I spent a few hours last night digging through the code, trying to find out exactly how the code is operating and what it's doing. What I learned was that, well Myth was doing exactly what I thought it was -- it builds a file list upon first entering, and then it doesn't examine it at all until you re-enter the video browser through the main myth menu. (I wish I had a decent screenshot about now, it's a bit confusing if you don't know what I'm talking about.)

There's a couple of problems with this approach, in my mind. First of all, the time it takes to actually load the mythvideo plugin grows in relation to how much media you have that it needs to parse. That is, it iterates over *every* single file that is in your media storage, and adds it to one variable. It's essentially like running find on your filesystem, saving it into one variable, and then when browsing, just using that snapshot that you took.

The simpler way, in my opinion, would be to just refresh the directory structure and metadata for the directory you are in. While I was poking at it, one thing I tried was to get the directory scan to not go more than one level deep. That reduced the startup time from about 8 seconds to less than one. Nice.

Ideally, I'd like to change it so it just updates the directory scan as it enters a new one, progressively growing the variable as you jump around the directory tree, but I couldn't figure out how to do that in the code (and if someone wants to help, that'd be awesome). MythVideo calls fetchVideos() only when first entering, and not anytime after that. The real problem is that it in turn calls about eight other levels of functions that eventually get to scanning the directory tree. I could probably hack it together to pass the current directory I'm in and update the directory scan from there, but again, I'm so limited in my C++ skills, at this point it's just code and guess. So, I can find and explain the problem, but not fix it myself.

Fortunately, it's a minor wish list item of mine, and so it's not a show stopper. I can live with not being able to do it, and it's probably just a matter of me learning how to code a bit more that I could figure it out. On the plus side, I'm learning more about the internals of the code, and each time I go in there, I find a few small inefficiencies that I can cleanup myself, which is fun. Making progress, I suppose.

Usually I would avoid going into the code, but I'm slowly getting more comfortable doing it.  I think the Qt3 docs could stand being a tad bit more verbose, though.  In a lot of cases where I was confused, it was a matter of not understanding exactly what the function was returning, and I'd have to execute it myself to figure it out.

Aside from that, all the "original" stuff is in, but I found two more bugs that I want to hunt down.  I thought I had this first one licked, but I guess not -- if you have a file on the filesystem that is not stored in the database, then it will display the filename sans extension as the title at the top of the page (fex: Mr._Belvedere).   I've already fixed it so that it will show the "correct" title (replace _ with spaces) when displaying the grid of all files, but I can't seem to find the variable where it's showing the other title and it's a little hard going through the code trying to figure out what everything is doing.  I haven't figured *that* much out.  In fact, I know my way around just a few functions in videogallery.cpp and that's about it.  Once it gets outside of that, I'm back in Wonderland.  I'm lost.

Add on top of that there's not much documentation, if any, in the code and it makes it a bit of slow going.  Ah well, it's only a matter of time most likely.

The second bug is really annoying, and it's interesting in that it's one of those phantom ones that was always like ... "wait a minute, did something just change?"  There was a nagging feeling that something had changed, but I could never pin my finger on it.  I finally found it.  What happens is, when MythVideo has scanned the files and put the metadata into the database, it will do some kind of intelligent sorting based on the titles for display.  That is, titles prefixed with "A", "And", "The", etc. will have the prefix dropped (can't remember the correct grammatical term for those) and then sorted by the following words in the title.  I only caught it because I had added an MP3 file for the LP of "A View To A Kill" (and yes, there are children's records that tell the story of the 007 films -- how cool is that?) and I was testing some stuff in that folder and actually saw it's position change before and after it was put into the metadata database.

That one, I have absolutely no idea where it's getting sorted at all.  I don't have a clue, and it could be anywhere, since all the MythVideo displays implement that, not just the Gallery view.  I just need to send a note off to the mythtv user's mailing list and hopefully someone will know.  That would be nice to get rid of, though.  I don't like the inconsistency.

In fact, I never use the metadata database at all.  Pretty much all I see is the cover image, which I supply manually, and the title.  And I rename all my videos so that the title is part of the filename, including the episode order for the ones that are a part of a series.  I already ripped out the stuff to display the metadata before playback, since I'm not interested in that.  So, I know that it's somehow related to the metadata database, since the titles *and* the orders are affected once they are in there.  Just gotta figure out where.

Other than that, everything has gone really smooth, and it's been nice.  One thing I did notice as well was that 0.21 just seems generally snappier and much more responsive.  It could be my imagination, but I don't think so ... there just seems to be less latency and wait when navigating and moving around places.  It's pretty nice.

Normally, the process wouldn't be hard, except that I've built a custom image that is running on a solid-state flash disk that is only 256 mb in size. And yes, it's Gentoo. It doesn't have a full blown Gentoo install, of course, but it's certainly a very stripped down version of one. I've had the image on there for probably a year and a half or more, and have been extremely content to just leave it alone as it works just fine.

As time goes on, though, I've been hacking on MythVideo a bit here and there, adding a few tweaks to suit my needs. This weekend I finally got another navigation one hammered out that took me a few hours to figure out due to my lack of C++/Qt programming skills. It was worth it though -- it was one annoying UI decision I didn't like (I won't go in details, but it's how the menu position is selected when navigating back and forth through the video gallery).

The problem is that making any kind of changes to the Mini's image is always a pain for a couple of reasons. For one, if I screw something up badly, it's a bit difficult to get into the box. I don't have a USB bootable stick laying around, and in fact I've never had much luck getting one to work .. and I don't think this box will boot off of one anyway. Not sure. That means if something really goes haywire then I have to boot over the network, which is a bit of a pain to setup sometimes. Fortunately, it didn't come to that this time.

Another issue is that because space is so limited, part of the filesystem is loaded from a read-only squashfs image. That means a bit of tedious testing when it comes to unpacking the image, removing the old files, adding the new ones in place, repacking it, remounting it, and restarting the application each time just to test anything. That adds a lot of time to the process.

This time around, I did something pretty smart, in my opinion. I don't know why I didn't think of this before. The squashfs image is loading /usr/lib. This time, I installed Myth to /usr/local so that I could leave the libraries alone and replace MythTV easily. Just create a new image for that one, and drop it in anytime.

Anyway, tonight I just barely got it working with the new install. I went from a very old 0.20 install to the latest 0.21 in portage (0.21_p19961). In fact, one of the reasons I had to upgrade is because I can't even get 0.20 to compile anymore. Normally I wouldn't care, but I figure I may want to write more patches, and it's getting to be painful trying to maintain an older version that I can't even duplicate in case of a problem.

One other nice thing that's changed since I last built this is I have my still-somewhat-newish ThinkPad to build it on. So I just build the binaries on my x86 laptop, strip out all the crap I don't need or want, create a new squash image, and drop it right in. Relatively speaking, it has all gone rather smoothly. I think I've probably spent about 20 hours on it since Sunday. I vaguely recall it taking at least two weeks the first time I put it together. And of course, it took me something like three months to even get X, Qt, LIRC and all the other stuff on such a small bootable image. That was a really bumpy ride, but I wouldn't trade the knowledge to do it for anything.

That's the other thing -- I could *easily* spend less than $20 and get double the harddrive space (512MB) and be able to forego half the problems. Or, I could even spend another $20 and get a 1 or 2 GB drive and have a *lot* of room to play around in. Oddly enough, I'm really going against my normal approach and instead of throwing money at the problem, I'm taking it as a matter of pride that I can endure so much pain and still get it on such a small drive. And really, I don't need the extra space anyway. Once it's done, it's done and done. It'll be just like before, where I'll leave it alone for 18 months or more, and I'll be completely happy with it the whole time.

Just for the record, here's the harddrive current status. I managed to clean up a lot of cruft this time around and freed up a lot of space:

Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda1             238M  184M   42M  82% /
udev                   10M   60K   10M   1% /dev
/usr/usr.lib.img       36M   36M     0 100% /usr/lib
/usr/usr.local.img     18M   18M     0 100% /usr/local
shm                   474M     0  474M   0% /dev/shm
svcdir                2.0M  116K  1.9M   6% /var/lib/init.d
//willy/media         1.4T  624G  726G  47% /var/media

And finally, here's what the menu currently looks like ... still unpatched, and with the default theme. That's for another day. I'll cover what the patch changes, too. Someone may find it useful. In the meantime, I think it's time to try and catch up on sleep.  I'm really tired.

Oh, and those icons are from the gartoon theme set.

The only thing I use it for is a GUI interface to browse folders, display thumbnails of folders and files, and playback whatever I pick.

There's gotta be something simpler out there, though I imagine I'll probably just end up writing my own.

Now what's a good easy GUI development library that wouldn't be hard to learn?

This patch fixes an annoying problem I've had for a long time -- it's a royal pain setting a cover file for a video. A cover file would be the actual image that shows up in the gallery view for a media file. Without one, you just see a blank little icon which is pretty boring.

Folders are really simple -- you just add folder.jpg (or .gif or .png) to the directory, and it will show that. Individual files are a bit tricker. If you were just using the interface, you'd have to first go into the Video Manager to let Myth scan the directory of files, create an entry in the database, then go find the file, edit the entry, and set the coverfile manually.

I originally wrote a script to do that part for me. I would just create a JPEG image for each media file, usually with the same filename, but a different extension, and code in a check to see if both exist, update the videometadata table. All the time, I kept thinking though, it would be so much simpler if Myth would just check to see if the file existed like the folders, and display it. That's exactly what this patch does.

I pretty much just copied the same code from the part where it looks for the folder icon, and did the same thing. If, for example, you have movie.avi, just create movie.avi.jpg (or .gif, or .png) as the coverfile and you're done.

Actually, you do have to put the file in the database first, since it still checks to see if there is any metadata for it at all. That is extremely simple, though, either by script or UI navigation. The UI will just add new ones quietly, and you can quickly exit out. The patch will still use your coverfile in the videometadata table too, if there isn't a similar filename that it can find, so you can apply this and it won't break your existing setup.

As usual, the ebuild is in my overlay. This one is mythvideo-0.20.2_p15087-r3.ebuild. I'm going to eventually document these a bit better and file bugs with upstream. I know I'm using an "old" version to patch it onto, but the reality is that SVN hasn't changed at all since that revision, so even the latest version bump is the same code.

I also spent the weekend working out a number of small kinks in my system and setup. I drafted up a new "wishlist" that I have of stuff I'd like to eventually get fixed, and it's getting smaller all the time. Right on.

As far as mythvideo patches, though, I only have one last small annoyance that, while it doesn't really bother me, does kind of throw me for a bit of a loop so I'd like to see if I can fix it. The bug is that folder names and file names are sorted differently. I can't remember which is which off the top of my head, but one of them will ignore prepositions like "The", and "A" on the front of titles and sort by the second words. So "The A-Team" would show up near the top of the list. Maybe it does that on both file and folder. Anyway, I don't like it. It's a bit confusing. I tried looking for where it does that, but I haven't had much luck yet.

Here's a few things I want to remember as a point of reference, that took me a bit of research to figure out:

Printing options in MPlayer:

mplayer -list-options <command line arguments>

mplayer -input cmdlist <slave mode commands>

mplayer -input keylist <events>

Mapping Page Up and Page Down with my remote in MythTV:

begin
prog = mythtv
button = ch+
repeat = 3
config = PgUp
end

begin
prog = mythtv
button = ch-
repeat = 3
config = PgDown
end

Finally, I hit some snag with MPlayer and VobSubs (subtitles that originally come with DVDs).  I've got some movies in Matroska format, and with recent (SVN r27719) revisions, it will forcibly display the subtitles on playback, and I have no idea why.  I swear I remember reading something about this on the mailing list a while ago, but I haven't had much luck finding anything.  Best option so far, go back to an earlier revision (r25993).  Not ideal, but it works.  Every sub, force and vobsub option I've tried does nothing.  I'm not passing anything by default like -slang or -sid to mplayer.

Another thing I've been working on (I'm really bored) is finding posters for the cover images in my movies folder.  Which got me looking at UK quad posters.  If you haven't ever seen the posters from across the pond, they are so much better than our American counterparts.  They are a horizontal landscape, which allows for, in my opinion, a much more dramatic picture.  Check out this Star Wars one, for example.

It just looks so much better, in my opinion.  I gotta get some movie posters up on my wall (only two so far: Tron and The Adventures of Milo in the Phantom Tollbooth), and I'd love to hunt down some quads.  The old school Disney ones look even awesomer.

Speaking of cover images for Myth, I have a new patch I cranked out last night, which has an interesting story to it.  I'll post details later, though.  I'm not in the mood for details right now.  I'm more about hunting down stupid bugs that don't require too much brain power.

I wanted to wait to bump mplayer-resume until after I added something else, and this is gonna be it. Just gotta clean up the code and package it now, and it'll be ready to go.

Here's how it works though: the script, like mplayer-resume, acts as a wrapper to mplayer. In fact, everything is pretty much the same except that it saves both the filename along with the position in the playlist.

The problem I was having a hard time figuring out was that I wanted to easily make two options available: resume playback in the current file I'm in (old mplayer-resume functionality), and resume playback in the position in the playlist I'm in. I just finally mapped two keys on my remote, exit and stop, to take care of both of them.

Hitting Exit on my remote will save the playback of the current file and write that to the playlist position file. Then it also saves the seek time where I left off. Hitting Stop will kill the old entry and just add a line to the playlist saved position file that says what the *next* file should be on playback.

Pretty simple when you consider it, but it took me some time to figure out, mostly so that it seemed intuitive. I figured I'd have a hard time getting used to it, and hit stop accidentally and losing my place where I wanted to be, but so far it's worked out fine. I'm happy with it.

I'm using it for playback of my TV shows, which is pretty much 95% of what I've got ripped on my media setup. I have a few movies, but no AC3 output, so I prefer to just stick those in my DVD player. It is the only way I can watch my Region 2 or 4 DVDs though. For TV, it works great, since I generally want to watch them in general succession of episode order. And if I don't feel like watching a certain episode, you just hit stop and it'll skip to the next one. Very nice. I suppose I could map a button to go *back* in the playlist if I screw things up accidentally, but I'm kinda running out of buttons to map on my remote. Besides, vague mappings that I'm supposed to remember usually hurt more than help.

The bug is this: when you are using gallery view in MythVideo and you enter a folder, when you exit back to the main root menu, it repositions that folder at the top, regardless of where it was when you entered the folder.

Some pictures will probably make more sense.

Here is a screenshot of what my folder display looks like when I enter MythVideo's gallery for the first time, and browsing for a folder to select:

Now, when I select that directory, I'll see the files in there. But when I hit Escape or select the previous folder icon, it will return me back to the root menu. However, the folder layout has changed, and the row that the folder is on, originally the bottom, is now at the top.

Moving around the position of the folder layout throws my brain for a loop every time it happens, because I'm expecting to see the same display as when I was just in there, and since it's different I have to rescan the layout visually and reprocess where I am and where I want to navigate.

This patch fixes that, and keeps the layout the same when you return to the root window.

I went ahead and added a new ebuild in my personal overlay which will install it for you if you don't want to patch it manually. The ebuild is mythvideo-0.20.2_p15087-r2.ebuild and it also includes my original navigation patch.

Now then, there's one small bug in it that I'd like to fix, but I don't know any Qt or C++, and it's a miracle in itself that I managed to even get this far on my own. In fact, I'm quite proud of myself actually that I even figured this one out all by myself, go me.

I originally patched it so that it would just reposition the parent view around the last folder row you were in ... that is, I was doing the same thing, but not specifically for the root menu, just any folder you went into. That worked fine, provided your tree didn't have more than one level. The second you went into a third directory Home -> Foo -> Bar, the 2nd variable would overwrite the first one so when you returned to the parent it would be whacked. If that makes any sense. Anyway, for someone with Qt knowledge, it shouldn't be hard to fix so that it always does that no matter which folder you are in, and at what depth level. I have no idea how, though.

It's actually kinda interesting how I figured this one out. There were two things I noticed from poking around in the code. One, to get videogallery to dump out variables to stdout, I would add this to the code:

VERBOSE(VB_GENERAL, QString("Some text."));

VERBOSE(VB_GENERAL, QString("Some variable: %1").arg(someVar));

Yah, brilliant hacking on my part, I know, but I managed to kludge my way through it and figure it out.

The second thing I realized was that if I wanted to find out if I was on the parent tree or not, I would have to create a new instance of GenericTree and check to see if getParent() returned the main root or not.

GenericTree *lparent = where_we_are->getParent();

Then, if lparent != video_tree_root you would know you're not at the top yet.

Anyway, yah, my awesome debugging skillz at work there, but hey -- it took a lot of patience and more than a few rebuilds, but it worked, and I'm happy. Woots.

One last thing -- the patch will also apply cleanly against current SVN (r18336 as of this writing) since it hasn't changed in a good while, so you don't have to use my ebuild if you don't want, or you could just rename it to the latest snapshot in portage and it'll still apply.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There's a lot more channels that I like to watch, but I'm taking it slow. Another channel I'm mostly interested in is TNT, since they play Without a Trace and Cold Case regularly. I think. Anyway, I'm actually trying to cut *back* on the number of channels I watch (one of my TVs only has all the PBS channels on it, which is a nice change of pace), but the fact is that some channels on cable have a much better and interesting lineup than the local ones.

Onto the cool stuff though. The settop box is a disaster and a half, or at least the menu is. I'm going to have to take screenshots because it really is unfathomable how much of a UI nightmare this is. Here's my biggest beef with the whole thing: you can't setup a custom channel list, or even add / delete channels from your lineup. If you want to go channel surfing, you have to go through *every* *single* *channel*. The only option around that is to add a 'Favorites' list, for which the remote has a button that will flip through those, but only going up. It's incredibly annoying because adding / deleting channels has been a standard option for TVs for decades. Comcast's settop box does let you setup a list of your favorite channels, but to browse it, you have to go through about 3 or 4 actions on the remote to get there, and even then it only displays the list in a guide. If you go back to hitting channel up or down, it just cycles again through every channel you get. And there are a lot of channels. And of coures it doesn't ignore the ones that you aren't signed up for, so you get to muddle through about three dozen that you aren't authorized for.

I *think* that that the DirecTV and Dish Network boxes let you create lists, and then keep you in those channel lists for when you want to channel surf. I'm not sure, since I've never given one a good hard look. I'd switch to one of those just for that, though. In fact, I probably will.

In the meantime, I'm going to screw around with this settop box for a bit more before taking it back to Comcast. From what I've been reading, MythTV can add the box as an input device, using a firewire connection to control the channel tuner, and of course record TV. Mine is the HDTV DVR (Motorola DCT3416), and I haven't yet seen much info about connecting one. The anecdotal evidence so far seems to be along the lines of "plug in the cable, and it works great." We'll see. I don't even have a firewire cable.

So that's where I'm at right now. I'm not gonna use the settop box unless I can get Myth to play around with it. Even then, I don't need it, since I can tune into all the channels I wanted anyway with my normal TV tuner cards. I still need to see exactly which channels I get. I actually ripped it out from my HDTV since the picture was so horrible to begin with. Even on component output it looked incredibly crappy, not to mention worse than my original coaxial input connection. I plugged it in briefly using HDMI, but that was just as unimpressive.

I'm toying with the idea of getting a Tivo just to see what my options are (yet another area I don't know anything about, so who knows), but I'm not too optimistic anything good would come out of it. I'll probably buy one used somewhere just so I can see if its worth it.

The real good thing is that, despite all these interesting issues, is that I'm perfectly happy with my original cable lineup, so if I rip everything out, I won't miss it one bit. I'm just curious to see what I can accomplish though. It's fun.

Here's some of the cool little stuff I've found out recently.

mythtv custom menus

I didn't know this til just the other week, but the design for the menu layout that Myth uses is all in XML files, and right there in the themes directories (/usr/share/mythtv/themes). That said, you can customize them all you want! Just read the docs, and you'll be up and running in no time. It's really simple. It took me just a few minutes to simplify my main menu so I can jump to the TV recordings and MythVideo really easily.

mythvideo gallery view

I'm really having fun with this one. There's a few things I'd change, but for the most part it works great. Here's what my layout looks like right now:

mplayer + xvmc + high motion

I just barely discovered this tonight. One of my frontends is a Pentium 4 1.6 gHz, which does plenty well. You really don't need that much horsepower to play back video. It's got an older nvidia AGP card in there which works just fine with s-video out. The only problem I have is that there is sometimes a slight stutter on the video with some high-motion scenes. I've actually started to get used to it, but then I found out that using the XvMC video out option really makes things much smoother.

At first I was just playing with it to see if I could get the CPU usage down. It was only dropping by about 10%, which wasn't that great, especially since it was still running high ... around 35%. Turns out I had cpufrequtils set to use the powersave governor, so my CPU was only running at 400 mHz. Whoops. I bumped it back up to full speed, and mplayer dropped down to around 10% total.

But, even then, at the lowest speed, the video looked gorgeous. I'll admit it might have been my imagination, but those motion blur issues seemed to go away. I was so surprised by the results that next I ran it through the Star Trek test (which everything has failed), and played back some Deep Space Nine. Normally I'll test TNG since I'm extremely picky about the video quality on that one, and I've seen them enough that I can notice video artifacts more easily, and this was only the 2nd time I've seen this DS9 episode. But, it still looked nice. I could notice some small amounts of blur, but it was pretty minimal. So, who knows, that solution might work well for everything. We'll see. I'm feeling pretty optimistic about it, and at the very least it works great for my older TV.

mplayer + audio delay

Before that, I was taking a break and watching some A-Team. Great stuff. On one episode, the A/V was off just slightly. This has always plagued me in the past, and it's one of the reasons I don't bother with encoding files. Also, this has happened before on another Universal disc (of all the DVDs I have, they have the most problems ... they are rare, admittedly, but that studio is still the winner). I remembered reading somewhere about adjusting the audio delay with mplayer, so I checked the man page. You just use + and - keys on the keyboard to adjust it by 1/10th of a second each way, faster or slower. Played around with that, and the A/V was back in perfect sync. So, I mapped my channel up / down keys on my remote to do that in case I ever run into that problem again, and now that's all fixed too.

matroska saves the day, and disk space

This is another cool one I noticed last week. This is all anecdotal evidence, so YMMV, but I've noticed that Matroska files are consistenly smaller than AVIs. About 8% smaller, in fact. I noticed that quite by accident while playing around with some encoding files. At first I figured I had done something wrong, but the results proved the same after quite a few tests. That is a lot of overhead for AVI, sheesh. Just one more reason to love and use Matroska.

Seems like there was something else, but I can't remember now. Ah well. Anyway, I was hoping to get all those random thoughts down sometime, so there you go. Lots of fun playing around with this stuff. I'm pretty blown away by how well it's working and how polished the whole thing is getting. Once I'm done for good, I'll be sure to document how to reproduce the entire step in detail. Good times.

Actually, just setting up vesafb plus splashutils took me about three hours. I haven't played with that stuff in a very long time, and since I'm on amd64, I can't use vesafb-tng. I did try uvesafb, but didn't feel like experimenting to see if I could get bootsplash working as well, so just went with plain old vesafb at 800x600 instead. The end result is still really nice. From boot to MythTV's main screen, the user never sees any text (BIOS is setup to display a VGA image on POST as well).

I mostly set it up again to see if I could do it again. I've already got my (original) mythbox in my bedroom, which is just a small Pentium4 with a small 250 GB IDE drive. This new one, though, this is my dual-core Athlon64 with 5 SATA harddrives, totalling 880 GB just for media files. I hadn't played with LVM2 in a good long while either, and I was cautious since last time I didn't have much luck. This time, reading the docs, it just clicked and made sense. The thing that always confused me was how the partitioning worked. Once you wrap your brain around the concepts, it starts to work.

I'm also running the latest MythTV that is 0.20, which needs to go real stable here anyway. I'm using 2.6.22 kernel and the 1.0.1 of IVTV which is supposed to have a lotta nice fixes. I'm just glad to see Hans finally got it into the kernel. Good work, man. I love the new new MythTV themes in mythtv-themes-extra, too. I'm using a nice widescreen one and it's gorgeous.

Anyway, I've been thinking about it for a while on and off, but I think that this time I'm going to actually write up a good Gentoo doc on how to actually do all the stuff in detail. I still can't believe I set it all up so fast. I'll have to post some pictures.

I just barely committed mythtv-themes-extra which adds a few new themes that I think look pretty nice. I'm going to be bumping it again soon, to grab some other ones that I saw on the MythTV wiki. I just wanted to see how these would work out first before doing too much.

I also upgraded today to the latest unmasked MythTV in portage, 0.20.1_pre13344. So far so good, though I haven't even looked at it for more than two minutes. The last version, I'd been using for a few good months now without touching it, so we'll see what happens.

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.

Anyway, I posted this on the Gentoo forums, but it's worth repeating:

*BACKUP* your mythconverg database before upgrading.

If you don't, you won't be able to go back to 0.19-foo. The reason is because with each point release, the schema for the database changes. When you run mythbackend for the first time, it will upgrade your database schema if it needs to. But running an older version won't roll it back, meaning you will lose all your settings and entries in 'Watch Recordings', etc.

Backing it up should be pretty simple. Just get the mysql connection settings from ~/.mythtv/mysql.txt

Then do:

Code:

mysqldump -u mythtv -p mythtv mythconverg > mythconverg-`date +%F`.sql

and save that file in a safe place. Heck, I would recommend doing regular database dumps anyway.

Good luck and have fun.

I've pretty much already come to the conclusion that nothing short of a slightly beefy computer is going to cut it as a usable mythfrontend. I'm highly skeptical (hence the research part), but I think that a 1ghz mini-itx system might be able to pull it off. Apparently, there are motherboards that have onboard MPEG2 hardware decoding, taking a huge load off of the CPU on playback. I'm pretty skeptical about how easy it is to get those working too, but I'm willing to consider it.

One thing I know that would be a shoo-in replacement is using a Hauppauge PVR 350 which does both hardware MPEG2 encoding and decoding. I know right now you can use it's S-Video out connection to watch the TV, though I kind of remember reading something about that disappearing soon or X not using it anymore or something. Gah, I really need to read up.

I actually had no idea you could even do this until yesterday, but apparently you can have slave backends for mythtv, not just frontends.  It is really cool how it works, too.  In my scenario I have two amd64 Gentoo boxes both running the 0.19-fixes svn release.  On my main master myth backend, I have the Plextor tuner and all my recordings.  Then on my slave backend I've got the PVR-500 with dual tuners on it.

Setting up a master-slave backend relationship is actually much, much easier than I thought.  Just run mythtv-setup, first of all, and setup the IP addresses of the machine.  Myth will know if your box is the "master" backend server if (and only if) both IP addresses are the same in the General configuration -- one is for the ip of the box, and one is for the ip address of the master server it should connect to.  By default they are both set to 127.0.0.1 for localhost.  Just change those to 192.168.1.x and now others can connect to it.

Then, on the slave just set the master ip address and the subnet address for the slave too.  The only other big thing to do is make sure you setup MySQL on the master server to accept connections from the subnet.  Up until this point though, your "slave" box is just a frontend, since you haven't really done anything with the backend.  In fact, I'm assuming the only difference between running it as a frontend or backend (or both) is if you actually start running mythbackend on that box.

I went through the rest of mythtv-setup on the backend and added the tuner cards.  The DataDirect listing showed up in my list already from the master server (wow, that's cool) so I knew they were already talking to each other.  Then it was time to try out the little booger.  Sure enough, I could record three shows at once, and set the scheduling from either of the two frontends.  Plus, I could watch things in the library from either one, not to mention stream video from the live tv recording streams on the tuners from the other boxes.  Very cool stuff.

I started playing around with myth a bit more after that, and it started dawning on me quite a bit more how cool this application really is.  Even when you take it down to the bare basics -- it is an awesome PVR.  I still remember pretty well how crappy my Comcast DVR was, mostly lack of features and huge bugs, and mythtv just totally pushes the standard.  It's great stuff.

Let's take a look at some of my not-so-run-of-the-mill options:

• Gentoo Linux (yay!)
• amd64 (still a relatively new architecture, imo)
• Custom kernel module settings
• Subversion checkout of MythTV developer tree
• USB TV Tuner with external kernel modules
• Streamzap USB IR receiver with the remote mapped to my all-in-one
• SPDIF digital out to receiver
• Two RAID1 partitions
• LVM2 spanning three harddrives
• Slightly hacked version of mplayer
• Matroska videos
• Custom playback wrapper to mplayer
• Owner who can't seem to be content with status quo

You see, mythtv really isn't as hard as everyone makes it out to be. All you need is some disposable income, the social skills of a caveman, a little hyper-attention and you'll be set! And when you're finished with it, you can show it off to your friends who by now have gotten married and have children.

It's the American dream, I tell you.

The first thing I realized was that my original myth setup wasn't using ALSA. I was using /dev/dsp as my output device, so I was using ALSA's OSS emulation. So, when I tried watching a movie in mplayer with -ao oss, there was no sound. Exact same thing as was happening in myth -- it wasn't throwing any errors, just no sound.

So then I googled for 'mythtv spdif' which took me to a good mythtv guide. Then I quickly saw what had happened. I'm loading 'alsa' as a module, and while doing that, I have to tell the module parameters to remap everything that OSS uses to device 2, my SPDIF. Somewhere along the line of upgrading ALSA and my kernel, my original /etc/modules.d/alsa was changed back to a vanilla config file, which didn't have those extra settings in it. That was the problem the whole time. I'm not entirely sure what overwrote it, either. 'equery' tells me that the file is owned by alsa-utils, but re-emerging it didn't overwrite it. I wonder if it's when I make the modules from the kernel that it clears it out, or something.

In all fairness, I recant my original rant about mythtv always needing some kind of external third-party config to get it working right. That is true, however, when you're using complex setups, such as remote controls, audio receivers, and USB TV tuners. I would have had to configure things no matter what the program that used them. I was wrong.

However, I still stand by my opinion that I think it's stupid that it was complaining about the ALSA parameters. Throw me a bone, here. Just play the stupid thing.

I'm actually glad for all the grief I went through, though. I needed to reinstall myth anyway so that I could get MythVideo back on there. I got both of those accomplished, and the new myth is looking really slick. I like it. The 'Internal' player is working now in MythVideo as well, but it doesn't save the movie position still, which was my biggest hope. That's not a big deal though, because I finally discovered a hack so that I can write my own wrapper to save position. I'll have to post that up here another day.

And so, things are finally moving forward. With mythvideo working and a player that I can resume playback, I can finish ripping my DVDs and have everything in one central place. It's definately all been worth the hassle to be able to watch Transformers any time I want without having to pop in a DVD.