wonkablog

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.

Tonight, I managed to get one item off my wishlist done that I’ve wanted to accomplish for a very long time — I managed to switch my mythfrontend setup from a wired connection to a wireless one. I have had network cables running all across my house, from my living room through my kitchen to my laundry room where my media server is, and it always drives me nuts seeing the nasty things running around everywhere. With a bit of hacking, though, I got my Linksys router running OpenWRT to act as a wireless bridge to my wireless router. It works pretty good, too. Theres some small latency on the myth frontend, but with caching the playback it’s an acceptable few seconds to wait for playback.

Here’s how I got it all setup. First of all, I have a Linksys WRTSL54GS that I’ve had for a few years, and it works great as a router. It’s running OpenWRT WhiteRussian 0.9 with X-WRT on there. Up until tonight, I’ve been using it as my main router, but since openwrt provides me with everything I need to turn it into a secondary access point on the same network, all I needed was a second wireless router.

So, I went to Circuit City tonight and picked up a Linksys WRT110. After playing with it for an hour or so, I must say it is nice. It’s got this slick design that makes it seriously look like a little alien blinking at you. There’s no external antenna either, which is nice. Just really well designed. Plus, it seems much more responsive, though that could just be my imagination. I can’t put OpenWRT on there, but that’s okay — I’ve always been pretty happy with Linksys’ stock firmware if I don’t need to get down to the nitty gritty. And it’s still much simpler than Netgear’s and gives you more options. I’ve gone through a few Linksys routers in my day, and I didn’t expect to be disappointed, and I haven’t been yet. I picked mine up for $60. Not too bad. Plus, it supports the 802.11n draft, so it’s nice to have that for when I need it.

Anyway, now the new WRT110 is going to be my new router. I quickly set that up and set it next to my media server, ready to do its job.

Setting up OpenWRT wasn’t quite as simple, but really the hardest part was reading the documentation and understanding what I was supposed to be doing. I locked myself out of my router while setting it up, and managed to get back in failsafe mode and restore things, thank goodness. That’s happened before. Networking is seriously not my thing, I dunno why, but I have the hardest time just grasping the most simpe of principles. So I’m usually pretty dangerous and clumsy when it comes to messing around with nvram settings. My advice, though, is to simply document everything you change, and what the original settings were. Probably most importantly, though, is to see if you can get into failsafe mode if you do screw things up.

The instructions for setting up my openwrt router are here. I went with the routed client mode. I have no idea what that means. I’ll explain it in layman terms though. Basically the internet wifi router (the WRT110) acts as the main router (192.168.1.1), and the openwrt bridged router (the WRTSL54GS, 192.168.2.1) has it’s own subnet. Everything is pretty stock on the first router, and there’s nothing you would need to change to get it working. The openwrt router uses the wireless interface to connect to the first router using DHCP. So basically you’re turning the wireless part into a client instead of a server. But it will still act as a LAN router besides that, handing out DHCP leases on it’s own subnet (192.168.2.1) for whatever you plug into the onboard ports.

I’m going to borrow some ASCII art from another part of the openwrt wiki to illustrate my setup:

                / - - - Wireless Clients
               |
INTERNET-----WRT110- - - - - - - WRTSL54GS

             | | | |            | | | |
            4 clients          4 clients

----- Cable link
- - - Wlan link

I don’t wanna get into a halfway written howto on what I did, but I’ll illustrate where my changes (for *this* specific router) were different from the instructions. Actually, all I had to do was consult the page that lists my network configuration devices, and replace those with what the howto said to use.

Specifically, here’s all I changed:

• nvram set wl0_mode=sta
• nvram set lan_ipaddr=192.168.2.1
• nvram set lan_ifnames=eth0 (howto says vlan0, but my LAN is eth0)
• nvram set wan_ifname=eth2 (howto says eth1, but my WIFI is eth2)

That’s about it. Commit the changes and reboot the router. You can also confirm that the eth2 device is the wireless one by running iwlist on it:

• iwlist eth2 scanning

After that, I just had to take down the wifi, set the new ssid and channel, then turn the wifi back on, and it worked. I must say I was impressed it was so easy. I’m not exactly sure what my signal strength is like, but it seems to be a healthy connection, even though my walls are made of Kryptonite.

The first thing I did was poke at mythfrontend to see how badly the damage was gonna be on playback. Without any options, it sucked, skipping a bit. I threw in framedropping (mplayer -framedrop) and that helped a little, but would still bounce badly on any scenes with motion. I threw in an 8mb cache (mplayer -cache 8192) along with framedrop and it looks great. It does take a few seconds to start up, but that’s fine. One thing I was worried about was if mplayer-resume would handle it or not, since I thought that using -cache and -ss (starting point) would cause it to crash, but so far it’s working fine.

Most people probably wouldn’t have problems with their media files to start with. Mine are about as large as they can get, with MPEG2 video and AC3 audio. Over 802.11g it works fine though. No real complaints. Myth is a bit laggy pulling up the menus when I browse the folders in mythvideo. Everytime you go in a new directory it takes a good 2 to 5 seconds to come up. I’m guessing it’s my folder covers (usually between10 to 25k), and it has to display 30 of them at a time. I dunno. Could be anything.

I’m pretty excited. I’ve already yanked the offending network cables from my kitchen so I won’t trip on them anymore. I tell you what. I really can’t believe it was that simple, I was expecting it to be much harder.

Edit: I should clarify a few things.

First of all, using wireless to stream multimedia is not the best-case scenario.  Using a wired connection is by far the best solution, obviously.  I just don’t want anyone to think that this works super great and go out and try and duplicate the same thing.

Second, it’s really important to get a good line of sight, or I can’t get a good streaming connection at all.  I’m still looking at ways to improve my wireless connection, but again, it wasn’t really designed for this.  Sure, it works, but its not optimal.

I caught the news this morning via Engadget that Blackberry is coming out with a new phone pretty soon, the Blackberry Pearl 8220. What makes it cool is that it’s their first flip phone, yay!

I’m not big into cell phones myself, but my new job that I just started (which I still haven’t written anything about, meh) is going to pay for a new one and coverage. I’ve been looking around a lot, and decided on the Blackberry for the feature set it has, but I really wanted to get a flip phone. I’ve got a RAZR that I’ve had for about three years now, and its worked great for me — nice and tiny and gets the job done.

Looks like the new Pearl has all the features the other phones have, minus GPS, which I could live without, but it would come in really handy — half the reason I use my phone is to call someone when I’m lost, which happens way too much.

Edit: yay, piccies!

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.