which is significantly more crowded than the 5 Ghz range, so I'm going to test out a 5Ghz router this weekend, and see what I can get.

Another possibility is to transcode the HD to SD (which is the quality I would be viewing it anyway) and stream that. I don't want to outright replace my HD content (I still watch it in HD downstairs afterall), so I might set up a User Job to transcode it, and place an entry in the MythTV database for a 'second' show.

Mac Mini and Analog video

2009-03-15T07:01:00.000-07:00

Well, it seems in Apple's infinite wisdom that they've dropped support for analog video in the newest mini. After pounding through forums and what-not, I've discovered the same issue exists for the macbook pro's as well. Unfortunately, that will lead me to the purchase of a VGA -> S-Video adapter. More on that later, as I continue my quest for a turnkey MythTV frontend.

Ruby code for creating redirects for my (roughly) 100 old posts

2009-03-14T09:08:00.001-07:00

As I mentioned in a previous post, I moved my blog from my own host, to Google's blogger. As a result, there are ~ 100 old blog posts that are linked to from all over the place and I'd like to have a graceful way to re-direct. The previous post mentioned updated the header with a 301 redirect. Going through so many old posts, and updating each one was nuts, so I wrote a small ruby script to handle the duties.


#!/usr/bin/ruby
# update_redirects.rb
# This script will traverse the directory given as the first argument
# and replace the contents of all files with the 'redirect_text'
#
# some special conditions: it assumes that they are php redirects, but you 
# can use <meta> redirect tags as well for plain HTML
#
#

require 'find'

dir = ARGV[0]
redirect_text ='<?php
header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");
header("Location: http://blog.myhdbox.com/%%PATH%%");
exit();
?> '

# find all the files that were published by blogger (they are all in their
# respective year directories)
#
Find.find(dir) do |path|
    if path=~/^\.\/200.*.php$/
        f=File.open(path,'w') # open 'w' truncates the file
        new_text= redirect_text.gsub("%%PATH%%",path.gsub("./",""))
        f.write(new_text)
        f.close()
    end
end

MythTV on a Mac Mini

2009-03-13T10:35:00.000-07:00

I've finally gone and done it. I've purchased a new mac mini for an upstairs MythTV frontend. MythTV runs well on Mac OS X so I figured I'd give it a shot. I've never experienced anything quite as easy as this. The Mac Mini is the *perfect* MythTV frontend. I've unboxed (always fun with Apple products), plugged it in, gone through initial Leopard setup, and downloaded the precompiled dmg from The Snider Pad. I have my backend broadcasting itself as a UPnP Media Server, so when I fired up Mythfrontend.app on the mac for the first time, it found it right away. Once it connected, I was done. There were all my shows. Of course, the first thing I did was go straight to some of my traditionally difficult HD content, and it played it back flawlessly.

Now onto the next steps

I streamed HD over 802.11n in the same room as the router, I need a real-world test upstairs
The apple remote worked out of the box, but only has six buttons. The nice thing about MythTV is you can remap the buttons, but six... hmm... just not quite enough. I'll need to find out if there is another remote that can work. I might go down the lirc path

Bottom Line

This was such a pleasant experience and the mini is soooooooooo silent that I'm counting the days until my monstrous 4 year old media PC dies in the family room! Another project might be to figure out what the most compatible tuner's are for a mac and kill my loud backend in the office. I've been impressed with MythTV on a Mac OS X. I hope to write some apple friendly applescripts/automator actions to do some fun things that I've been dying to do.

Making google happy with redirects

2009-03-04T17:42:00.000-08:00

I've been moving my blogs around a bit the last couple days, and the thought occured to me that I have years of posts that are still generating pretty significant traffic to my blog. How can I update the 'old' urls so that they 1) redirect the person who runs across an old link and 2) tell google to update my link in their search results and keep my rank.

Here you go:


<?php

header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");
header("Location: http://blog.myhdbox.com/newpage/newurl.htm");
exit();

?>

That little dandy replaces every page that I want re-directed. Now... wouldn't it be nice to write a little ruby script to go through my 100 posts and update each one!

New mac mini

2009-03-04T12:56:00.000-08:00

The new mac mini has been released, and we've decided to go ahead and use it for a second frontend for the MythTV backend. Not that we're big TV watchers, but having a second frontend upstairs gives us a chance to hole up upstairs when sick/etc... and watch the same programs as downstairs. We'll see how streaming HD over 802.11n goes!

Upgrades galore

2008-06-11T06:48:00.000-07:00

For the past six months, I've been content with Ubuntu 7.10 and mythtv 0.20. Very stable, very smooth solid HD playback, no recording glitches. Everything I could ask for. When Ubuntu 8.04 came along (along with an upgrade to MythTV 0.21) I resisted for a bit. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Maybe it was just an excuse, but after deciding to set up a second front end upstairs, I also decided to install Mythbuntu 8.04. Little did I know that 0.21 frontends are not compatible with 0.20 backends... and so my upgrade began.

I'll chronicle a few of the major gotchas I had and how I solved them over at the MythTV Tips page, but as a quick summary, it took about two days, and several nasty looks from my wife and kids to complete the upgrade of both the backend and the frontend. Everything is working wonderfully (again/finally) and there are a few cool surprises in 0.21 that made it all worth it.

Next up... installation of a frontend upstairs. I think I might go with a mac-mini for that one, and since I don't have cat-5 upstairs, I *might* just try 802.11n.

Ubuntu + MythTV = happy me

2008-02-29T14:59:00.000-08:00

Well, I know it's been a while since I've posted. I've been a busy camper, and this blog hasn't quite risen to the top of my todo list in a while. I was re-reading my past posts, and noticed that the theme has been my thoughts about switch from Fedora Core to Ubuntu. An update is that I made the switch a few months ago, and haven't looked back. Ubuntu comes with all the mythtv packages that I use and was incredibly easy to set up for both my backend, and my frontend systems.

My current system is Gutsy (7.10) and I used the guides from the Ubuntu community docs for setting up mythtv (https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MythTV). No big gotchas for me, even with my HD setup.

Mythbuntu looks promising

2007-06-08T06:36:00.001-07:00

I just ran across a new distribution of mythtv in a box (along with MythDora and KnoppMyth) called MythBuntu and I plan on giving it a test run this weekend. The project is currently in alpha. One nice thing is that they offer a live cd version so that you can simply drop in a disk and run a mythtv frontend anywhere you want (we'll have to see how well that one works!). Lirc is not available yet, so it won't be an option for me in terms of actually replacing my FC5 frontend, but I can't imagine it will be too long before they get that working.

Technorati Tags: mythtv ubuntu

Switching to Ubuntu

2007-06-07T06:49:00.001-07:00

I'm making the switch to Ubuntu. After being a faithful Fedora Core user since FC1, I'm making the big leap.  I'll post progress reports as I go through, and when I'm done, I'll post a tip to MythTV Tips.

Technorati Tags: mythtv, ubuntu,

Back from Vacation

2006-08-10T06:57:00.000-07:00

I just got back from a vacation with the family. 2,000 miles in two weeks with a four and seven year old in the back.

Of course, no major road trip would be complete (or even possible these days) unless you provide some kind entertainment. When I was a kid, that consisted of hours on end of singing "I've been working on the railroad", and playing every possible variant of I-Spy (I spy something that starts with the letter P --- Peterbilt -- again...). But for somebody with MythTV on the brain, you have to think a bit outside the box. Enter LaCie's Silverscreen.. I won't go into a major review here, but this little guy can output up to 1080i via component, it also outputs S-Video, and composite, and can play almost every popular video format. We hooked it up to a pair of 7" TFT displays strapped to the back of our headrests, and the kids had more shows than they could possibly watch during the trip. Where did the shows come from? MythTV + nuvexport to Xvid format. Being able to take my content on the road with me in a totally open format is one of the great advantages to MythTV. I know there are other commercial solutions available, but since they are all closed source, you need to use proprietary solutions which are either more expensive, or have less features.

Wendy Seltzer, EFF Lawyer and MythTV user debates Fritz Attaway from the MPAA in the WSJ

2006-06-30T06:25:00.000-07:00

When Fritz Attaway starts out the entire debate with this line:

Attaway:"Digital rights management is the key to consumer choice..."

He then goes on to explain how by being able to control the content, and how it can be distributed, and used, the movies studio's can get a return on the millions they made to make a movie. See how much better that is for us? It occurred to me that he really believes that.

Wendy replies that the DMCA stifles technological innovation, and she describes that there are still no legal solutions for viewing DVD's on her Linux computer (go Wendy). Then she throws him this:

Seltzer:"DRM plus DMCA protects existing business models, such as that of the blockbuster movie, but at the expense of new developments that could create more value for both creators and users of content. In the era of podcasts and YouTube, I'm quite interested in seeing what those users can do as they become creators."

What she's getting at here is that if the MPAA continues down their current path people will find ways around them, not just DRM.

Over and over again, Fritz stresses that any possible innovation around Media technologies that are disallowed because of current DRM are completely acceptable because it's more important that the studios make money.

Fritzie:"'Transformative' uses are fine, but they cannot be given priority over the incentive to create new works. A central tenet of our fair use doctrine is that fair uses do not interfere with the ability of the creator to exploit the economic value of her work."

I don't know about you, but it seems clear to me he knows exactly who pays his bills.

The debate rages on, and is a must read.

The broadcast flag is back, let's knock it down!

2006-06-21T06:32:00.000-07:00

I got my EFF Action Alert in my inbox this AM, and sure enough, the broadcast flag has jumped up again. This is the text from the newsletter:

"The Communications, Consumers Choice, and Broadband
Deployment Act of 2006 is a monster name for a monster bill
-- in its latest form, it contains 159 pages of densely
plotted telecommunications reform. But while politicians
struggle with its major clauses, the RIAA and MPAA have
piggybacked their own agenda: the broadcast and audio flags,
which restrict innovation and legitimate use of recorded
digital radio and TV content. Your call today could force
the flags to find a home of their own.

The Committee markup of this bill is on Thursday, and your
Senator is on the Commerce Committee. One last push from
you could get Congress to remove the entertainment industry
mandates from the bill."

The call to action is to either call or write your Senator. They make the process of writing your Senator incredibly easy by providing a form that you can fill out, and they provide sample text for the e-mail. I can tell you that they do get the message so I encourage you to write.

Major League Baseball v. Sling Media (and the rest of us)

2006-06-12T15:49:00.000-07:00

Major League Baseball says that users of placeshifters like Slingbox are lawbreakers. According to them, if you are remotely watching a baseball game that is being broadcast at your home, you are stealing from the local cable/satellite companies that paid to broadcast in the area you are watching the game.

Read More: Major League Baseball takes swing at Sling Media | CNET News.com

My two cents, I can't imagine what MLB is trying to enforce here. The customer is paying for the content once somewhere, isn't that all that's important?

Time to clear some disk space!

2006-06-01T17:08:00.000-07:00

Not much going on lately, except that now that the summer is here, I get to clear out the backlog of shows that I recorded but didn't watch. Including the entire season of Alias! It should actually be a fun summer. I find my viewing habits have changed so much with MythTV (or any PVR for that matter). I don't feel the need to 'keep up' with shows any longer, with the exception of a couple reality TV shows.

MythTV: First PVR to offer Karaoke!

2006-05-15T15:40:00.000-07:00

Who knows. There might be Tivo-aoke, or something, but it's fun to dream...

And now.. I give you: MythKaraoke

If only MythTV could open and close my garage door... Wait... It can?

SageTV 5.0 - Claims "First PVR Software with Built-in TV, Music & Photo Placeshifting"

2006-05-12T15:31:00.000-07:00

"SageTV Media Center today becomes the first full-featured personal video recorder/media center software product to offer placeshifting capabilities enabling users to access their live or recorded TV, music and photos on any PC when they are away from home."

Huh? First? I call bullshit. MythTV has been placeshifting music and videos for years. Is it the fact that it doesn't "placeshift" photos? That hardly seems like enough innovation or differentiation to claim "First".

Link: PVR Spot: DIY PVR, TV Cards and more » Blog Archive » SageTV 5.0 - First PVR Software with Built-in TV, Music & Photo Placeshifting:

Amazon.com: Hacking MythTV (ExtremeTech) (ExtremeTech): Books: J. Wilson

2006-04-30T07:00:00.000-07:00

Hacking MythTV

Jarod Wilson, author of the renowned 'Fedora MythTV Setup Guide' (a.k.a. "Jarod's Guide") is now author of a book "Hacking MythTV" soon to be available.

I haven't read the book but if Jarod's writing and technical ability come through in the book half as well as his guide, then it should be very well received.

Good Luck Jarod!

How to customize your MythTV Menus

2006-04-21T16:49:00.000-07:00

How to customize MythTV's menus in MythTV Tips.

Link: MythTV Tips

Edit Keys explained in MythTV Tips

2006-04-21T16:45:00.000-07:00

MythTV's new Edit Keys feature explained, along with a tutorial for re-mapping keys.

Link: MythTV Tips

Announcing MythTV Tips

2006-04-17T17:57:00.000-07:00

I'm introducing a new section of the site: MythTV Tips. I'm kicking off this blog after assembling several questions (both mine, and from others) about how to actually use MythTV. There are SOOOOO many features in MythTV, some documented well, and some.. not so much. I am going to use this site to publish my personal tips, tricks, tutorials for MythTV.

Feel free to comment with any questions you have, and I'll do my best to answer.
You can subscribe to MythTV Tips via RSS

First up: MythTV's new Edit Keys feature

Orb drops the ball with DVR Everywhere

2006-04-13T13:31:00.000-07:00

Just caught this on PVR Wire:

Orb Networks has released their new DVR Everywhere software, allowing TiVo users to access content directly from their Series 2 box anywhere in the world over an Internet connection.

Not sure why the good folks over at PVR Wire say that this would work with "Presumably any other networked PVR", everything I see on the site says 'TiVo only'. It's really a pity, because Orb had previously managed to stay away from any platform specific media sources. I see this as a step in the wrong direction for them.