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.

There has been some recent activity again on the libdvdnav front, and so I’ve been playing around with it again.  I finally created an SVN ebuild for MPlayer which I can use myself instead of just manually updating and reconfiguring the repo myself.

Generally speaking, I don’t like the idea of ebuilds that hit upstream’s SVN servers directly, so please be kind and don’t do anything asinine like upgrade every single day or something.

So now I have live subversion ebuilds for both libdvdnav and mplayer.  This is the important thing to know about the libdvdnav ebuild: it has some changes to libdvdread so you will have to unmerge the one that is already uninstalled.  On top of that, since it is a new API version, everything you previously compiled against libdvdread (k3b, etc.) will have to be re-emerged … and even then, there are zero guarantees that it will work at all.

In short, these ebuilds are only designed for a select few: those people who are using mplayer exclusively and want to have dvdnav support at the risk of breaking anything else that needs DVD access.  Obviously, that scenario fits for someone with a media frontend, but doesn’t make sense for general desktop usage.

Also worth noting is that these are the only two ebuilds that will work together.  Previously, the mplayer in the tree would have detected and worked with the libdvdnav ebuild, but that’s not the case anymore.  It’s these two in the overlay, or the mplayer in the tree.  Pick one set and choose.

If you have problems with the ebuilds, let me know.  I’m still not an expert at layman so I can’t go about giving you instructions on how to install this stuff directly.  Have fun, though.

Oh, and last but not least — I tested them, and it works for me. :)  Just emerge libdvdread first, then mplayer.

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.

Even though I can’t code in C++, or anything more hardcore than bash (and even that’s pretty sketchy), with a push in the right direction from a noble soul in #mythtv, I managed to mangle a patch together for MythVideo that fixes some annoyances that I’ve had for a very long time. They are:

• Filenames won’t display underscores, but folders would
• Getting rid of the “cover image” screen in the gallery
• No page up, page down support with your remote

The patch is here, which should apply cleanly to media-plugins/mythvideo-0.20.2_p15087. Or you could just try and use my overlay directly. If you look at what I’ve changed, it should be really simple to make the same changes to the most recent version for SVN, since I don’t think the file has changed much between releases. Creating patches is also not my favorite thing to do, and in fact actually took me longer to create the actual diff and apply it correctly then it did to hack the code.

Here’s a complete list of what I changed, if you don’t want to go digging around the code and determining what’s happened for yourself:

First, the issue of page up / page down. Sure it’s nice that you can do that with a keyboard, but if you are using a remote, it’s painful scrolling when you have a lot of folders to look through. I remapped 1 and 7 to emulate Home and End, and 3 and 9 to emulate Page Up and Page Down.

Second, for the display of folder names, if it has an underscore in the title, that is replaced with a space. This is consistent with the naming scheme for the actual files.

Third, and always most annoying to me, is that I got rid of the information screen that displays all the metadata about a movie after you select it in gallery mode. I always thought that was pretty useless, because I already know what I want to watch, and didn’t like having to hit enter twice to start playback. There was a shortcut already, you could just hit the Play button and it would skip the screen, but I think this is more effective and natural.

Finally, I disabled the Menu, Filter and Info options by commenting them out, for the only reason that I never used them and sometimes they would pop up when I was debugging stuff with mplayer and my remote.

Needless to say, I’m much happier now with my user experience, since MythVideo is all I’m using right now. I have a really low tolerance for small tweaks that bug me, and I’m glad I finally got these taken care of. Besides, it’s forced me to start learning some C++ (again) so I don’t have to keep relying on people to help me get started.

Now I can go back to watching Roger Ramjet and Knight Rider in navigation harmony. It’s great.

If you’re looking for mplayer + dvdnav support, there’s two ways to get it right now. Depending on how much support you want is going to change which ebuilds you’ll have to use right now, though.

If you just want simple playback support (no menu navigation), then use portage’s tree. Just unmask and emerge media-libs/libdvdnav, then re-emerge media-video/mplayer. That will build against the older, original dvdread library, but it should be enough to get you around the Sony ARccOS DRM. Hint: mplayer dvdnav://[track_number]

If you want the full playback + navigation support, you’re going to have to use an overlay (specifically, mine). I, personally, am against the idea of using overlays since I think it splits the tree, only asks for problems, and reminds me of using Mandrake back in the day when I had to have all these third-party mirrors just to get software I want. So, I’m really against the idea and wouldn’t be doing this unless there were an easier, simpler way.

Ranting aside, my overlay is at http://overlays.gentoo.org/dev/beandog Browse the ebuilds here. I would give some slick instructions on how to add it using layman, but since I never use overlays, I can’t tell you how, and I assume that the people who really know what they’re doing don’t need instructions anyway.

There are very few differences in my ebuilds. libdvdnav will use the newer version of libdvdread, so the one from the portage tree will show up as a blocker (and possibly break all your other packages that use it). After it’s installed, you’ll have to use my mplayer ebuild as well, since it’s configured to use the external dvdread library as well. After that, you can use dvdnav:// as you normally would. Hint: mplayer dvdnav://

I know it’s a bit of work, but until the forked libdvdnav can also work as a replacement or secondary slot to libdvdread in the tree, either option which would require testing, that’s how its gotta be. The plus side though is, it works.

I normally don’t post info about version bumps, but since the last MPlayer one was a while ago, and since I’ve been way too busy lately to work on anything Gentoo related, I thought I’d make mention of this one.

Not much to say, though, really … there’s a new snapshot in town (media-video/mplayer-1.0_rc2_p25993).  It fixes some security issues in older versions, which was the reason for the bump.  I’ve tried to change my approach of bumping the package every month or so and instead just focus on getting one release working really well and as many bugs fleshed out as possible in that release.  So far the approach has worked well.

Normally I’d have a good idea of what’s changed between releases, but since I haven’t had time to keep an eye on mplayer-dev either, I couldn’t really say.  I think there’s a few DVD fixes, but I’m not sure.  Sorry.

Anyway, as usual, let us know if you have any issues.  Should hit the tree shortly.  Enjoy.

A bug in MythVideo inspired me to work on fixing mplayer-resume tonight, so that it can properly handle movies with filenames.  I don’t know why I didn’t think about this before, but it’s simple if the file is properly escaped or quoted.  And so, mplayer-resume v1.5 is released, with support for spaces in filenames, finally, and also one other cool little thing: it works with playlists now, to a degree.

The playlists thing is kind of hard to explain, and it’d be easier to point you to the documentation that I’ve already written.  Instead, I’ll just describe what it is I’m going to use it for.

One thing I’ve been wanting to add to my MythVideo setup is some playlists so that I can randomly play something.  I have a lot of cartoons and videos and movies, and sometimes I don’t feel like picking something myself — one of the nice things about TV in general is you are genuinely surprised when you’re channel surfing and something cool just happens to crop up.  That’s kinda what I like, and what I wanted to do.  But, I wanted to take it a step further.  If I started playing $random_episode, then if I quit, I want to be able to resume playback of that same show.  Up until now, mplayer-resume wouldn’t work that way, since if you’re randomly picking something from a playlist file, there’s no real way to seek back to the same one.

That’s fixed now.  The script will read the filename of the movie you are playing when you exit (once you setup .lircrc correctly), and checks to see if that’s the same file you started playing.  So if I play random.pls and it plays Tarzan.mkv, and I exit, then when I go back to watch Tarzan, it will resume in the same place.  Basically, it saves the file position for Tarzan instead of the playlist file.  Pretty cool.

So, there you go.  I’ll put it in portage shortly as well.  Enjoy.

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.

So, I finally made an impulsive move and called up Comcast to get an expanded cable TV package. I got an ad in the mail yesterday (addressed specifically to me, interesting) from them offering Digital Cable with HD for only $25 for 6 months. I thought that was a pretty spanky deal (certainly less than their bundled crap), so I called em up. The only hidden fees were a $13 installation fee for the guy to come out, and the HDTV box is gonna cost me $7 a month to rent. Still, I’ve been wanting to check out their HD selection for a while now, and in fact was planning on calling them for the past month or so, but never got around to it. For HD programming, I’ve actually done my research and decided that Dish Network is the best one to go with (Comcast is too expensive, and DirecTV are crooks). I haven’t gotten around to calling them yet though … so I guess I’ll give Comcast a spin first.

I’ve been going with Digital Basic or whatever it’s called for the longest time. That in itself is an incredible deal — its only $12.95 a month, and I get all my local channels, plus 5 HD channels (ABC, CBS, NBC, KUED, FOX), plus Discovery Channel and Travel Channel, BYU TV and a few other cable channels that I’d never watch (C-SPAN, some shopping network, TV Land). I used to get Hallmark Channel as well, which I really loved because they would show stuff like Matlock and Perry Mason all the time, but one day it just disappeared. That’s probably the main reason I want cable again, I really enjoyed having that channel.

If you do want the most basic lineup though you’ll have to call them up and ask for it specifically. I don’t think it’s listed on the website anywhere, and of course when you call they’ll try to talk you out of it, but it’s worth it. Plus you still get the $10 discount a month for having cable internet with them. Not too bad.

Anyway, I haven’t had expanded cable TV for a long time. I wonder if the box is gonna come with a DVR or not. They’re coming out Friday to install it, so I guess we’ll see.

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.