wonkablog

Every now and again I get the desire to learn C++, but I rarely follow up on it consistently.  I usually get the bug when some small, simple program isn’t working correctly or has a tiny bug or something and I just *know* that if I knew a bit more and could get in there and tinker around, I could probably figure it out.  That’s actually what happened with my little mythvideo patches which I’m so proud of, even though they’re all about 5 lines each.

This time around, the bug that hit me was in vobcopy.  The program itself is excellent, and works 99% of the time.  The fault is really that about 1% of DVDs that I try to rip will just scream and screech at anything that tries to touch them, and I’m awfully curious why.

Being a programmer myself, I have a theory.  My guess is that there’s just some small variable that is overlooked, or some sanitization that is assumed and just throws the whole thing for a loop.  I’m obsessive about a lot of stuff, but programming is one of my extremes — I have a style of checking and verifying all possible external input and strictly checking it to make sure it fits exactly what I’m asking for.  Basically, make no assumptions.

That’s kind of why I think I would like C++ so much, in that it’s incredibly strict.  I love writing hard core code, in the sense that it cannot possibly break because you’ve accounted for every variable.  C++ has stuff like that built in, so I think we’d be a good match.

I just wish I could follow through on the desire and commit myself to learning it.

I just found a workaround to something I’ve always preferred to do in SQL. I’m using MySQL 5 at work, and I had a query where I would order the entries by a column that is a varchar. Since there was the possibility for this column to be blank, it would display all rows with a blank entry first, and then alphabetically from there.

So, the order would be something like: ‘ ‘, ‘ ‘, ‘1′, ‘2′, ‘3′, ‘A’, ‘B’, ‘C’.

What I really wanted was to display the blank ones last, since I wasn’t interested in those. I poked through the string functions available to see if I could conjure up a hack, and ASCII works great, as it fetches the ASCII numeral of the first character in the string. And, if the string is empty, it will return a zero. And that’s all I needed, was a binary flag to order by first.

Here’s a sample query then:

SELECT string FROM table ORDER BY ! ASCII(string), string;

And the result would be: ‘1′, ‘2′, ‘3′, ‘A’, ‘B’, ‘C’, ‘ ‘, ‘ ‘.

Perfect.

I’m trying to build a database of what packages users have installed on their machines. I’ve been wanting to do this for a while. I think it would help out in a number of places, like before considering what packages to remove.

Here’s the webpage which gives all the details: http://stats.larrythecow.org/

If you just want to cut to the chase though, and upload your statistics, you’ll need curl + eix or portage-utils.

Here’s the quicky:

curl -d "arch=$(uname -m)&packages=$(eix -I ––only-names)" http://stats.larrythecow.org/

or

curl -d "arch=$(uname -m)&packages=$(qlist -CI)" http://stats.larrythecow.org/

Thanks guys. I’ll make a prettier page once I have some actual data and something worth sharing.

Edit: Sorry about some of the characters, wordpress was messing them up.

I had a lot of time on my hands yesterday, from getting home from my vacation as well as being sick (I should be in bed right now), so I did a lot of playing around with encoding my videos again. I’ll write more about that later, but one thing that has has proved interesting while finding another possible standard to apply for my library, is how there are a few things I was so adamant about having in the beginning that don’t really matter at all after some practical application.

I can only think of a couple of examples off the top of my head, but it’s funny to see how stuff I just whined and cranked about being a “must have” back in the day, after many hours of actually accessing my library, my assumptions on what I “needed” were wrong.

Perhaps the most important realization I made, though, was that different categories require completely different approaches. When it comes to a multimedia library, you can’t apply the same standard to a movie and to a TV episode. I’m still mulling over in my head if that’s true with live-action and animated shows.

Video metadata: titles and chapters

Way back when, I was adamant about getting chapter information in my metadata, so I could quickly jump to points where I needed to in my videos. This actually makes sense for movies, where there will be something like a dozen or more chapters that jump between obvious scenes, but for TV shows, it doesn’t make so much sense, where there might be four or more on an hour long show, and usually nothing on a half-hour show.

But, setting chapters was probably one of the main reasons for me choosing Matroska in the first place over all the other container formats, simply because it was the only one (aside from OGM) that supported it. OGM was nice, though, but I vaguely recall that there were reasons for not using it. I can’t really think of any right now, but I imagine that since development has stopped, and mkvmerge had more options and supported more codecs and is actively developed, that probably made the choice simple.

The reality is that I never use the chapters. The solution that eventually worked it’s way into the scene was just fixing mplayer-resume to work correctly. Add to that the fact that I can resume playback from a series of a TV show (a playlist of media files), and I’m happy to be able to pick up anytime where I left off, versus flicking back and forth between chapters to find it myself. The problem I worked so hard to avoid never came up. Interesting.

Subtitles

One problem I struggled with a long time was that I wanted to have subtitles, mostly “in case I ever want them.”

I went to a lot of work figuring out how to get VobSub formatted subtitles out of a DVD and into a Matroska file. That, in itself, was rewarding. For one, I needed to learn how to find one possible solution, and this one proved very simple.

The reality, again, though, is that I never use them and in fact they are more annoying than helpful. Only annoying because MPlayer is forcing them to be on, when I don’t want them to, which is a bug, but still.

The “problem” in this case is still there, and I think that as far as long-term solutions and archiving goes, it’s a good idea to keep them, but it’s again telling that I had another must-have feature which never got used.

Audio quality

This is one I’m currently dealing with fixing, since I’m looking at other containers aside from Matroska. Part of me hates to let go of my vehement fanboyism, but a large part of me knows that it’s good to be objective, even if the software isn’t up to speed just yet. Does Matroska have the best support on Linux *right now* to do everything I need to? Absolutely. Should I use it for everything, everywhere, all the time? Not really. I’m going off on a tangent again, though.

I’ve always maintained that the audio quality should remain in the original AC3 (Dolby Digital) format, simply because I might someday (another archival/possibility requirement) want to someday pipe all the audio through my receiver.

Again, the reality completely disagrees with the presumed history. Turning on my receiver, switching my audio devices around, and using the remote to control two different volumes is a real hassle. I never do it. Also, this is another time where the categorical differences come into play. Movies, you want to keep at the highest quality, including sound, because the channels are almost always going to be in surround. Of all the TV shows I have, though, Star Trek are the only ones that are not either stereo or mono.

So, my probable solution is to save a small amount of space and eventually use MP3 or *gasp* AAC in the next storage standard I decide on for TV shows. I’ll admit that the size difference is generally marginal, about 20 MB of space on a 30-minute show … but added up it starts to make some difference.  Not big enough that I’d switch my entire library, but if I do end up converting the video mostly because I want to save space, then I might as well do the same for audio if I’m never going to use AC3 for its nice feature.  Either way, if I’m switching to MP4, then I have to, no matter what, as the format won’t support Dolby or DTS.  Plus, there should be receivers out there that support AAC.  I think.

A/V sync

This is the one that got me started thinking about the whole thing, which is actually quite funny considering how much time I spent on the problem, and the incredibly simple solution.

One of my main, longstanding issues with re-encoding my DVDs from MPEG-2 to MPEG-4 has been A/V synchronization. Having the audio off by just a few milliseconds drives me insane, being the observant freak that I am. Which is also one reason I won’t reencode anyway, because I can notice slight video artifacts, and it’s simply more mentally relaxing knowing I didn’t make any changes to the original stream. Ah, the wonders of obsession.

I spent a lot of time playing with encoding options, frame rate settings, etc. to find that perfect mix of configuration harmony where everything would be perfectly in sync so I wouldn’t go insane trying to watch Looney Tunes. I never found that secret combination, but I did learn a lot in the process of what was throwing it off and why. Plus I learned early on that there’s never a magic bullet for re-encoding that will work on every source material.

However, I still had some audio/video sync issues on some TV shows, even with minimal transformation on my end (from DVD straight to MKV, MPEG-2 with AC3). The solution was really simple: I just mapped the Channel Up and Channel Down buttons on my MPlayer configuration to change the A/V sync by 100 milliseconds in either direction. That way, when I can visibly detect the difference, I’ll just tap a button on my remote and all is happiness. Much simpler.

MythVideo

One last problem, or set of problems, I ran into, was with mythvideo itself. I’ve documented those pretty extensively over the course of my blogging. Everything I ran into, though, my proposed solution was to pretty much just sit around and wait for someone to fix it. I never would have imagined years ago that I’d eventually just open an editor, spend a few hours trying to hack on the source code, and actually manage to fix them myself.

Granted, they were all really, really, really small issues … nothing major like adding a TV tuner to the supported hardware list, but the fact that I managed to hack it out still impresses me, no matter how tiny the changes. That’s just cool.

Interesting stuff, I think. This is one of those posts that I look over and think, “my heck, everyone is going to think I’m this maniac nutball who obsesses night and day over a stupid collection of cartoons on a computer” and I start to wonder if I should hit that publish button. The reality, though, is that any subject that I get really fascinated, interested and involved in, I look at it from a whole lot of different levels. And if finding that perfect solution is just a matter of time, research and dedication, then I’m definitely up for the task. It has, of course, taken me a matter of years to learn all that I have, so consider this the side notes to everything I’ve figured out so far. Fun stuff.

Here’s one post I’ve been meaning to write for a long time.  Because of the firmware updates that just came out yesterday, it kinda poked me to get around to it.

I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned it, but I got a Playstation 3 not too long ago.  That in itself isn’t really interesting news, but it is when you consider I haven’t had a game console in 25 years.  I grew up on the Atari, and man, *those* games were tough.  After that, our parents never let us have one again, though, so I never really grew up with the joys of crippled thumbs.

I do have a lot of computer games, though, I’ve always been really into those.  Monkey Island FTW.  The thing I don’t like about it so much is having to dual-boot between Linux and Windows in recent years.  For one, it makes my desktop a lopsided powerhouse that I never use.  I have a really nice nvidia graphics card in there that can handle any game thrown at it, lots of RAM and a good processor, and 95% of the time I just surf the web and do programming.  It would be kind of cool to have a dedicated Windows box that I could fire up just for games, but I already have too much computer clutter sitting around that I don’t wanna do that.

So, I’d been thinking for some time about getting a console.  The idea of having a dedicated machine specifically for games seemed like fun.  I wouldn’t have to worry about rebooting, waiting for Windows, patching Windows, finding Windows drivers, fixing Windows, and using Windows.  The best part about gaming on a desktop, though, is that you can usually save your game at any point.  I still wish consoles would allow that.

When I got my HDTV not too long ago, I really, really, really wanted to try out Blu-Ray to see what 1080p was like, and if it was worth it or not.  Sony had some nice Blu-Ray players on the market, but they were freaking expensive.  The one I wanted was $400, and I *almost* had grudgingly convinced myself to get it, when I read one review that mentioned how it takes a long time to start up, and how it had moving parts.  Well, moving parts, in my mind, means noise.  I’m extremely sensitive to noise so any whirring coming from my entertainment center makes me want to chuck an AOL CD at someone’s head.

The thing that was interesting was that at the same price point, I could get a PS3 that already had a Blu-Ray player.  Not only that, it already had a network card on it (both wired and wireless I quickly found out) so that it could do the BD updates.  It’d be future-proof!  So, I got one, not at all with the intention of playing games, but instead just to watch movies.

I was really impressed as I started to unbox the thing and learned more about it.  One thing I have always hated about game consoles in general is that they use custom, proprietary input connections that only their hardware will work with, forcing vendor lock in.  If your cat chews on your power cord or if your little brother flushes your controller down the toilet, you have to buy a new one from them.  Annoying.  The PS3 was totally different, though.  The power jack was the standard one that computer power supplies use, so I can swap out that cord at any time.  It has a normal HDMI output port on the back, so I could use my existing one right away.  The SPDIF port was standard as well, and if all that wasn’t enough, the controllers connect using USB!  I was pretty blown away.  In fact, the only thing that was non-standard was a cord connecting to RCA and Component video output.  I didn’t care about those, since I’m using HDMI, but man, that is awesome.

I remember I went out and rented two Blu-Ray movies that night.  One was Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (best Harry Potter movie, evah) and 2001: A Space Odyssey.  I’ve already written about my Blu-Ray experiences in the past, and so far, while it’s impressive, it’s not nearly as mind-blowingly amazing as I was hoping.  So, I still haven’t switched.  On a sidenote, though, I’m really tempted to get Sleeping Beauty.  It’s supposed to be finally presented in its OAR (original aspect ratio).  Plus, it’s about the coolest animated movie there is.  How often do you get to see an awesome dragon fight like that one has?  It’s classic.

So, Blu-Ray discs was pretty much out of the picture.  Oh well.  I started playing around with the PlayStation Store a bit, and that also blew me away.  How cool is it that you can sit on your couch and just buy video games directly from your console, download demos, themes, wallpapers and movie trailers.  Okay, so maybe themes and wallpapers isn’t an exciting point, but the demos is my favorite part.  I’ve gotten burned by a few game purchases in the past, that had I had a few minutes of checking it out, I never would have gotten it.  Strangely enough, that’s actually really rare.  I seem to either have a lot of luck in buying games that I like or something.

PS3 games are so expensive, so I decided that I was only going to buy the ones that I would get *really* excited about and want to play repeatedly.  Which, again, kind of goes for almost all my games … Hmm.  The first one I grabbed (and I don’t remember how .. I think I had a GameFly membership or something) was Dark Kingdom.  Then I got Burnout Paradise, and then Bladestorm.  Bladestorm was the freaking bomb.  I remember playing it non-stop for an entire week, staying up til like 4 a.m. each night.  That was the game that pretty much sold me on my purchase for good.

I’ve gotten a few more games since then, and they’ve all been great.  Overlord is freaking awesome.  Civilization: Revolution is one of the most addictive games I’ve ever played.  And last weekend I picked up Star Wars: The Force Unleashed and Lego Batman.

Somewhere along the line, I also bought myself a PSP-2000.  That is also a lot of fun.  They had a firmware update come out just yesterday which I installed last night, which finally lets you access the PSN store directly.  It’s really cool, too, it was a bit of a pain having to connect it to my computer or my PS3 to get data.  I wish it had better multimedia playback support, though.

I haven’t found a lot, or any, good games for my PSP yet, though I really haven’t gone looking.  Right now I just have Mortal Kombat and Star Wars: Lethal Alliance (I have this passive goal to get every Star Wars game, ever).  Looking online, it seems like there are a lot I’d be interested in, but I never get around to checking them out.  It’s still a great little console, though.

Overall, there’s just a lot of things that make up what I like about the system — games in 1080p, wireless controllers, UPnP support, large storage device, multi-user support, etc.  Probably the best of them is that this thing has a network connection and can receive firmware updates.  In fact, I think I’ve installed three since I bought the thing, and it gets a little bit better each time.  In my mind, this is how a gaming console should have been years ago.  There’s a lot of potential for this thing too, it effectively fill a lot of multimedia and on-demand roles.  I’m curious to see where things go.

In my last post about my new cell phone, I made this comment, which at the time seemed like some people would find hard to swallow considering my geekiness: “I’m a really slow adopter to new technologies, believe it or not, so this might take me a while to get used to.”

As my good friend Jason pointed out, “That is the world’s biggest understatement.”

More accurately, in his words, “I wouldn’t say slow adopter to “technologies”…. I’d just say, “I loathe change in any way, shape, or form”.”

Heh, believe it or not, it’s really true. I find something I like, I stick with it, and I vehemently won’t give it up until I’m absolutely forced to. Whatever works.

As far as the phone, I think I’m gonna take it back and get a brand new … RAZR. Whee!

That or a StarTAC. I can’t decide.

The Blackberry Pearl Flip came out today, so I ran out to the store and got me one.  Initial reaction — meh.  It’s nice, but I don’t like trackballs all that much.  I kinda prefer my RAZR where I can just quickly hit one button and it goes to where I want versus navigating menus.  Still, we’ll see, it’s too early to tell.

One thing I do like about it is it can use a WiFi connection to make phone calls.  That’d be nice, since I didn’t get good coverage with my old phone at home — though whether it was T-Mobile, the Kryptonite in my walls, or a funky battery, who knows.

I’m a really slow adopter to new technologies, believe it or not, so this might take me a while to get used to.

Well, I had fun last weekend writing up just general notes about multimedia stuff I was playing with, so I think I’ll have a go at it again.

For some reason, this weekend, I got it in my head that it would be a great idea to look at the MP4 format again, to maybe put a few video files in, for portability. Which of course makes no sense, because I’m not streaming or sending my files anywhere at all except from one linux server to one linux client. But, vague issues of necessity never stop me when there’s something exciting and new to learn, so away I went. After playing around for a few hours, I came to the conclusion that things really aren’t quite up to par (for me, that is, the perfectionist), and that there’s no chance of me switching from Matroska any time in the near future.

The first snag I hit was that MPlayer wouldn’t report the aspect ratio or the bitrate on the files. At first I thought it was just happening on .mov files I had downloaded from Apple, but even with MP4s I created myself it was happening. Poop. Bitrate I can do without knowing, I was just curious, but ignoring the aspect when the original source is non-standard causes issues.  Edit: I should have known this, using the lavf demuxer works fine.  midentify -demuxver lavf movie.mp4

I started making a DVD of Star Wars trailers for my little brother (yay, trailers!), and I was reencoding them using ffmpeg. Lemme go off on a bit of a tangent here and say that as much as I love MEncoder, sometimes ffmpeg is just a wee bit simpler to throw out some quick changes. “ffmpeg -i foo.mov -target dvd -aspect 16:9 foo.mpg” is just too easy to remember. Obviously I could create a profile for mencoder, but I do that all the time, and then forget which ones I have. Not too helpful. Anyway, the trailers were actually already cropped so it was more like 2.3259 or something like that instead of 16/9. FFmpeg couldn’t read the aspect ratio, so I had to figure it out myself. I’m sure there’s a simpler way, but I just dumped the Apple trailer into Matroska first, got the ratio from there and then reencoded it. A bit of a run around, but it was fast, simple, and got the job done. Of course it might be a problem if your source material was longer than 90 seconds. Good luck with that.

Oh yes, I think one reason I wanted to play with MP4 was to see if I could get something to play back on my PSP. I have this wild-eyed dream of using my PSP to remotely stream video content from home. Unfortunately, it’s a royal pain in the pooty to even get something to encode for them. I really didn’t throw much effort into it, but quickly tried the first example I found online to encode it using ffmpeg, and it didn’t work. Meh. I tweaked the settings a bit to see if that helped, but nothing worked. Can I just throw in, again, even though it didn’t work for me, that ffmpeg is cool like that — it has a PSP format that it’s preset to encode to, along with a bunch of other ones … see “ffmpeg -formats”.

Actually, ffmpeg’s output was annoyingly confusing, now that I think about it. I couldn’t figure out for the life of me what the actual command line option was for the vcodec and acodec option. Anyone else run into that problem? I seriously couldn’t figure out which one was the AAC option. Aargh! “ffmpeg -formats” would just say aac, so of course I tried that, but it didn’t work. The option was actually libfaac. I have no idea in the freaking world how people are supposed to figure that one out. I read the entire man, and it didn’t really give much help there, either. Bleh.

One nice thing about the older releases of ffmpeg was that you could just say “ffmpeg -i foo.avi foo.mp4″ and it would automatically select mpeg4 video and aac audio for you. I switched over to using just SVN, and it wouldn’t do that for me, sadly.

Oh yes, one more thing I remember about MP4 (I am *really* bouncing around in this post), was that when I first read up about it, I discovered that the format supports MPEG2 video, which got me really excited. What surprised me was that Dolby Digital and DTS are not supported. AAC is the multi-channel choice, it seems. Still, I could live with just having to re-encode my audio. I hate waiting on video. Just a preemptive defense here, but say what you will about my MPEG2 choice of codec, but there’s something to be said about using a video codec that has been around for a long, long time and is extremely well supported in all kinds of software.

Playing with MP4, I found three ways to make one: using mp4creator (part of mpeg4ip package), ffmpeg, and mencoder. mp4creator was nice, but somewhat lacking in features — that is, comparing to mkvmerge (for Matroska). I’m not trying to bash it, since it did exactly what I needed it to do in every case, but it could be a bit more polished. I’m sure that’ll come with time, though. Once I had a movie file with MPEG2 and AAC, it wrapped it just fine, assuming it was named with a suffix it understood (complained on .vob, took .mpg fine). I’ve read that MP4 supports VobSub, and I wonder how someone would about putting that in there. Interesting stuff. I’ll have to play with it later.

FFmpeg I already mentioned. My biggest headache was just trying to figure out how to what the options were. In reencoding an MPEG2 video and AC3 audio to same video and AAC audio, for some reason, the resulting .mp4 file had blocking artifacts on playback. I have no idea how that happened, since I just copied the video stream directly. So, I couldn’t really use that to just quickly create one.

MEncoder worked best of all, even though it screeches at you (using SVN) that the LAVF muxer is broken, everything worked perfectly fine. I used something like “mencoder movie.vob -of lavf -ovc copy -oac faac -o movie.mp4″. No blocking issues, sound worked fine, everything was great.

So, that was my short lived trial with MP4 for the weekend. I’m actually really surprised that it isn’t as well developed / supported as I thought it would be. I thought that this was the hawt new thing in codecs. Like everything else, I’m sure support for it will improve in time. I figured there was a lot more options right now, though. I wish Matroska was supported on more commercial platforms, because I still think it blows everything out of the water.

Anyway, going all the way back to my custom DVD. I’ve been ripping my Star Wars trailers off the DVDs to make a new one of just all the trailers. I have the original theatrical release DVDs for the original trilogy, and unfortunately they don’t come with any trailers *at all*. Super bummer. Episodes one through three, though, have a ton. Episode III has 18 trailers total on it. Sheesh! It was a bit of a pain trying to find them all, too.

One thing that surprised me was that with all the trailers on the Episode I disc (seven), I noticed that one of them was missing. I can’t believe I even know that. I guess I am a nerd. But there’s this one really memorable trailer which starts off with Anakin pod racing, and it’s incredible. I’ll have to find it somewhere else, I guess.

As much as I’ve written, believe it or not, I did all of this within about four hours time. It was a fun weekend. In fact, I wasn’t even on the computer until Sunday afternoon. Good times.

his being my third patch to fix some mythvideo nags, I’m actually starting to get comfortable going in there and trying to find this stuff. It’s still incredibly difficult to try and figure this out, since there’s little documentation and I vaguely understand C++, but it’s fun to attempt and cool to succeed.

This patch fixes an annoying problem I’ve had for a long time — it’s a royal pain setting a cover file for a video. A cover file would be the actual image that shows up in the gallery view for a media file. Without one, you just see a blank little icon which is pretty boring.

Folders are really simple — you just add folder.jpg (or .gif or .png) to the directory, and it will show that. Individual files are a bit tricker. If you were just using the interface, you’d have to first go into the Video Manager to let Myth scan the directory of files, create an entry in the database, then go find the file, edit the entry, and set the coverfile manually.

I originally wrote a script to do that part for me. I would just create a JPEG image for each media file, usually with the same filename, but a different extension, and code in a check to see if both exist, update the videometadata table. All the time, I kept thinking though, it would be so much simpler if Myth would just check to see if the file existed like the folders, and display it. That’s exactly what this patch does.

I pretty much just copied the same code from the part where it looks for the folder icon, and did the same thing. If, for example, you have movie.avi, just create movie.avi.jpg (or .gif, or .png) as the coverfile and you’re done.

Actually, you do have to put the file in the database first, since it still checks to see if there is any metadata for it at all. That is extremely simple, though, either by script or UI navigation. The UI will just add new ones quietly, and you can quickly exit out. The patch will still use your coverfile in the videometadata table too, if there isn’t a similar filename that it can find, so you can apply this and it won’t break your existing setup.

As usual, the ebuild is in my overlay. This one is mythvideo-0.20.2_p15087-r3.ebuild. I’m going to eventually document these a bit better and file bugs with upstream. I know I’m using an “old” version to patch it onto, but the reality is that SVN hasn’t changed at all since that revision, so even the latest version bump is the same code.

I also spent the weekend working out a number of small kinks in my system and setup. I drafted up a new “wishlist” that I have of stuff I’d like to eventually get fixed, and it’s getting smaller all the time. Right on.

As far as mythvideo patches, though, I only have one last small annoyance that, while it doesn’t really bother me, does kind of throw me for a bit of a loop so I’d like to see if I can fix it. The bug is that folder names and file names are sorted differently. I can’t remember which is which off the top of my head, but one of them will ignore prepositions like “The”, and “A” on the front of titles and sort by the second words. So “The A-Team” would show up near the top of the list. Maybe it does that on both file and folder. Anyway, I don’t like it. It’s a bit confusing. I tried looking for where it does that, but I haven’t had much luck yet.

I’ve been spending part of the weekend working out small annoyances in my myth setup, trying to get it inching closer to my “perfect” setup.  I’m actually really close now, minor stuff is all that’s left.

Here’s a few things I want to remember as a point of reference, that took me a bit of research to figure out:

Printing options in MPlayer:

mplayer -list-options <command line arguments>

mplayer -input cmdlist <slave mode commands>

mplayer -input keylist <events>

Mapping Page Up and Page Down with my remote in MythTV:

begin
prog = mythtv
button = ch+
repeat = 3
config = PgUp
end

begin
prog = mythtv
button = ch-
repeat = 3
config = PgDown
end

Finally, I hit some snag with MPlayer and VobSubs (subtitles that originally come with DVDs).  I’ve got some movies in Matroska format, and with recent (SVN r27719) revisions, it will forcibly display the subtitles on playback, and I have no idea why.  I swear I remember reading something about this on the mailing list a while ago, but I haven’t had much luck finding anything.  Best option so far, go back to an earlier revision (r25993).  Not ideal, but it works.  Every sub, force and vobsub option I’ve tried does nothing.  I’m not passing anything by default like -slang or -sid to mplayer.

Another thing I’ve been working on (I’m really bored) is finding posters for the cover images in my movies folder.  Which got me looking at UK quad posters.  If you haven’t ever seen the posters from across the pond, they are so much better than our American counterparts.  They are a horizontal landscape, which allows for, in my opinion, a much more dramatic picture.  Check out this Star Wars one, for example.

It just looks so much better, in my opinion.  I gotta get some movie posters up on my wall (only two so far: Tron and The Adventures of Milo in the Phantom Tollbooth), and I’d love to hunt down some quads.  The old school Disney ones look even awesomer.

Speaking of cover images for Myth, I have a new patch I cranked out last night, which has an interesting story to it.  I’ll post details later, though.  I’m not in the mood for details right now.  I’m more about hunting down stupid bugs that don’t require too much brain power.