So, the backstory is that the other day I was making a note of all the projects I have to do,  creating what I call my project tree.  It's basically an ordered list of general projects (Gentoo, home theater system, etc.), and then abstract projects underneath that.  It's nice because I can get a birds eye view of all the stuff I'm working on without going into specifics about any of them.  One of the home theater ones was to get at least ISO disc rips of the Blu-Ray movies I already have, even if I can't decrypt them yet, so I can at least play around with my options as they become available.

Well, I had moved my server setup around not too long ago, so I had two 750 GB harddrives just collecting dust.  I put one of them in an external USB drive, and plugged it into my PS3, which was already running Linux (see this pervious post for all the fun details).

I formatted my external USB drive as NTFS, so that I could read/write to it with Windows as well, and then I would insert a disc and just dump it to an ISO file.  That's easy enough:

$ cat /dev/sr0 > KFP.iso

I grabbed a couple of them (which took awhile, don't let me kid you on that part) so that I could get a good sampling in case I had more luck with one than another.

Once that was done, I trotted the little drive and plugged it into my netbook, running Windows XP, and installed both Virtual CloneDrive and AnyDVDHD.  The first one lets me mount an ISO as an actual disc drive, and the second actually decrypts the disc for me and dumps the contents back to the harddrive.  So, that's two passes now on all the data, which is making this take a long time.  But that's okay, it's fun.

Now that I have the actual contents, the MPEG2 transport streams, I can play it back with MPlayer, ffplay or whatever.  I'm having limited success with latest MPlayer on the files with VDPAU playback support, but it could just be my video card (GeForce 8600 GTS).  On my HTPC frontend, it works almost perfectly on there, with a nicer video card (GeForce 9300).  My desktop just craps out, though.  I can still watch it with Xv video out, though.

mkvtoolnix doesn't support m2ts files right now, so I don't have many options if I wanna change things around.  I'm still in a proof-of-concept stage, so I don't really care all that much.  Plus, my options are already limited.  AnyDVDHD is shareware that will expire in 21 days, and while it's amazing and works great, it's really expensive -- something like $200 for a lifetime license.  Eek.  With that, I'll keep trying my options on Linux.

The second piece of shareware I ran into (which also has a limited evaluation license, though this time for 30 days) is MakeMKV.  The Linux port is always a little more difficult to find, so here's a direct link to the details on the lastest version.  Boy, I never thought I'd be talking about shareware on my blog.

MakeMKV works really nice, too.  It's supposed to be able to do the same job as AnyDVDHD, I believe, but since I don't have the actual Blu-Ray drive, everything I've tried has never worked when just mounting the ISO direcly and trying to access that.  I believe that part of cracking the key involves having access to the drive.  I'm really not sure.  I've read a bit about the whole process, but it's still really confusing to me still.

Anyway, the software will let you access it directly through the decrypted contents, and that's what I did.  The interface is actually really simple and nice, and I would actually consider buying this one (it's much cheaper, at $50 for a lifetime license).  I'm trying to remember the last time I paid for a software license.  One that comes to mind, is that I actually have a valid registration key for Legend of the Red Dragon, the *really* old BBS door game.  Wow.  I think it cost me something like $15.

MakeMKV is pretty nice, though.  It snags the subtitles I select, and already includes the chapters as well as the HD audio formats.

So, that's it.  The whole process is pretty tedious, but it works, and I'm happy.  I don't really care about decrypting it *too* much right now, since I don't wanna go through the pain of trying to play them back over my HTPC just yet.  I'd need to do a lot of tweaks and upgrades to my system, and I really don't care that much.  It's not worth the hassle.  Especially, uh, since I just bought a new Blu-Ray player last month.

Really, though, I'm just doing this for the exercise since when I get bored, often times I'll want to play around with media files and formats and see what I can do with them.

Eventually I'll buy a BD-ROM drive and see what I can do, but for now I'm trying to save some $$$ and the whole point of this was to see if I could rip some discs with just the hardware available, and I could.   Woots.

On a sidenote, I posted aacskeys to the portage tree today, which is one of the tools users need to decrypt the keys on their discs.  Hopefully we can get some more hackers interested in poking at it.  That's always good.

Last but not least, here's an actual screenshot from the final rip.

I love TMNT.   Boy that's a post for another day ... which reminds me, I should get a copy of my home-made videos some day, that I made with my action figures.  Oh man, that'd be awesome.

Now, the question is, what to do with all the hardware?  I have three (yes, THREE) Tivos with unlimited subscriptions.  Two of them are the klunky one-tuner first generation of the Series2 boxes, but the third is an HD Tivo, which is very nice.  I could sell them, but considering the price I shelled out (for the HD one, at least, savvy consumerism got me the first two for real cheap ... under $50 each) I hate to part with it.  I keep thinking I'll get cable again some day, and by that year sometime in the future, I'll pat myself proudly on the back and say, "way to hang on to a piece of hardware for so long!  Now go get the compressed air."

I'm cursed with the pack rat mentality, though.  I hang onto stuff far too long in the oft chance that someday, I *might* need it.  On Saturday, I woke up a little early, and as is normally the weekend routine, I get the feeling that I must turn my entire world around by 11 a.m.  This time, it was the closet in my living room which has the distinction of dedicating 85% of its storage space to electronics that I might need sometime before the next century.  The other 15% is a mix between my puzzles, dust bunnies, air, movie posters, and movie t-shirts.  I have a red t-shirt promoting "Searching for Bobby Fischer", I kid you not... I'll even take pictures to prove it.

I swear I've been carrying this collection of cables and equipment for at least ten years or so, probably ever since I haven't been living at home.  It never really bothered me that I don't use most of the technology anymore (or ever, really), you just never know when you're going to need a floppy IDE cable.  Really!  I'm all about being prepared, but for the wrong circumstances.  I can just see the day when I'll be someone's hero for helping them be able to flash the BIOS on their 15-year old Dell desktop.  I still have the floppies to put it on, too.

So, this weekend was the closet's demise.  I grabbed a bunch of plastic bags from the kitchen (the bachelor's preferred method of storage and transportation for all things non-essential) and started filling them up with stuff.  My method of deciding what to keep and what to throw out was pretty simple: if I couldn't remember the last time I used it, it gets tossed.  Normally it could be times like these that a selective memory can cause problems down the road, but I had so much junk anyway, I don't think it'll cause a problem.  Besides, the memory problems go both ways -- when I do need a new cable or piece of hardware, I can't get mad at myself because I'll have forgotten I used to own one anyway.

All in all, I filled up something like eight to twelve bags of stuff.  I don't remember how many it was, but I do recall that when I took it to the thrift store and started unloading, I had so much stuff that it took two guys to carry it all away, and one of them kept laughing because the stream was endless.  I think most of it was cables.  There were some notable things that I'd been hanging onto for a long time, "just in case," some of which were: my old Gamecube, an 8 GB IDE harddrive, my old home-theater-in-a-box speakers (which were about as powerful and had as much wattage as two light bulbs), three PCMCIA wireless cards, a few wireless USB dongles, and a slew of PCI slot brackets.  I elected to hold onto the floppy drive -- it was a sound investment in 1990, and it's a sound investment today.

That's not really the interesting part, though.  There is still all the stuff that I decided to keep because it held some kind of value, but I don't have the energy or drive to see them through the process of being sold on the secondhand market.  Nothing makes a closet grow quite like a pack rat mentality combined with the laziness of avoiding the hassle of making spare change.  I've still got my Tivos, for instance.  There's an old (now) AMD Athlon64 desktop that is pretty nice -- top of the line of about 5 years ago.  Runs really quiet, too.  Then there's a used Gateway desktop I remember I bought on Craigslist for some reason a while ago, and I've never used.  I'm holding onto that one because it came with Windows, and I might someday want *another* Windows XP Home key, so I can just use that one.  It probably wouldn't work, anyway, but hey ... hope lingers longer than logic.

I almost dragged off my original Xbox to the thrift store, too.  It hasn't been as fun as I'd hoped it would have been, and having one console (PS2) with corded controllers is enough for me.  Plus it's a bit wheezy.  Probably just needs a new fan, or harddrive.  Dunno.  I also decided to keep all my TV tuner cards, even though I never use those either ... especially now without a cable subscription.  One of them was the Plextor external USB one that has MPEG4 hardware encoding (very nice).  I think my brother wanted that one.  Maybe it'll be a nice holiday surprise, as in, I'll be surprised if I manage to make it to the post office before Christmas 2010 to mail it off.

Oh yah, and there's an MSI Mini-ITX motherboard with an Intel Atom that I'll probably never try to revive, but I hate to donate it since I still think I could get at least $20 for it somewhere.  Then there's my new Motorola RAZR phone that I used for about a week before I switched to Verizon.  That's gotta be worth something.  I've also got two MP3 players, an iPod Nano and a Sansa something, each 4 GB ... too small for me to do anything with ... but I'll hang onto them just because.  I think I still have a portable Sony Walkman cassette player, too.

In actuality, I'd like to get rid of all of the stuff, provided I can do it through a simple way ... meaning I don't have to do any work, and non-creepy people flock to my house with cash in hand.  I doubt it'd happen, but hey, if you live near Salt Lake and are interested ... drop me a line.  That's about as proactive as I'm gonna get about it.  If you ever need your BIOS flashed, too, I could probably do that as well.

This is the server that houses all my media files, so I can't really just rip it out and replace it with something else.  It has two 750 GB drives right now which make up my entire library space.

I shut the sucker down for a bit so I could pop it open and see if I could adjust the fan and blow out some of the dust in there.  While it was powered down, it was so quiet in the room, I couldn't believe it.  I forgot how much noise these things make.

Since I was already up, I decided to look into some ways to either reduce the noise pollution or find an alternative storage setup.  I've got a spare Mini-ITX system and a spare external SATA drive enclosure, so I decided to fire that up and see how good my transfer rate would be if I just used external drives with a fanless low-powered Mini-ITX.  By the time I left for work, I was in the middle of transferring a bunch of media files over to the new harddrive, so I guess I'll find out later.  But the transfer rate was at about 8 MB/s, so I think it's safe to say that it'll work out pretty nice.

I'm hoping that this setup will work in the future for my dream scenario: a quiet file server.  I figure if I can buy a few 1.5 TB harddrives, and plug them all into external SATA enclosures, then I should be good to go.

I went ahead and bought a Western Digital Green 1.5 TB harddrive this morning, too, to replace my other drives in the server.  I know the Green line of harddrives isn't the fastest of the line, but I think that, for my circumstances, it'll run just fine.  They run between 5200 and 7200 RPM.  Less speed should mean less heat, which would make me worry not as much about having it as an external drive being passively cooled.  I'm not gonna be using it as the OS, for the Mini, I'm already running that off of a 4GB USB drive, and that runs plenty fast.  The only thing it'll do is just be serving up media over the wired network.  As long as the read speed is decent, I probably won't have any complaints.

The first step, though, was getting the PS3 to run Linux.  I took the shamelessly easy way out (and I don't regret it either) and installed Xubuntu.  I won't go into details about how I got Linux on my PS3 since that's well documented.  I will say that I remember quite vividly now why I can't stand binary distros.  Bleh.

The BD filesystem is UDF.  Providing you have a recent kernel (2.6.20, I think) with UDF v2.5 support, you are good to go.  I mounted a remote share and just dumped the disc to an ISO file onto my desktop.

$ cat /media/cdrom0 > wonka.iso

That was the easy part.

The hard part was trying to get it decrypted.  I had to use Java tools (bleh) to get to the source.  There are three applications you need.  And if you hate digging through forums and using download services, then I've got direct links for yah:

• aacskeys-0.4.0c.tar.gz
• bdvmdbg-0.1.5.7z
• dumphd-0.61.tar.gz

For Gentoo, you'll need to install the JDK to build the aacskeys library and binary.  I just emerged dev-java/sun-jdk and it worked for me (I know absolutely nothing about Java, but my stabbing in the dark miraculously worked).  You'll also need a runtime environment to actually execute the stuff, and I emerged dev-java/sun-jre-bin and that worked fine, too on my amd64 box.

For aacskeys and Gentoo, you'll need to apply this patch that I cobbled together from what I found on the doom9 forums to get it to compile.  It just fixes the Java include directorys for the Makefile.

Now, I'm still a bit fuzzy about what each program does, and whether you need all of them or not, so I won't go into a lot of detail.  What you want to use, though, is the dumphd program.  But to use it, you'll need to copy the aacskeys library and a file from the bdvmdbg package as well into the path or same directory as the dumphd program.

Once you have that, you can just run dumphd.sh and it'll fire up a simple little GUI telling you if it has all the libraries it needs.  Then you just specify the source and destination, and aacskeys will see if it has a working key to access the disc.

I can't really give much more detail than that, since I'm so new to this.  Suffice it to say, if you read the accompanying README doc that comes with each one, you'll get along just fine.

It took me a long time last night to get just one disc ripped and transferred over my subnet to try it out, and by the time I managed to get it mounted (mount -o loop -t udf wonka.iso /mnt/udf) and access it, it was pretty late.  The keys I had didn't work for my disc, and I didn't want to try the whole procedure over to try another disc.

Anyway, good luck if you try it.  One thing that impressed me is how much simpler it was than I thought it'd be, but what a pain it was trying to figure out where things went wrong.  The doom9 forums are a good resource, but not exactly the best place to find clear, concise information for a beginner.  That part was frustrating.

Personally, I don't think it's worth the hassle right now, the way I did it.  I'll get a BD-ROM sooner or later so I don't have to transfer the content over the network and can instead just test it directly.  But, I started out to see if I could at least get a copy of the ISO and get the tools running all without Windows, and I can.  So, that's progress right there.

At the end of September, I finally plunked down some cash and got a Zotac GF9300-D-E Mini ITX motherboard from Amazon.  The board is a bit older, but it's loaded with features.  It's got an onboard Nvidia 9300 video card, with HDMI output along with both SPDIF ports.  On top of it, it is a socket 775 Intel chipset, so that means I wouldn't have to bite the bullet and go with a sluggish Atom again.  Don't get me wrong, the Atoms are nice for general computing, but I still don't think they are really up to the job for dedicated video playback.

So, I got one of those, along with the same 35W Intel Celeron CPU that has been working so extremely well on my first Zotac Mini-ITX that is only capable of SD playback.  I don't want to knock that board either, because it has been doing extremely well.  I've been very happy with it since day one.

The board arrived, and I immediately set it up and got everything plugged in.  I took out my old Zotac and rested the new one into the Silverstone HTPC case.  I've got an LC19 which is actually big enough to hold a Micro-ATX board -- really, this thing is huge -- so a Mini is comfortable and capable enough to slide right in there.  There's a lot of things I like about this case.  It's top cover is covered with ventilation holes so you don't have to worry about the board overheating.  In fact, the original Zotac was running so efficiently, that the CPU fan would rarely turn on.  It was great.  I do have some issues with the case, though.  There's no reset button, which would have been nice, and the power supply has always seemed a bit flaky to me for some reason.  I can't really pinpoint what the problem is, but it just seems a little cheap to me.

Anyway, I plugged in thew new HD-capable Zotac, hooked up all the cables, and hit the power button.  The CPU fan started spinning briefly, then stopped completely.  At first I assumed it was like the original board, and it the smart fan meter was kicking in and it was just powering down because it was running cool.  Except that the board wouldn't POST.  I wasn't getting any video output at all.  I took everything back out and meticulously checked all the connections, and they certainly looked fine.  I made sure all the connections were secure on the case as well, and they seemed good too.  A bit puzzled, I put it all back together and tried again, with the same result.

At this point I figured that maybe it didn't like my RAM configuration, so I took the module out of the first row, and set it into the adjacent one.  After doing that, I hit the power button, and then *nothing* happened this time.  The fan wasn't even spinning up at all.  Crap.

Finally I did what I should have done the first time around, and I grabbed a PC speaker component and plugged it into the motherboard.  I've had tricky motherboard issues in the past, but my last line of defense was always the BIOS beep codes.  Once I interpreted those, I could fix the determined issue and be on my way.  I was expectantly hoping that the same would hold true here.  I plugged in the speaker, turned on the computer, but nothing.  No POST, no initial fan speedup, and no speaker codes.  At this point I assumed the board was DOA, so there was nothing I could do for it.  I did have *one* last sneaking suspicion though.

The new Mini-ITX motherboard also had a 4-pin CPU power plug, but I wasn't plugging anything into it.  The manual casually mentions plugging it in, but I had assumed that it was optional -- only because my previous Zotac ran perfectly fine without plugging one in, and because my case, while the power supply has a 4-pin port, didn't come with a cable.  So I always assumed I didn't need one.

I decided to see if that was the issue, instead of sending it back, and trying my luck to see if I could still solve the problem.  So, I went off to Monoprice and ordered three of the cables (for 85 cents each, I love you, Monoprice).  In a rare show of patience, I waited almost a week for them to arrive in the mail before resuming my experimentation.

With my new little cable, and honestly the last piece of the puzzle at this point that I could try with this case, I plugged it in and hoped for the best and ... nothing.  Still no initial fan spin, no POST, no love.  I took everything out and replaced the original Zotac (with the same RAM, too), plugged everything in, and of course, it started up just fine.  So, at least I know the case and power supply are still okay.

It's about this time that I finally realize that perhaps I should try my second Mini-ITX case instead, a Morex that I got from Logic Supply.  At first I kind of scoffed at the idea, since the Silverstone is by far the better of the two, and if it didn't work in that one, there was little chance it'd work in the economic model.  I was wrong, though.  It powered up just great, and worked fine.  So, now I'm really lost as to why.  I still suspect that there is something funky about the power supply on the Silverstone case, and I'm currently toying with the idea of replacing it myself.  It'd certainly be cheaper than getting a new case.

So, I decided to move my hardware setup around, and keep the new Zotac in this smaller case.  The only problem was that it didn't have as good an airflow, with the only real ventilation on the sides.  That would (and does) work fine with my fanless VIA C7s, but not here.

After setting up the system and playing around with the box, I was extremely happy with the performance.  I watched all my HD trailers in 1080p a couple of times each, with VDPAU and the picture was gorgeous.  It was great, and would have worked wonderfully if the motherboard wasn't running so hot.

The problem was that the heatsink on the northbridge (I think that's the right term, I'm not a total hardware geek) would get really, really hot.  The CPU itself was running really cool, since it had its own fan, it was just fine.  I didn't realize there was a problem until I came in to watch TV shortly I think the day after I had set it up, and the box was turned off.  It was just after all the intial setup and testing stages, so I assumed that I had just turned it off and forgotten.  But as I was watching some video, it shut itself off.

I took the top of the case off to see if I could figure out what the problem was, and that's when I nearly scalded myself touching the heatsink.  It seemed kind of flimsy and cheap to start with, and I was kind of surprised to see how crappy it looked, finally giving it a good look, and comparing it mentally to the other Minis I have.

I rebooted and went into the BIOS menus to see what the temperatures were looking like.  The northbridge was running at 66 C, which is 150 F.  Again, I don't know too much about hardware, but I was pretty sure they're not supposed to get that hot.  I left the top of the case off to let it cool down, and kept it running.  Coming back later, I saw that it had dropped to 48 C.  I rebooted, went back into my OS and watched plenty of video, and it was chugging along great since then.  So, it seems like it just needs some good airflow, and will probably be reasonably happy.

That leaves me with the problem of what to do next.  Technically, I could leave it in the Morex case, without a cover and expose it to dust and who knows what else is floating around my house, or I can try fix the Silverstone case just so I can use this board.

At this point, I'm a little tired of throwing so much money towards the problem, especially when it all should have worked in the first place.  Add to that that the new Mini-ITX I got is really the first-generation of this type of arrangement, and the nvidia ION is the one that is replacing this.  Aside from the Intel Atom CPU, I probably wouldn't have a problem with it, and so I'm also considering replacing it with that one.

I'm still not sure what to do, and part of me is leaning towards a third option -- wait for a year or so for the hardware specs to improve.  I'm not dead-set on having HD capable playback just yet, and it's more in the realm of "would be nice to have" instead of "really useful" right now.  Besides, even before I could start getting some content, I need to expand my server's capacity issues, as my media storage is almost at 100%.  I think I have something like 40 GB free space left.  Even then, I still need to get a Blu-ray ROM so I can rip my movies, and I only have about 12 Blu-rays right now to start with.

So, everything right now just tells me to wait.  Which is real shame, considering this board is very nice -- once it's given the proper TLC.  I think this is one of those situations where I would really like the whole thing to work out, but I imagine at the same time that the issues that are causing me problems right now, will only give me headaches later on down the road.  It's probably better to just cut my losses now and save up for something better later.

There are a couple of ways to do this, obviously, but I'm not sure what the best way to approach it is, or the one that is the least cost-prohibitive.  Generally speaking, all I need is some *way* that I can access multiple harddrives (of various sizes, since I have old ones I can use) through one mountpoint, either using LVM or RAID (I'm not that picky).

Now I could spend lots of $$$ on a Drobos or something similar, where I just cram them into one box and let it fly, but I don't need that level of sophistication.  The idea I'm currently toying with, is just getting a bunch of eSATA HDD enclosures, and hooking those up to my fileserver.  My server currently has six internal SATA ports on it, along with one eSATA port on the back, giving me seven drives I could plug in (either internally or externally).  So that's not a problem.  I'm curious, though, how realistic getting a bunch of external enclosures is gonna be.  Typically, the drives I use (Western Digital) don't run that hot, so cooling doesn't seem like a big problem.  I already have one external SATA drive that I'm using, and it silently runs and sits on my desk without a problem.

That's not my only option though.  I'm thinking of switching out the server completely for something less beefy and much more quiet.  In fact, that's my biggest annoyance right now, is that it's loud.  I'm not sure what it is, and I really should pinpoint the source before I rip everything out and buy lots of hardware.  I'm fairly certain though, that it's just the CPU fan first and the power supply second.

If I did replace the server's hardware, then I have a few options there -- I could go with a Mini ITX motherboard that doesn't need a PSU with a fan (just get a Morex power connector that uses 120W max or something).  Since I'd be hooking up everything externally anyway, they wouldn't draw on the PSU for power, so the chipset could be really low wattage.  I'm not sure if I want to spend money on that, though.

Ideally, I'd have a place in my apartment where I could stick a server that can be as loud and as noisy as it wants, and I wouldn't have to hear it.  Sadly, that's not the case, and I doubt I'll be moving anytime soon.  So, noise pollution is a factor in this as well.

Anyway, I'm still trying to think of what the best way to go is.  There's a few directions this could take.

I've been trying to pick out a motherboard again, and I came to a few decisions and realizations.  For one, I just need a simple replacement for the previous motherboard that totally crapped out on me, and I only want some basic playback features for standard-definition DVDs.  I also was not going to settle for anything but an Nvidia video card, so that already eliminated a lot of possibilities.  Basically I made a list of things I would like to have, and would use, right now, and then a list of things I would like to have sometime.

The list of things now was pretty simple and sweet: VGA (my TV has a port, I could use HDMI, but meh ... who cares ... then I'd have a free port that only a computer can use), 10/100 Ethernet, quiet, standard-def playback, IDE port and stereo sound (I never run stuff to my receiver, even when I could ... besides that, I never watch movies on the HTPC, just TV shows).  The list of stuff I would want for the next-gen one, the future-proof edition as I like to call it, has this list of stuff: VGA + DVI or HDMI, Gigabit and/or Wifi (I might use powerline networking too, haven't decided yet), fanless CPU, HD capable playback -- which means at least a GeForce 8300, and both optical and coaxial SPDIF, because I can never decide which one I want to use (starting to notice a pattern yet?).

I threw the whole fanless thing out the window, for one simple reason -- I decided there's no way for me to pick between which one I think I'm gonna like better, so I'll just buy both.  Heh, that's one way to deal with indecision.  Actually, there weren't any fanless options except for the new Zotac ION-ITX boards, which just came out, and *nobody* has them in stock.  So, I couldn't really buy one even if I wanted to right now.  Aside from that, though, I don't like the idea of buying the very latest hardware, especially when it's a new chipset thats just come out (Nvidia ION).  Not that I don't think it would be exactly what I would need, it's just that when you factor in my luck with a new design, things tend to go south pretty often.  I have the kiss of death when it comes to hardware.

So, I just did what I always do after weeks of research and comparison -- I just kinda picked one at random that looked good, and could get here fast.  Works for me!  Actually, I've done a lot of looking at all the boards I was considering, so I'm pretty confident it will work out.  Specifically, the one I got was a Zotac NF6301-D-E Mini-ITX.  It's not as powerful as similar stuff, and I could have gotten one with a lot less features, but I decided to at least make sure it has DVI on there, just in case.  Compared to my must have in the future list, it's obviously pretty barebones.  I got a pretty low-powered CPU for it as well, an Intel Celeron 430 Conroe-L 1.8 GHz that only runs at 35W.  That may seem way too under-powered, but consider that on my VIA Mini-ITX I'm already watching SD with (pretty much) no problems at 400 MHz.  Whee!  So, yah, I'm not worried about speed.  For the fan, I got a Silverstone NT07-775, which is small enough to fit inside my case.  I guess we'll see how it works.  I'm betting that the CPU will run slow enough and cool enough that it won't generate a lot of noise.

I should get all the parts by Tuesday, so I'll know by then how it's all gonna work out.

The basic story is that, last time I bought a Mini, I did a lot of research on the VIA C7 boards and had a good one picked out, but at the last second changed my mind to get an MSI instead with an Intel Atom 330 (dual-core 1.6ghz with hypertheading).  I just saw all the fancy CPU features and went ga-ga, and ignoring it being from MSI, I picked that one.

I made a lot of assumptions with this board, and I've had a lot of problems since.  I won't go into the details here, since that's boring, and I've already covered it.

Now then, I'm looking at options for replacments, and it's basically come down to two contenders: a Zotac Nvidia ION chipset with an Intel Atom, or another Zotac Mini-ITX board without an integrated CPU.

For reference, here's the two boards I'm looking at: Zotac GF9300-D-E and Zotac IONITX-C-U.

As far as specs go, they are nearly exactly identical.  The only real differences is that the ION has a PCI-Express Mini slot, while the other has a regular one.  But aside from that, they both have onboard Nvidia graphics chipsets (ION: 9400M, GF9300-D-E: 9300M), so using VDPAU isn't going to be a problem.

The difference I'm looking at is that one is fanless (the IONs all are) and the other isn't.  Now, generally speaking, I hate background noise.  I sometimes can't filter it out when I'm trying to pay close attention to something, as in watching TV or a movie, which is where this thing would be.  So having a fanless HTPC would be a top priority, but if it's going to overheat with the Intel Atom, then I don't want to risk it.

The alternative is to get the 9300M Mini, and put a low-powered Celeron in there with a quiet fan and hope for the best.  That CPU would come with speedstepping so I could throttle it down to pretty low.  My VIA at home runs at 800 mhz all the time and does perfectly fine for standard-definition playback, which is what my entire library is in now.  I'm guessing (and this is where problems start to form) that if I throttle it low enough, and it's already a slow processor to start with, that the fan won't be kicking into high gear much and it'll be easier to ignore.

On the flipside, the argument for the Intel Atom is that, if I get one of the IONs with the Atom 230 instead of the 330, then it would run less hot to start with.  My MSI Mini-ITX at home is a 330 and is both a dual-core 64-bit and has hyperthreading.  Both the 230 and the 330 have hyperthreading, and run at 1.6 ghz on the ION, but only the 330 is dual-core.

I really can't decide which one I should get, and have been bouncing back and forth between the two options for a while now.  Frankly, it's driving me a little insane.  On one hand, I'm betting that the fan won't be loud, and on the other, I'm hoping the CPU won't run too hot and burn things out.  It's a gamble either way.  Right now I'm leaning towards getting the 9300.  I figure I'd have more options with picking my own CPU and fan and being able to throttle it myself.

Actually, I've always wanted to get another ViewSonic. The first CRT monitor I bought myself was one, and I remember it was really nice. Plus (and this'll really give away how old I'm getting), I remember when VGA was just first coming out -- and how incredibly cool it was that you could have 256 colors instead of 16 -- and I remember thinking the ViewSonics back then always looked nicer than the others too. So, there ya go.

The specs look good, though. It's only got a max res of 1920x1080, but I think that'll be fine. I was hoping to get an HDMI input, and this one has one. It wouldn't be a big deal, but kind of nice to have just in case. Actually, I don't really know what any of the specs mean ... all I know is this one can tilt, so I'm happy. A monitor is probably the only thing when it comes to computers that I'm pretty indifferent about. I imagine it'll be fine.

I've only got one game right now -- Wii Sports -- but that's enough to keep me going. I love playing Baseball and Bowling and I even get a little Tennis in now and then. I have zero interest in Golf whatsoever.

The way everything works with the sensors is pretty impressive. Everything seems pretty realistic, especially the pain I get when I swing too hard. Being the geek that I am, I've quickly discovered where you can game the system and found a few flaws in the motion control feedback. For instance, in Bowling, if you just fling the Wii remote up in the air as you let the ball go, it will go flying up and actually gain speed when it lands. When you're really bowling, that would slow the ball down quite a bit. In baseball, it's a lot easier if you just use one hand and gracefully flick it forward to bat, but I find it much more fun and engaging if you get in the stance and do it right.

Boxing is the only thing I have a problem with as far as responsiveness. The nunchuck controller seems way whacked, as when boxing with my left hand I have to jab kind of up and to the left to get it to even go remotely straight. I'm not sure what's up with that. I suspect that it might be getting the positioning for the left hand as it is relative to the Wii remote, but I'm not sure. It's the only game I've played that uses it, so it could be something else. When I'm actually boxing though, it seems to be okay -- its just when doing training that I can't punch with it to save my life.

The games are a lot of fun, though. I still can't wrap my brain around the idea of playing video games standing up and getting so out of breath. I'm a little sore in my arms and stomach, but mostly I feel great for getting some exercise. I'm already getting a lot better. And I love how the game adapts to your skill level. As I improve with Baseball, the pitches get harder and harder.

The only thing I don't like about the Wii is the UI.  It seems totally confusing at times, and it is definately inconsistent about navigation.  It feels like a different team came up with their own UI rules for each little section, and just cobbled things together.  The navigation for the Messages is different than the Settings is different from the Mii Channel.  Sometimes you can use the buttons to move around, sometimes you can't, sometimes you get a confirmation when exiting back to the main menu, etc.  It took me a while to figure out just how to add a friend, and it didn't seem intuitive at all.  I still get confused trying to remember where what is.  It's not all that bad, but it could use some polish.

Really, though, it seems like Nintendo has totally invented a new category of social gaming, though. Playing on the Wii is fun, but it is absolutely hilarious and engaging playing with someone else right there in the room. It's just a lot of fun.

I've gotta find some more games. I didn't get Wii Play yet, I'm not sure if I wanna get it or not. I figure I can pick up a used copy for real cheap if I want. I took a look at Wii Fit and it looks really cool, and like it has a lot of stuff that would really help. I'm not a big fan of paying more for all these accessories and peripherals, so I'll have to think about that one. One thing I like is that the Wii is backwards compatible with the GameCube. I only have two games left, but at least I can still get some if I find something fun.

Anyway, if you wanna send me your Mii and add me as a contact, my console # is 5500 7000 5524 4618. I gotta find some good multiplayer games for online, too. My little sister has one. Gotta stomp her somehow.

I've been wanting to upgrade my whole audio setup for a while now, and this is the first step. I'm going to do it pretty much piecemeal, adding or upgrading one item at a time, and the receiver was the first one to go.

This thing has some really cool features. For one, it supports all the extra HD codecs that Blu-Ray supports, two of which enable up to 7.1 surround sound, and two which are lossless. Right now, I only have one Blu-Ray disc that supports 7.1 channels (Sleeping Beauty), but since I don't have the extra speakers, I won't know for a while how nice it sounds. But, one major point of doing an upgrade is to future-proof the system, so that's what I did.

I also bought some nice stereo speakers to compliment the receiver, since I figured most of the sound goes through there. My good friend Jason, who is far more the audiophile than I'll ever be, tried explaining to me that most of the audio comes through the center speaker, and I'd be better off investing in that. I didn't really understand how it could work that way, so I bought some side speakers anyway. It should be worth mentioning at this point, that my audio experience can be summed up pretty simply -- I just like the aural experience of feeling like I'm surrounded, and as far as my class as an audio expert goes, I couldn't tell the difference between a phone and a tin can on a string.

I was sure, though, that since I wanted it to sound like stuff was coming from all sides, that I needed good speakers for the sides. So I got some good ones. As I was wiring the new receiver, though, I noticed that it had been opened and returned by someone else. The previous owner's hair being all over the place was a good indicator. I think they owned a cat who apparently thought a receiver would make a great tanning bed. I wanted to make sure it would work properly before I set everything up, so I wired my old speakers, and being the lazy bum that I am, only did the side ones, leaving out the center speaker. I popped in a Blu-Ray (Clone Wars) and everything sounded fine. I puttered around for a bit looking at the manual and left the movie playing. After a few minutes I realized that I wasn't hearing any dialogue. That seemed normal enough, since I knew that it comes through the center speaker, but what I didn't realize was that wasn't *all* that comes through there. There was a cool space battle (which is one reason I recommend watching Clone Wars -- some of the coolest Star Wars battles are in there), and all I could hear from the side speakers were these little pings. None of the good stuff was coming through at all. Well, there's nothing like real world experience to school you, so with that, I packed up the very expensive speakers and took them back. I still haven't found a good center speaker I like, but I'm glad I didn't blow a load of cash on an otherwise mostly secondary effect.

I also took my receiver back, in exchange for one uncoated with fur, and setup my old speakers and away I went. The setup came with a little microphone that you can plug in and run an automatic setup to determine the distance of the speakers and how they need to be adjusted. That is really nice. One of my speakers had to have the volume level slightly higher than the other one, so it worked out well to get it all balanced. Despite the 7.2 capability (supports two subwoofers as well), I've only setup a 3.1 system so far -- two bookshelf speakers, one center, one subwoofer. I'm not sure how I want to wire my living room just yet for surround sound, and for some odd reason the idea of running speaker wire across my ceiling or floor seems a little unsightly to me. I guess I'll never be a true A/V geek.

All in all, though, it sounds really nice. For some odd reason, my old receiver had a perceived A/V sync issue on Blu-Ray discs played from my PS3. It's gone with this one, I'm glad to report, though I'm still not sure if I was just imagining it or not. Another great feature I found out about is that the receiver will upscale and export any input video through the outgoing HDMI port. That means I can plug in pretty much anything from Composite to Component and have it all go out through one display port. Not a bad feature, but my TV already comes with something like 7 input sources anyway, so I probably won't ever need it. It also has a Monitor Out feature, where it will give you an OSD for the setup. That is a really nice touch.

Just as cool as a new receiver, I got a new book in the mail from my parents -- Batman Animated.

I'm not much of one for coffee table books, but with Batman, anything goes.

I probably wasn't supposed to open it already, but if I get unwrapped presents in the mail, you can bet your bippy I'm opening it up.

It's a great book. I absolutely love the new animation style that started with Batman: The Animated Series that Warner has been using since. I'm a real freak for certain styles of art. The whole book is all sketches, drawings, commentary and the like. Awesome stuff.

I wonder what else I'm gonna get .... er, that is, from myself for me. I asked my little sister the other day, "Why is everything I want to get so expensive?" She said, "Because you've already bought everything affordable." How true it is. Happy burfday to me

I ran into some problems because I originally used a stable tree with some really old drivers. DRI wouldn't work at all, and it hated pretty much every resolution I threw at it. I just barely finished upgrading everything X-related to ~amd64 and so far it's much smoother.

I'm working now on getting XvMC setup. It's not a bare necessity, and it's more of an attempt to see if I can get it done more than anything. I think I had it setup on my old VIA C7 with Unichrome before, but ended up ditching it because I couldn't use any video filters. The same thing will probably happen here.

Technically, it's working right now, but I'm not sure if everything is running correctly. The CPU will jump to ~30% on playback with MPlayer for an MPEG2 video, which is way too high. If it really is offloading the processing, it should be much closer to 3%. I'm not sure if MPlayer even supports it correctly, as the last time I tried it, nvidia was the only one it supported. I'm having some trouble finding some information about it, but I'll keep plugging away.

One thing I did stumble on is that there is a bug in the mplayer ebuild (28058) where it is doing something wrong when building against libXvMC. The ebuild doesn't work, but just unpacking the same tarball and configuring it with no arguments worked fine. I haven't had time yet to investigate why, but I'm glad I found that. XvMC has always been one of those dark horses that I'm never sure what the status is. The whole thing could use some more documentation.

Anyway, aside from that minor issue, the only other problem I've run into is that the kernel doesn't have a CPU frequency driver for my processor (Intel Atom 330). Everything else works great. The sound seems fine, though I haven't really had a chance to test its quality yet. I'm still setting everything up, so it's all hooked up to my desktop components still. I plugged it into my HDTV briefly just to verify that I could indeed get a fullframe X session, and that was about it.

I did have a nice surprise which was quite a bonus. I was doing some research on the CPU to see what it could do, and it turns out that it is 64-bit, not 32-bit as I originally assumed. I'd never even imagined that there were any 64-bit Mini-ITX boards out there, so it came as quite a shock to me. I had to rebuild the entire OS, but I didn't mind. I actually let the Mini do most of the work, since it can handle the load by itself quite well. I still can't get over the fact that this thing is fanless.

So, I'm almost there. Development has gone incredibly fast, especially compared to my last one. Getting a bigger hard drive made a nice difference, since I don't have to worry about space anymore. I think it's already up to 400 megs. I just need to finish getting some configuration stuff done, and then it should be ready to roll and then I can do some quality tests to see how nice the picture and audio really are. It's a great little board, well worth the wait and and awesome deal considering the price. I can't wait to put it into production.

Here's the board I got: an MSI IM-945GC.

Just looking at it, it doesn't look like a good board for multimedia playback at all. It doesn't have SPDIF, S-Video, Composite, Component or HDMI ports. Just VGA, stereo jacks, PS2 ports and three COM ports. Woots. But, it is stocked with lots of cool stuff.

The processor is a dual-core Intel Atom. Dual-core! That's just amazing, and the first I've seen. I would normally be hesitant to go from a VIA C7 chip (which is what I already have) to something else, but my netbook also has an Intel Atom CPU, and it runs surprisingly fast. This thing also runs at 1.6 GHz, which is the fastest that I've seen, and still fanless. The next thing that even comes close to this is a VIA C7 1.2 GHz single core that is also fanless. So, this thing is gonna rock.

Because it's using an Intel chipset, that means that the onboard video is also Intel's. It's got a GMA 950 onboard, which means I'm not gonna have to worry a lick about the graphics or OpenGL. My only complaint in that area is that, like all onboard video cards, it uses shared memory which I'm not a big fan of. But, the picture will look really gorgeous.

Despite the lack of media ports, there's still other reasons why I got this thing. It has a PCI Express Mini slot on it, which means I can get a wireless card and stick it in there and it'll rest on top of the motherboard. It also has a PCI slot so if I really want to, I can get a different video card in there. I doubt there are any PCI ones with HDMI, but I do know you can snag one with S-Video.

Perhaps most importantly, though, this thing supports 2 GB of RAM. I had a really hard time deciding on which features I wanted the mobo to have, and when I finally listed features by priority, this one came out on top. My current Mini only supports 1 GB, and while that's sufficient, I'm more in the market of making sure I can future proof this thing as much as possible. The harddrive will be a SSD flash module that plugs into the IDE port, and I'll run it in readonly mode using ext2 with no swap. I'll have a small partition for /var so that I can write temporary files, but that's it. Everything is going to use RAM, and that's it, so I want to make sure my option is maxed out.

Another great feature is that this thing also has two gigabit NICs on the back. Plus, there are four USB ports, all 2.0. I'm really excited for this board. I think it's gonna be pretty fast. The CPU also supports hyperthreading, so it'll look like I have four cores in there.

I decided to go ahead and forego some of the other media ports because I don't see me wanting to use them anytime soon. Or, by the time I want to, I'll probably want either a better motherboard or a completely different delivery option by then. Both of my mythfrontends are used primarily to playback TV shows and casual movies that I just feel like watching. They are not intended to deliver an amazing presentation, such as duplicating a great picture like or surround sound. When I want the best quality, I'll just pull out the DVD and turn on my receiver. But that doesn't happen very often. My HDTV that I'll be hooking this up to has a VGA port on the back, and so that's all I needed. It also has a stereo input jack, so I can just run an audio cable straight in without any fuss. The low quality playback solution works perfectly since 90% of my content is old and in stereo to start with.

This thing doesn't come even close to being able to handle an HD stream, and I'm totally cool with that. As strange as it may seem, I am an incredibly slow adopter when it comes to new technologies, and in cases like this I get extremely stubborn and stick with what works for a long time. That does have one advantage to it -- by the time I do get around to working with something, it's not in alpha or beta stages anymore, and I can usually do what I want without much of a hitch.

I'm just now barely starting to warm up to BluRay just a little bit (another post that I need to write about) ever since seeing some actual quality films. I only have three films at home -- the first three Harry Potters -- only because I got them at a great deal at Amazon ($40 for all three) and I bought them just so I could have *some* source material on hand to see what its like whenever I get the urge. Movies is pretty much the only thing I would care about when it comes to HD anyway, and since almost all of my time accessing the mythfrontend is watching TV shows from the 60s to the 90s, HD isn't even a variable, and it won't be for a long time.

So, I'm really excited to get this thing. My old setup was working perfectly well, and I just barely took it down last night. Right before I did, I looked at the uptime to see what it was at -- 141 days. Freak, that's over 4 months that this thing has been working without a hitch. I'm pretty proud of that.

This time around I bought a bigger flash drive. My old one was 256 MBs. Yes, megabytes. I had a job a few cycles ago developing an embedded multimedia operating system (based on Gentoo, of course) which is where I learned everything. The job or the company didn't quite work out so well, but the experience was a great learning one. The OS that is running on my current Mini is completely crafted from an extreme amount of TLC. Every single program that is on there has both been modified to cut out cruft and save space, and optimized where possible to run faster. I did not have any space to play with, and when you need X, MythTV, Qt3 and glibc you gotta really learn to squeeze. It is quite possible though. In fact, I think my image is closer to 180 megs in space total, after using SquashFS.

The amazing part is how responsive the thing is. Since everything was nicely tweaked, it seriously feels like I'm using my dual-core amd64 desktop because it is so snappy. In some cases, it is more responsive, the latency is just so low. There are a lot of shortcuts you can take, though, mostly in the kernel ... such as not dumping anything and turning off a bunch of other stuff you wouldn't dare do anywhere else, but building for embedded is so amazingly fun. Plus there's just nothing cooler than knowing it runs with such an small footprint. I highly recommend Building Embedded Linux Systems, Second Edition from O'Reilly if you are interested in doing some of the same. It's a lifesaver. And, of course, I recommend using a source-based distribution like Gentoo because it will help you to very easily trim down the fat and get only the bare essentials on there.

I bought a new flash IDE drive along with the new motherboard, and this one is 4GB in size, so I'm not going to have to ever worry about size. I'm not sure if I'll create a new custom build for this one as well or not. It was a lot of work getting the first one done, but a great learning experience. It reminded me a lot of when I first started installing Gentoo years ago, because up until that point, I thought I knew a lot about how things work together. There's nothing quite like getting into every single program you install in your OS and digging to see if you really need it or not, just trying to save an extra 59kb to 4MB of space. Good times.

Anyway, I'll be sure to take some pics of the new one once it gets here. I already started taking some of my old one, as I'll have to dismember it a bit and move it to a new case. I might end up replacing that one as well, since it's starting to fall apart a bit. I'm not sure I could go through the decision making process again, though.

Edit: leio-dl was asking me in #gentoo-dev why my image was so large, so I dug up a list of all the packages that is installed on the image, and here it is. 180 megs for an embedded image is actually really huge, but mine has a lot of stuff.

Edit #2: Er, just looked a bit closer. Main image is 97M, and then I have /lib in a SquashFS image which I think is about 40M, so it'd be closer to 130 total than 180.

Here's the short summary, before I go into any detail:

Ruko: Almost Perfect (A+)

Netflix: Needs Work (C+)

It's hard to really write an accurate take on the Roku box because it is, for now, only tied directly to Netflix's service. The Roku box and it's firmware, UI, and options are simply amazing, awesome and wonderful. The best way I could describe it is it's as simple and easy to use as the Tivo's PVR menus are.

The only problem is with the Netflix service itself. I've run into apparently the same issue that others have, and that is that there is audio/video sync issues all over the place. If I had to guess, I'd say it's happening in about 35% of the movies I've watched so far ... and I think I'm being generous with even that number. It feels like its closer to 50%. I haven't done any hard data gathering, but it happens enough that I've almost completely resigned myself to sticking to DVDs because its so common.

Before I bash Netflix, though, lemme go on with the glories of the Roku player because it really is awesome. When I first got mine, I took one look at the remote and thought to myself, "you have got to be kidding me." It's really small and the buttons look like crap. It looked like it was going to be an instant disaster, but after about 30 seconds of using it, I knew I was dead wrong. The feel is actually really comfortable, and the UI is smartly done, and makes the need for more buttons absolutely unnecessary, by combining multiple functions into each one.

I could go on and on about the UI, because it is is nice, but I'll do that later. I'll just say that it's intuitive and well-done. One thing I was really worried about was that the interface would suck because the one on my HD Tivo leaves a bit to be desired. The Tivo's Netflix interface by comparison is total crap.

The Roku has some features that I really like. Some of them are that if you are browsing your queue, and you are at the first or last entry, going to the left or right will wrap around and continue at the other end.

Choosing your rating for the movie is simple, too. It displays it as a selectable option in the menu, and when your pointer moves over it, then you have the option of selecting the star rating. Kind of a cool, nice touch.

Fast forwarding and rewinding is really cool. Instead of actually moving you through the stream, once you hit one of the buttons it will show snapshots of the scenes. You just select the scene where you want to pick up, it will rebuffer the stream and away it goes.

Finally, the feature I am most happy about, being the freak that never finishes watching anything in one setting, it makes it easy to resume playback of where I was. Not only that, but it remembers the last movie / show I had selected of my queue whenever I wake up the device again. That is just awesome, and one thing that really annoys me about the Tivo interface -- any changes you make and it will bump you back to the first entry in the queue. That probably wouldn't be an issue with most, but since I have 150+ in mine, it's a bit of a pain going back and forth.

Speaking of updating the queue, the second you change something on the Netflix website, it will get changed on your box as well the second you start navigating around your selections again. It's great.

The Roku even has a cool feature for resuming playback of TV series. I started watching Star Trek, the original series, and once I finished with the first episode, the first entry in the menu for that selection was to start watching the second one. The Tivo's interface, on the other hand, will just dump me into the same menu regardless of where I left off.

One interesting thing about the resume point for shows / movies, though, is that the location is stored remotely on their servers. That's actually a nice thing. So if I stop watching the show on my Roku, I can go over to my Tivo and resume playback from the exact same position (and now that I think about it, it actually does that on the website, too). That's another nice touch.

Anyway, I have no complaints with the Roku box itself. There's a lot of little things it has that just impress me, and I haven't even gone over all of them. It's one of those things that just works. As far as the hardware goes, I'm impressed with that as well. It has every video output available, from Composite to HDMI and everything in between (Component, S-Video). For networking, it comes with both an onboard NIC and an onboard wireless card. Not even the Tivos have that yet, which is another minor annoyance for me. And it still is only $100. Very nice.

Now, then, the only problem is with the actual Netflix service. I don't know what they are using to encode their movies, but something along the line absolutely sucks, because the A/V sync issues are pretty annoying. And I'm not talking about me being the videophile noob that notices 10 milliseconds of delay, but I'm talking about 3 to 5 seconds delay. Sometimes it's present in the movie no matter what you do, and sometimes it happens if you stop the movie and restart playback. I haven't watched a *lot* of stuff on there yet, so I haven't noticed any patterns ... if it's with certain studios, or whatever. It is pretty lame, though.

I'm not too worried, overall, I'm sure the issue, along with the small selection, will get worked out sooner or later. I'm just surprised how common it is so far, especially as the service is getting pushed out to a lot of devices.

For now, though, if I had to recommend getting something for streaming Netflix, I'd say if you are into independent film, then don't wait. I still think the Roku box is an amazing deal at just $100 for everything it does.  My wishlist of features that the UI had is extremely short -- with a big queue it's a bit tough to navigate through all of them quickly.  One thing has certainly settled on my mind, though, everytime I watch something -- I definitely think I made the right decision in buying the shows I want to watch myself on DVD and controlling every aspect of the UI and playback myself.  There's just enough kinks and tweaks that need to be worked out that I think owning or renting the DVD still wins for now, but only barely.  It's getting to be a really close battle.

I could only find one that looked decent, but even that one I wouldn't get if I had a choice.  I don't remember exactly what it was, but I know it was a Sony Bravia 40-something inch with the newer display engine, about 9000:1 contrast ratio and running at 120hz.

Everything else, they were all fuzzy.  I had to stand far, far away (about 24 feet) so I couldn't see it, but any closer than that and it just stood out horribly.  On one 40" I looked at, they were playing a standard-def DVD of National Treasure 2, which should have looked nice (since it's a recent film),  but even that, all I could notice was the fuzziness.

I imagine it's probably just me... I'm pretty picky when it comes to my TVs and I have a real eye for picking up even the smallest artifacts.  For my recommendation, though, if you want a TV, either get a rear projection (they all look gorgeous) or a regular CRT tube TV.

Actually, there is one area the LCDs do start to look nice -- if they are small.  Anything 22" or less actually looks decent.

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.

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'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!

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.

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.