wonkablog

An interesting post came up the other day on the Gentoo forums about how to rip Blu-Ray discs on Linux. Short summary: I have no idea if it’s possible, and the original poster is still investigating. It has gotten me thinking though. The Blu-Ray player that I want to get it is $600, and it looks like it’s being phased out of production anyway, so why not get a disc drive instead and rip the movies? It’d save me some money, and I’d eventually buy one anyway.

Well, the questions that come to mind are, will the software actually work, will the drive firmware let me do that, and am I going to have to use Windows?

I haven’t done any research at all, mostly because I can’t afford to buy a DVD drive right now, but the whole thing does have me curious. I always assumed there was no way to rip the stuff under Linux, but I haven’t gone looking for possible solutions either. The only thing I am sure about though, is that once ripped, you can play the content just fine. At least, I think so. I’m not positive about the HD audio codecs, pretty sure about the video ones though.

I tend to buy hardware first and figure out how to get it working second, but because the DRM is so finicky in this case, I really don’t want to take that approach and be out a couple hundred bucks.  In the meantime, I really wish I could at least demo the stuff at home.  That would be cool.  The only 1080p content I’ve seen so far is the movie trailers I’ve downloaded from Apple’s website.  I gotta say that stuff looks pretty good.

Okay, now this is something I wasn’t expecting. Warner Bros. is releasing season one of Justice League on Blu-ray. Wow.

I’d been planning on *eventually* getting a Blu-ray player anyway, but I’ve been pretty indifferent about the decision, or when. Actually, the real thing that’s holding me back right now is that I can’t natively rip them on Linux right now (play back, yes, but that’s an entirely different matter). There’s no way I’m firing up my Windows box just to get some 1080p goodness on my harddrive. I’m a sucker for automation.

Just another Gentoo PSA, portage now has the latest driver for the openChrome X11 drivers for VIA chipsets (x11-drivers/xf86-video-openchrome). These drivers are really nice because they support more chipsets than the standard VIA ones do.

I shouldn’t get any credit for this one. I’ve actually had an ebuild for this for like 4 months, and procastinated putting it into the tree. In fact, Donnie (dberkholz) beat me to to it — thanks, man. All I really did was clean up the ebuild and do some testing. Also, of course, thanks to upstream for actually working on the project and getting something successful out the door. Much love.

So there ya go. With that little driver you should be able to do some cool stuff with those Mini-ITX’s that you’ve been waiting to convert into a PVR. Rock on.

I noticed that Woot today has refurbished HD Tivos for a nice price.  I’d recommend picking one up, if you have been waiting for a good opportunity.   I actually just bought a brand new one last week from Amazon, and I barely got it all setup just yesterday.  It’s been pretty cool, so far, though I still haven’t decided if its worth the extra cost in service fees.

The picture on the Tivo is absolutely gorgeous.  It outputs in every HD and standard format, 480i, 480p, 720p and 1080i and can display the recorded or live shows either in its native format or force them to another one.  Don’t ask me how that one works.

The interesting thing is that I had to go to Comcast’s office and pick up a CableCARD for it to pick up the encrypted digital channels.  The first time I went, they gave me a single-stream card.  The way it works is that there are two types of CableCARDs, a single-stream or a multi-stream.  The Tivo HD box has two slots for cards, so you can either use one multi or two single cards.  So, I had to go back to Comcast and pick up a multi-stream one instead, so that I could watch TV on both tuners.

The dual HD tuners is one thing that I already like above my old Series 2 Tivo.  Both of the tuners are in HD, while my Series 2 Tivo had one digital tuner and one analog tuner.  That shouldn’t matter, but some shows, when recorded on the analog tuner, the audio would drop out of one channel, so I’d get mono sound on the left channel only.  Kind of odd.  Now though, I can record two HD streams at once, and I must say, it is very nice.

I’m also on a promotional plan for Comcast right now.  Even though I think all their prices suck, this one was the best I’d seen so  I didn’t want to pass it up.  I’ve got the basic cable for $24 a month for 6 months.  With that I get somewhere around 20 HD channels aside from the local stations.  I can’t remember all of them off the top of my head, though I know there’s stuff like two Discovery stations, TLC, USA, Universal and TNT.  Having all those channels is pretty dangerous, since I’m actually trying to watch *less* TV, not more, and the whole thing has had an interesting side effect — with the HD picture being so gorgeous, every show you watch is just so visually appealing that I want to see it, despite how crappy the actual content is.  So far, it hasn’t mattered what’s on TV, I’m just mesmerized by how nice it looks.  I don’t think that will wear off soon, either.  I was watching American Idol last night and I just kept watching the picture more than the show itself.  :)  It’s kinda hard to get used to.   And to think that I’m still only getting 720p as my best input so far.  I still have yet to see any true 1080p signals.   I wish the stupid prices on the Blu-Ray players would come down.

The Tivo itself is nice, as always.  One thing that really surprised me was that the menus were exactly the same as my Series 2.  Since the HD Tivo is a Series 3, I’d have expected it to be a little different, but the only changes were the additional menu items for HD TVs, and that’s it.  Even the remote is the same, with the only difference being that there is an Aspect button.

I do like the A/V connections on the box, though.  It has both HDMI and Component out for video, as well as SPDIF out for Dolby Digital.  Right now I’m just using the Component output, since the box came with free component cables (I thought that was a nice touch, certainly wasn’t expecting that) and also because I don’t have any free HDMI cables right now.  There is also a port for eSATA if you want some external storage.  I haven’t read up on it, but I assume any old harddrive would work with that.  Then of course there’s the standard Ethernet and phone line jacks, as well as 2 USB slots, then the normal RCA outputs for audio and video.

The only thing I hate about the Tivo is the service fees.  $12.95 a month.  Of course, I hate service fees of any kind.  One thing I’m curious about is I wonder if my Tivo would pick up my local HD channels if I didn’t have the digital package with Comcast.  My HDTV picks them up just fine since they are unencrypted, it’s just that I don’t have any way to record them.  Well, I’ve got my PCHDTV card which I have *never* gotten to work, but that’s a whole ‘nother story.  I guess I won’t be able to find out what the HD Tivo can do until I cancel the service.  I do know, though, that it didn’t pick up any HD channels at all without the CableCARD in there, which also seemed odd.  Chances are that it won’t work unless I’m paying Comcast the big bucks.

So, I still haven’t decided if I’m gonna keep this thing or not.  The picture is absolutely amazing, and it’s really nice to be able to finally (and easily) record HD channels.  TNT has Without a Trace and Cold Case in HD, and it’s a great treat to watch Discovery Theater as well.  I’m just not sure if it’s worth all the extra cost or not.  We’ll see, I guess.

Comcast came out on Friday morning and installed my upgraded cable connection. Strictly speaking, I have no idea which tier I’m actually on right now. I know it’s at least expanded digital cable, and I think I get some HDTV channels. To be honest, I haven’t played with the settop box for more than 5 minutes. The real reason I wanted to get cable was so that I could have the Hallmark Channel again. Unfortunately, it looks like that’s not going to happen. I’ve tried everything, and the only way I can get the channel is by using the settop box. In the meantime, I only added 4 channels that I was interested in watching (Food Network, TLC, HGTV and Animal Planet), and am living with that.

There’s a lot more channels that I like to watch, but I’m taking it slow. Another channel I’m mostly interested in is TNT, since they play Without a Trace and Cold Case regularly. I think. Anyway, I’m actually trying to cut *back* on the number of channels I watch (one of my TVs only has all the PBS channels on it, which is a nice change of pace), but the fact is that some channels on cable have a much better and interesting lineup than the local ones.

Onto the cool stuff though. The settop box is a disaster and a half, or at least the menu is. I’m going to have to take screenshots because it really is unfathomable how much of a UI nightmare this is. Here’s my biggest beef with the whole thing: you can’t setup a custom channel list, or even add / delete channels from your lineup. If you want to go channel surfing, you have to go through *every* *single* *channel*. The only option around that is to add a ‘Favorites’ list, for which the remote has a button that will flip through those, but only going up. It’s incredibly annoying because adding / deleting channels has been a standard option for TVs for decades. Comcast’s settop box does let you setup a list of your favorite channels, but to browse it, you have to go through about 3 or 4 actions on the remote to get there, and even then it only displays the list in a guide. If you go back to hitting channel up or down, it just cycles again through every channel you get. And there are a lot of channels. And of coures it doesn’t ignore the ones that you aren’t signed up for, so you get to muddle through about three dozen that you aren’t authorized for.

I *think* that that the DirecTV and Dish Network boxes let you create lists, and then keep you in those channel lists for when you want to channel surf. I’m not sure, since I’ve never given one a good hard look. I’d switch to one of those just for that, though. In fact, I probably will.

In the meantime, I’m going to screw around with this settop box for a bit more before taking it back to Comcast. From what I’ve been reading, MythTV can add the box as an input device, using a firewire connection to control the channel tuner, and of course record TV. Mine is the HDTV DVR (Motorola DCT3416), and I haven’t yet seen much info about connecting one. The anecdotal evidence so far seems to be along the lines of “plug in the cable, and it works great.” We’ll see. I don’t even have a firewire cable.

So that’s where I’m at right now. I’m not gonna use the settop box unless I can get Myth to play around with it. Even then, I don’t need it, since I can tune into all the channels I wanted anyway with my normal TV tuner cards. I still need to see exactly which channels I get. I actually ripped it out from my HDTV since the picture was so horrible to begin with. Even on component output it looked incredibly crappy, not to mention worse than my original coaxial input connection. I plugged it in briefly using HDMI, but that was just as unimpressive.

I’m toying with the idea of getting a Tivo just to see what my options are (yet another area I don’t know anything about, so who knows), but I’m not too optimistic anything good would come out of it. I’ll probably buy one used somewhere just so I can see if its worth it.

The real good thing is that, despite all these interesting issues, is that I’m perfectly happy with my original cable lineup, so if I rip everything out, I won’t miss it one bit. I’m just curious to see what I can accomplish though. It’s fun.

I got a new monitor at work today. It’s a Samsung 226BW, and it is very nice. I actually like the widescreen monitors. The great thing about them is you can work on your code and easily watch videos on the side.

Here’s a pretty snapshot of my desktop to go along with it.

Following up on an earlier post about region-free dvd players, I happened to have a stroke of luck — I found a DVD-RW drive that is region free. I happened to pick up an SATA DVD drive, and as I was playing around with it, I decided I wanted to rip one of my Region 2 DVDs. In order to do that, I had to use regionset to change the region code first.

Part of the program options, though, is that regionset will display what region the drive is currently set to. When I ran it, it didn’t have any setting at all, which seemed curious to me. I wondered what would happen if I just played the disc without changing the code. Normally, on my old IDE drives, it would throw all kinds of errors before dying on me, and I’d have to do a hard reset to get my drive working again. In this case, though, it worked flawlessly without any modification! I thought my luck was too good to be true, so I popped a Region 1 DVD back in the drive to see if it had any issues playing those, and it did fine as well.

I’ve since tried ripping other Region 2 and Region 4 discs on it, and it has taken everything I’ve thrown at it so far. I’m pretty excited, to say the least. It would have been nice to have a region-free DVD player with HDMI output, but I haven’t been able to find one at a decent price. Being able to rip and watch them on the computer though is just as good.

For the record, the drive I have is a Lite-On and the model is LH-20A1L (firmware revision BL03). Interestingly enough, the Lite-On brand is the only one when it comes to DVD drives that I have never had problems with. When it comes to poorly authored DVDs, when my other IDE drives (Pioneer, Sony) would freak out, freeze up and die, the Lite-On one would always (well, about 95% of the time) take those crappy discs and skip over the bad sectors and manage to complete the rip. I’ve been really impressed with them.

Well, it’s Christmas, and what makes a better gift than a TV that’s bigger than your wall? I was talking to my boss last night who just recently bought an HDTV, and we were chatting about it, so I got the idea to post my tips on what to look for in an HDTV if you’re considering a purchase.

HDTVs is actually one area where I have done a TON of research. When you’re buying something that costs over $1k and you plan on having it for 10 years, you should too.

First, get a good brand. There are only three brands worth buying: Sony, Samsung and Sharp. The rest are crap. In fact, most manufacturers will buy their stuff from Samsung. Personally, I prefer Sony, but whatever floats your boat.

Second, rear projection TVs are the way to go — the picture is better and the TVs are much, much, much cheaper than LCD flatpanels. Also, don’t even think about buying plasma (they are getting phased out anyway) as they’ll burn your screen out.

If you can stand having an extra 5 inches sticking out from the back of your TV, rear projection sets are the way to go. Check this out … Circuit City is selling a Sony 1080p 55″ rear projection TV for $1800. A Samsung 46″ LCD HDTV is also on sale for $1950. Whee! (I couldn’t find a good comparision online, but go in the store and you’ll quickly see what I’m saying is true).

Third, protect your investment with a decent power supply — get something with stage 1 or up filtering. You’re gonna pay a lot for the TV, don’t get a $12 power supply from Wal-Mart to keep it running. Expect to spend at least $150 for something decent.

Fourth, HDMI is the way to go for DVDs. Blu-Ray and HD-DVD players are insanely expensive, and not worth the price (yet). Go get a nice upconverting DVD player if you don’t already have one. You can easily snag one for under $100. The HDMI cables are more expensive, but again they are worth the picture quality. Personally I think they look better than Component. I’d recommend buying your cables online instead of spending $60 for a Monster cable that is 3 feet long in the store.

Fifth, you don’t need to get a huge cable deal to get some HDTV channels. Comcast, even with their most basic cable plan ($12/month) will give you the local channels in HDTV (ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX). The picture will blow your eyeballs out of the water. Sure, go ahead and spend $$$ if you want on Dish Network and get a lot more HD channels (in fact, from what I’ve gathered … they are the best deal. Its about the same price for lots of HD channels as it is for Comcast’s basic cable), but you don’t need it.

Sixth, look for online coupon codes. It’s worth waiting a month if you can snag a 10% off coupon somewhere. Or, just watch the weekly circulars and see how low the price on your TV will go. If you missed the opportunity, just wait, and it will eventually go back to that same price. If you can’t get some coupons, then be sure to buy from a store that will match the price for up to 30 days *after* the sale. That way, if they do sell it cheaper later, you can get the price difference back in your pocket.

Seventh, and as much as I hate to recommend this, if you are responsible enough to manage your money, open a store credit card and take advantage of their no interest for x amount of months deal. Put the cash that is going to go towards the purchase and put it in the bank, and float it so you can earn interest on it. Then, be sure to pay off the balance in full before you hit the due date, otherwise you’ll get hit with nasty back fees and insanely high interest rates. I really don’t recommend this route unless you *know* you can do it safely.

Eighth, don’t worry if its not “full” HDTV or not. Make sure that it is at least 720p though. Some smaller TVs will tout themselves as HDTV compatible or some crap like that, but they look poopy. The 720p pictures still look amazingly gorgeous. There’s nothing wrong with future-proofing though, and going with the best possible picture, and if it’s a difference of only a few hundred dollars, go for it. In three years you won’t remember if you saved $200 or not going for the cheaper price, but you’ll remember that you stuck yourself with the lower quality.

That’s about all I can think of … just be sure to do a lot of research. Check the connectors on the back. Play with the remote. Look at the features the TV has. Ask lots of questions. And for heaven’s sake, don’t buy on impulse. TVs are heavy and hard to lug back to the store. Especially in the snow. And then the cashiers sneer at you when you want to return stuff.

Have fun, though. HDTVs certainly live up to the hype.

I’ve been having trouble sleeping the past couple of nights, and last night was no different. I woke up at about 3 a.m. and couldn’t fall back asleep, so I decided to do some research for my ultimate mythfrontend box I’d like to buy some day. My biggest sticking point up until now was that it seems like DVI out on the motherboards was a real rarity. On top of that, the graphics chipsets are always VIA, which while the Openchrome stuff works great, using their hardware still wouldn’t be my first choice. Well, the enlightening thing in this morning’s research was that VIA isn’t the only one making boards (they were pretty much the only ones I was ever looking at). In fact, AMD and Intel both have their own. I found out most of this at the Logic Supply website … one I’d seen before, but never really investigated until now. They have a ton of options, products and setups … and I found just what I’m looking for.

Lo and behold, here’s the one I decided on after looking around: the AOpen i945GMt-FSA. Here’s where it makes the grade for me.

First of all, and most importantly, it uses an Intel chipset, including for the onboard video card which is an Intel 945GM. The Xorg wiki confirms that this works with the i810 graphics driver that is already available, and it’s the one that is being actively developed upstream by Intel themselves. This is the ideal chipset to get — no more binary blob madness. On top of that, the main video output for the motherboard is DVI. Since I’m going to be connecting this to an HDTV, having a DVI to HDMI connection is the smoothest and simplest way to go, and delivers the best picture compared to Component or S-Video inputs (I’ve been meaning to take screenshot comparisions some day). Before I knew this was even an option, I was struggling to find a motherboard and case combination that had a PCI riser card that would let me put in an nvidia graphics board, just in case the VIA one wouldn’t work for whatever reason. The only drawback when it comes to video on this board is that it uses shared memory, and the limit is only 128 megs. Kind of a shame it can’t go higher (and perhaps it can, I can’t find a manual anywhere, even on AOpen’s website), since the board itself supports 4 GB of RAM. That shouldn’t be an issue, though. It would just be nice to have it be a bit beefier.

The other big thing that I was cautious about was having S/PDIF support. Right now I’m not using it on any of my mythboxes, but I prefer to take my time and do some future-proofing. For now I’ve just got a stereo out to RCA cable that works great. I’m extremely picky about video, but sound not so much. Down the road it would be a very nice option to have in case I do start watching movies, and since I’m already ripping everything using the original AC3 streams, then it doesn’t seem too unlikely that I’ll need it. This board comes with two S/PDIF modules, which took me a bit of searching to find out how they plug in and work. It turns out there’s one for audio in and one for audio out. This easy installation guide PDF (warning, the file is HUGE) has some pictures of it, and explains where they plug in — each one goes in one of the regular audio jacks on the back. Seems odd to me, and I’m skeptical that it would even work, but I guess it could. Either way, I’m still going to make sure to get a case that I can add a PCI slot in there so if I need to get a soundcard with S/PDIF out, I can (Interestingly enough, those are hard to find .. at least in a decent price range).

All the other stuff is really cool, but I’m not too concered. From there it’s basically everything you’d expect on a decent desktop, so it’s nice to have. 4 USB 2.0 ports, SATA II connectors, onboard NIC, etc. It also has S-Video out on the mainboard as well so I can hook it up to my older TV as well if I’d like. There are a lot of processors you can put in there as well, though for a mythfrontend you’re not going to need much.

As far as the final setup, I’m not sure still what I’m going to do. One interesting problem I’ve noticed with cases for Mini-ITX systems is that a lot of them are butt-ugly. Most of the ones that Logic Supply sells for the Intel boards are pretty bland. I suppose most people just tuck them away somewhere. On the flip side, I guess it’s nice that you don’t have to spend all that money on nice design, right?

Here’s the case that I’ve tenatively settled on, the Morex 3777. It’s huge and ugly, but it’ll have more than enough room to put in extra stuff if I need it. One really cool thing is that Logic Supply will put the entire system together themselves, and I can pick all the components I want to get. I’m pretty excited already. The price seems reasonable too, considering I’d spend the same amount on a decent desktop system. With my preferences, the price is ranging from about $600 with the basics to $900 with everything I’d ever possibly want. As soon as I save up some cash, I’ll be getting mine. I’m pretty excited overall. Mostly to have found something I like … that’s always the hardest part.

I’ve picked up my quest again to find a DVD player that is region-free. This is about the fourth or fifth time I’ve looked around, this being my most serious attempt. I’ve been doing my research quite a bit on this one instead of just randomly buying whatever looks like it might work the second I see it.

The first question is whether you want to get a player that is region-free “out of the box” or hack one to reset the region settings. I’d rather go with the first one, for fear of getting stuck with a player that for one reason or another isn’t hackable.

I actually found a lot of search results on Amazon, which surprised me. Almost all of them are either Philips or some cheap-o brands I’ve never heard of. A Philips DVD player is most certainly out of the question. I bought one once and it had the most horrible remote I’ve ever seen. Today, that’s no real excuse since you can use a universal remote, but one feature it also lacked was that you couldn’t eject a disc from the remote. Lame.

Aside from my experiences, everywhere I read about their players, people regret the purchase, and have lots of complaints about them. So, definately going to steer clear.

The only thing I’ve really found so far that looks like it’d work is this one, the Samsung DVD-P171. The only problem is that I can’t find any reviews for it, anywhere at all. Either no one bought this thing or it was quickly replaced by another model. Neither scenario exactly inspires confidence. Even then, I couldn’t find the specifications for it on any website. I finally downloaded the product manual from Samsung’s website, and it has component and rca video out, along with coaxial audio out. No HDMI or S-Video which stinks for maximum options, but it’s not a big deal. Samsung seems to be generally a good brand overall, so I think I might get it and check it out.

The one feature I really want in my DVD player is what my Sony already has — remembering the last playback location. It’s great. The Sony players will remember the last position for six discs. So you can take them out and put them in later and pick back up exactly where you left off. I couldn’t really tell by reading the manual for the Samsung if it had that or not. Not a huge deal though, the reason I’m looking in the first place is to have it play any regions.

The reason I want a region-free DVD player in the first place should be pretty obvious — I want to be able to play DVDs from other regions. It’s the most annoying feature of DVD’s DRM that I hate. Ironically enough, HD-DVD and Blu-ray discs, known for their DRM, actually don’t employ this tactic … all discs are region-free. Sheesh.

Even dumber is that the studios will release some movies only in certain countries, or release them as widescreen only other places, but not in the USA or for Region 1. That means if I want to get Looking for Richard on DVD, I’d have to buy it from the UK. Or if I want George of the Jungle with widescreen I have to get it from Germany. I already bought Disney’s Shipwrecked from Australia, and changed the region code on my DVD ROM in my computer so I could rip it. I’m limited by the number of times I can change it though, so I’d rather have a player that I can just throw anything at.

For the record, here’s a list of Disney’s pan & scan only DVD releases, and which regions have the widescreen ones available.