wonkablog

Thanks to all the comments I got on my last posts. I apologize they didn’t show up earlier, but my Spam Karma plugin flagged them wrong for some reason. Whoops. Hopefully that should be fixed, now.

One thing I totally ignored that was again my fault is that mythtv comes with a contrib directory of user-submitted tools and the like. Included in there is a little script called mythrename.pl which does all the legwork of renaming your recorded shows for you to “Title - Episode”. It worked great on all my recordings, and so now they are much easier to index.

If you emerged mythtv, it dumps them all in /usr/share/mythtv/contrib. I’m going to take a closer look at what’s in there, and depending on how stable they are, modify the mythtv ebuilds to maybe install some of them in /usr/bin. mythrename seems pretty okay (though it could use some more documentation), but I’m not sure about any of the others. At the very least, I’m going to modify the ebuilds to add some notes that there are some extra tools if they’d like to try them out. That alone would have saved me a world of hurt.

Also, as someone commented earlier, I’m asking for problems if I’m running the SVN releases, and he’s right. Myth is one of those things I’m stupid enough to run bleeding edge and then wonder why it breaks.

As far as the NUV wrapper though, the problem is that MythTV has made changes to the format, so a standard demuxer will still have problems with it. Just run mencoder on one of them and you’ll see a bunch of errors as it tries to reencode the video. And I know that you can run tools to export it to something else, but my whole point is that I shouldn’t have to reencode it just to get it to a standard format in the first place.

But, I digress. Complaining isn’t going to get me anywhere. I’m working on actually helping out, given time.

Well, after calming down a bit after my last post (and Cardoe debunking most of my issues, thanks man), I’m a lot less ticked about the whole thing. Lately I’ve been really cranky about stuff just not working right. Go figure.

Anyway, I still think it’s silly that they don’t record the media files to a standard container format, but instead of complaining about it, I’m gonna see if there’s anything I can do to help out, if anything. Here’s to hoping.

I’m sick of MythTV, and I’m finally going to get rid of it once and for all. The thing that has really ticked me off is that in trying to archive my shows, I have to jump through so many hoops just to get my video back out in a file format that isn’t a total hack and still manage to not get it to squelch.

That’s just my latest problem, though. Myth drives me insane for a lot of reasons. Here’s all of em:
Things I hate about MythTV:

• Stupid file format incompatible with everything else in the world (hacked NuppelVideo)
• Lame naming scheme of recording files (like it would be hard to save a file as “TV Show - Episode Name.mpg” instead of something like 1071_20061017220000.nuv)
• How they reinvent the wheel on freaking *everything* — let’s ignore the fact that there’s already VLC, MPlayer and Xine, we’ll just write our own internal media player! Yah!
• Subversion tree of the fixes release branch segfaults so much you have to have create a cron job to check every few minutes if its running

Things I like about MythTV:

• Skips commercials for me

I could go on about all the stupid things that totally nag me about mythtv, but I’ll tell you this much — it’s worth the pain of having to fast forward every now to use something that isn’t going to screw me over when I try to do something *outside* of mythtv with my files.

Even then, instead of complaining, I’m actually going to do something about it. MPlayer is already working on adding native support for the IVTV cards, and I’m going to find out what I can do to get the Plextor ConvertX working as well. It’s about freaking time we had some options, and if it means me buying some hardware and giving it to developers, well I’m definately all up for that idea.

Plus, I’m seriously starting to think of just writing my own PVR system. Nothing too exotic (definately nowhere near the compelixty of MythTV or Freevo), but something simple to just setup a recording schedule. I was looking at the xmltv data that I grabbed from DataDirect, and there is a lot of stuff in there. It would be trivial to just setup some kind of combination of cronjobs, a webpage, and mencoder to record what I schedule. It’s not that hard to say “Foo Show” is on at 5:00, see if the file already exists, if not, record it.

I’m gonna see what I can whip up. In the meantime, I’m gonna downgrade back to 0.19 of mythtv so I can at least get nuvexport working again.

I’ve been thinking about getting rid of the nvidia kernel graphics driver from my desktop at home for a while now.  I hardly ever play games, I’m certainly not an eye-candy whore in the least, and the only thing I run that needs GLX is Neverwinter Nights.  Even that, I only play every once in a while.  So after I read about the security advisory, that nudged me in the direction of getting rid of it for good.  I’ve already got a Windows box dedicated just to playing games and besides, when I’m booted up into that one, I’m already expecting to get rooted at any moment.

What I found really interesting though is this — I’ve been reading the comments on the news sites that published the story, and the comments from the readers are largely indifferent.  I think that’s kind of odd, but it certainly goes along with this quote from the article:

“It seems that the majority of Linux users are perfectly willing to accept bugs in binary blob drivers from hardware vendors, so there is little incentive for NVIDIA to change their process.”

Craziness.

P.S. Aaron wrote up a better blog post than I did about the whole thing.

Malcolm in the Middle is one of my favorite TV shows evah. It’s great stuff. I watched about twelve episodes this weekend. It was great.

Anyway, since only season one is on DVD, I’m making my own set just for me. I’ve already got about 100 or so of the 151 episodes recorded using mythtv. Well, first of all I strip out the commercials manually with avidemux2, which actually doesn’t take very long. Then I re-encode it to MPEG2 with some special settings so it can be burned onto a DVD.

Newer versions of mplayer (I forgot where they started with this, since I run the SVN development version) have a feature called “profiles” which saves me a ton of time, especially with encoding. Basically what you do is take a set of options and stick it in a profile in your mencoder config file. Then, instead of passing 500 arguments to the command line, you just do something like this:

mencoder mitm_002_red_dress.avi -o mitm_002_red_dress.mpg -profile dvd

Isn’t that much simpler? Here’s my dvd profile settings:

[dvd]
profile-desc=”NTSC DVD”
oac=lavc=1
ovc=lavc=1
of=mpeg=1
mpegopts=format=dvd
vf=scale=720:480,harddup
srate=48000
af=lavcresample=48000
lavcopts=vcodec=mpeg2video:vrc_buf_size=1835:vrc_maxrate=9800:vbitrate=2200:keyint=18:acodec=ac3:abitrate=192:aspect=4/3
ofps=30000/1001

Just drop that in ~/.mplayer/mencoder.conf and you’re good to go.

The only real difference between mine and the mencoder docs is I changed the video bitrate to 2200 instead of 5000. And if you wanted to save a little more space, you could change the acodec to mp2 instead of ac3.

I hate having to type even all that profile stuff in though, so I made it even simpler and made a tiny bash script that does the same thing for me:

#!/bin/sh
F=`basename $1 .avi`

MPG=${F}.mpg

if [[ ! -f ${MPG} ]]; then
mencoder $1 -o $MPG -profile dvd
fi

The nice thing about it is it checks to see if the file exists first, and won’t overwrite it. Now I just run avi2mpg mitm_002_red_dress.avi, come back in a few minutes, and I’m ready to go. Then I just create the DVD filesystem and burn em, and I’m all done. They look great, too.

And I have no idea why I’m reencoding one that’s already on season one. Whoops.

In case you haven’t noticed, I made a few CSS changes to Planet Larry’s website the other day. It looks slightly less ugly now. I also added a default avatar for everyone who hasn’t sent one in, slackers.

I think I’m going to backpedal once again on promising the english-only feeds. The thing that you probably don’t realize is that providing it really isn’t going to change much of anything, since all but like four of our bloggers post in more than one language, and there’s no way to tag the languages of entries. So it’d be pretty much a lot of work, and you’d hardly notice a difference from the way it is now.

In other news, I’m still working on trying to get LiveJournal feeds syndicated properly, so you guys can use tags if you want to. It’s a work in progress.

Edit: Check this out.  Despite the author’s graciousness in providing it, I’d still like to get a local copy running somewhere so we don’t suck up all his bandwidth.   Too bad I can’t configure mod_perl to save my life.  If someone wants to host the script somewhere, lemme know.

Well, after hosting my website for about ten months now at home on my crappy comcast connection, I’ve finally set it up on a real hosting platform.  A friend of mine recommended signing up with grokthis.net, which I did, and they are great.  It’s always nice to find a webhosting company that knows exactly what they’re doing.

In other news, I’m moving out of my West Jordan apartment up to somewhere in Salt Lake City.  No other reason other than I just feel like moving.  I’ve lived in Provo, Orem, Pleasant Grove and Cedar City before.  So far, I’d have to say #1 is Cedar City and #2 is West Jordan.  I’m curious to see what living in Salt Lake is gonna be like.  I’m still looking for a house or decent apartment to rent, so if you know of something good, ping away.

Wow, Dick Tracy has been around for 75 years. That’s freaking incredible. The comic strip has always been one of my top favorites.

I have five Dick Tracy books sitting in my closet. Two of them are collections of best stories and the other three are the dailies for a few years. Really great stuff. Man, I remember going to the library too as a kid and checking out those collector volumes and reading them over and over. I never get tired of the stuff.

I’ve been into comic strips as long as I can remember, and I’ve been reading them daily for the longest time. My current all-time favorite is Peanuts. That’s some *really* classic stuff. I’m working on collecting all those daily volumes as well. In fact, I have a ton of the old books they used to release, those tiny paperbacks that were in print in the 70s to 80s. A lot of them are completely falling apart now, but I can’t bear to part with them.

Something else I just noticed — I’ve been running dailystrips every day since September 6, 2004. Wow. Two years worth of dailies on my desktop. Here’s my cron job that runs nightly if you wanna see what I’m pulling down:

dailystrips adamathome arlonjanis bc beetlebailey blondie calvinandhobbes cathy curtis forbetter foxtrot franknernest funkywinkerbean hagarthehorrible herman kudzu mutts onebighappy overboard peanuts pickles rhymeswithorange roseisrose shoe stonesoup thefuscobrothers dicktracy thephantom -l -q -s –basedir /home/steve/public_html/ds -a –stripdir –nospaces

I’ve already got 940 megs of comics in there. Crazy stuff.

Yahp. I’m a big comics fan. I could go on a lot more about all the other kinds I like to read and collect (from Disney Gold Key to Classic EC to Little Nemo … and Archie, who could forget Archie), there’s just so much good stuff out there. Good times had by all.

Happy day, flatfoot.

The weather is really starting to change here in the great state of Utah.  It’s overcast, it’s slightly cold, it’s raining and it’s dark.  I absolutely live for this kind of weather.

Plus we have Halloween coming up soon which is my favorite holiday (next to Christmas, of course).  Fall is great, I love it.  Definately my favorite time of year.

There’s been some posts lately in the media about security bugs in Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Internet Explorer, and what all the numbers mean when it comes to who has more or how many are critically severe.

I thought I’d bring my boring opinion to the table since I don’t use either one of them hardly at all, and don’t see myself using either one regularly for a good while either. My take on it is that MSIE is always going to have more problems than any major browser for one reason alone: an active development team.

It’s worth noting that my entire argument stands on the assumpion that Microsoft, as a business, will do two things when it comes to development. In the first place they will devote resources (time, money and employees) to developing a product up until getting a stable release out the door. Once the product is released, the engineering team is disbanded and the resources pooled into other areas instead. As a result, development becomes reactionary instead of proactive. Now, I don’t have an insider’s perspective to development practices at Microsoft, but from an outsider’s view, that seems to be the case.

Case in point — there has been a huge amount of stagnation between browser releases for Internet Explorer. Why is it that the only releases we see for the browser are security updates? Are there every any bugfix releases? I’ve blogged about this before … one reason I love open source software is for the incremental releases, which shows that there is still an active development team working on improving the product, even after a major point release has been accomplished. Not so with Microsoft products. You get a product release, and then security updates when they are needed. Even then, we don’t get patches unless the problem creates enough of a black eye for the company. If they don’t feel like it’s a big enough problem, they won’t devote any resources to the problem.

Mozilla’s projects, on the other hand, don’t kill development once a major version has been finished. People keep working on it, and we get regular updates. Sure, we’ll see Internet Explorer 7.0 any day now, but is Microsoft still going to release updates on a regular basis because they want to, or they have to?

Interesting stuff, I think. I’m all about the proactive development model, obviously, and how open source software seems to apply that principle much more. The big problem with proprietary software is you’re simply stuck with whatever they release, and whatever they feel like is an important feature, fix or add-on. I’ve never been too confident when any corporation says, “trust us, it’s good enough,” especially when their real priorities are budgets and the bottom line. If Microsoft has shown us one thing, it’s that having all the money in the world apparently has nothing to do with putting out the best software possible.