wonkablog

I’m actually *really* surprised that nobody on Utah Open Source Planet has blogged about the latest story in the Slashdot headlines, about the “naughty bits” decision. It just hit the front page for the second time (once an original post, now as a Backslash article). What is everyone’s take on it? I’m curious.

Now, while I’m too lazy to read court documents (much less understand them), I’m not really going to say much about anything other than where I stand on the principles. I agree with one commentor, that the ruling extends beyond just a ‘Cleanflix’ type business model, and it instead extends into the realm of what copyright owners can do with the content that you legally purchased (licensed, rent-to-own, whatever).

As far as I understand it, this is how the “edited movies” business model works — it removes itself from the crosshair because the movie is already owned by the customer. They just make a copy of that for them and digitally remove some parts for them. That seems perfectly reasonable to me. I’m writing my own DVD ripping script right now which does something slightly different — it doesn’t alter the movie itself, but it does completely ignore the commercials, ads, menus, and almost all the audio tracks. Aren’t I also altering the original copyright holder’s vision of duplication?

Anyway, it comes as no shock to me that evil men have it in their interests to destroy our liberty, and it certainly comes as even less as a surprise that most of Slashdot approves of the ruling because it somehow strikes a blow to morality and Christianity. What they fail to realize, of course, is that all liberty such as civil rights stem from the same root of morality. You can’t defend evil (the right for artists to not let an audience to choose their level of filtering) and good (allow fair use) at the same time.

The whole thing disgusts me, personally.

I never did post an update on the story with my Mini-ITX. Mostly because I’m a moron. It turns out I got the wrong motherboard completely, and the onboard video card really sucks at playing any kind of video. Basically I had to forcibly degrade the quality, play only at 320×240, and not use XV and even then the a/v sync was off and it had a lovely purple hue to the display. Needless to say, that’s not exactly gonna work as a myth frontend.

I’m not quite up to the task of dropping down $500 for a better mini, so the idea of using an Xbox as a mythfrontend has surfaced once again. I would jump at the idea, but there’s a few things I’m worried about. The big one is that I don’t want to have to do any hardware mods if I don’t have to. That might be worked around, but my other problem is this — how do you know which “revision” of the Xbox to buy?

The Xbox-Linux Wiki has this big fat version 1.6 warning about why not to buy one (I’m convinced) but doesn’t mention how to know which one is which. How do you recognize that stuff?

So, I’m pretty clueless, and at the same time not sure if modding an Xbox is the way to go or if its even worth all the effort. I’d prefer some custom hardware, but having a quiet little black box as my PVR would be kinda cool.

I’m convinced MythTV hates me, personally. I broke my long-standing unbreakable rule last night of never upgrading anything. And now MythTV is broken again.

Actually, I had to do a little tweaking. My kernel segfaulted while doing an emerge –sync. After poking around a bit, I found out that the partition was slightly corrupted (thank goodness for RAID). So I cleaned that up, and then I decided to upgrade to 2.6.16 since I’d heard that people were having success with it with my TV tuner.

The kernel upgrade actually went without a hitch. I had to upgrade my alsa libraries as well to 1.0.11, and as near as I can tell, that’s what threw myth for a loop. Naturally, everything else still works fine with ALSA (including MPlayer with all my funkalicious configs), just not this. It throws some weird error like ‘Cannot apply ALSA parameters’ or something or other when I change the audio device to “ALSA:default”. /dev/dsp doesn’t throw any errors, but it doesn’t produce any sound, either. And my mixer levels haven’t changed at all, so I’m pretty lost on what it could be.

I’m stuck with the only option that I can think of, and it scares me to death — upgrading MythTV. I’m running a fairly old 0.19 developer snapshot that’s had some bugs, but overall has been working great for me. I’m scared to touch it, but with Myth it’s always a gamble — you never know what’s gonna fix (or break) it next.

I had no idea how bad the spam situtation was on the planet gentoo blogs, until I went to clean it up myself. I deleted dozens of comments by hand and added a lot of sites to be blacklisted. Hopefully it should stem the tide quite a bit, and you guys won’t be getting hit as hard.

If you do get hit with a lot of spam at once though, just ping me on IRC. Now that I know how to clean it up, it shouldn’t be such a big deal.

I’ve run out of interesting titles for my ‘bend’ updates, so I figure the changeset # is just as non-entertaining.

I hit a critical point today in the coding — I’m finally at a point (again) where I’d use the current snapshot to go ahead and rip / encode my DVDs. Yay! Basically all I did was finish up the encoding part so it outputs to the correct filename: 104._High_Diving_Hare.mkv. That would be season one, episode 4 of Looney Tunes. And that is also one of the funniest cartoons ever. I love Bugs Bunny.

Now all I need is a media player for Linux that can resume playback for my movies. Nevermind that my DVD players have had that feature for at least the past 7 years. I’m not bitter about it.

Actually, I did find something, but it’s not working right. And, it’s written in perl, so I’m up the river on trying to fix it myself. Theres a project called mplayer-tools that has a bunch of little wrapper scripts around mplayer. I can get it working half the time, and the other half it just skips back a few seconds on resuming. Very odd. If I could figure out how to write a shell script to capture the output of mplayer, then I could write my own, but I can’t even get that far. Ah well, on with searching / tweaking.

Well, I finally started working on the multimedia faq I mentioned a while ago. I’ve just barely started on it, but I’d like some feedback before I get too far into it. Please disregard the format completely… I’ll probably end up writing it in GuideXML so it will look much prettier. The content is pretty much what I am aiming for, though.

Linky: http://dev.gentoo.org/~beandog/docs/multimedia.html

Feedback is muchly appreciated.

Also, I’d just like to mention that while writing it, I’ve been listening to the awesome soundtrack to Tron. It’s great stuff.

I just posted a message to -dev, but I figured I’d blog about it too, since it’s planet gentoo related.

I’ve finally got some time to work on this, so I’d like to ask all the devs being listed on Planet Gentoo and Gentoo Universe to send in their hackergotchis. A hackergotchi is basically a little bobble head you’ll see like mine on http://planet.gentoo.org/ next to a person’s blog posts. It helps to put a face to the names, and it’s a lot of fun.

If you don’t know how to make one, just post a picture on your blog and ask for some help, or check out some of the tutorials listed on the wikipedia entry page. Or, if you don’t want us to see your shining face, just send in a cartoon or an icon or something else you’d be happier with. As long as we get something, I’ll be happy.

Oh, and just e-mail them to me directly — beandog@g.o.

One last thing — if you’re a developer and your blog isn’t on Planet / Universe, contact me and I can take care of that too. Plus we do blog hosting. And catering on weekends.

Thanks, all.

I wrote my first real (more than 3 lines) bash script at work today. It isn’t that complex, but I wanted to write it in bash instead of PHP, because I really need to learn it.

So far, color me impressed. I’m amazed at how easy it is to do stuff like string manipulation. I want to get good at it since ebuilds are written in bash, and I need the practice. My big goal is to write “dvd2mkv” in bash as well. The bonus is that it will remove one major dependency: PHP 5.1. That, and it will be hard as crap. Trial by fire, says me.

With xorg-x11 7 now marked stable on Gentoo, I’m decided to try something a litle different with my upgrade… I ditched the nvidia binary kernel driver. Instead, I’m using the native open source nv driver that comes with xorg-x11. So far, so good. I can play my movies just fine and that’s all I was worried about.

I suppose if I use the native X11 drivers, then I can file bug reports on it if I hit any snags, and help to improve the little sucker. I don’t think I’ll be able to play Enemy Territory anytime soon, though.

Actually … maybe I can do a little more. I’ll have to read up on it, but apparently there’s some project called UtahGLX that I saw mentioned on the DRI wiki. Their webpage says that GLX works with the Geforce cards. I should try it out.