I signed up for a Linode (and did automatic billing), and I'll be moving the sites there rather soonly.  That'll save us all from other responsibility-addled issues.  Well, financial ones at least.

So, in no particular order, here's what I'm poking at:

mplayer-resume v1.8

I just finished coding this yesterday.  I've had 1.7 done for a long, long time and meant to push it into the tree, but never got around to it.  This version adds a feature that everyone I've heard from complains about -- getting it to accept filenames with spaces in them.  I added a --filename option that you can pass to it, so there's absolutely no confusion or guess work about what it should be.  There's a few other things in there, but I'll write that up in the changelog when I'm done.  I just have to rewrite half the documentation and package it and then I'll be done.

trip

I don't *think* I've made any mention of this yet, which is actually really surprising, because it's a few tweaks away from being distributable.  trip is basically "tivo ripper" (original, I know), a little shell script that has a CLI frontend that will let you sync your list of files on your Tivo, pick which series and shows to download, then strips the DRM from them using tivodecode and leaves you with a happy MPEG2 video that you can do whatever the heck you want with.

I'm debating putting this one in the tree or not.  I realized that mplayer-resume is just a really tiny shell script, and it probably shouldn't have gone in the tree to start with ... but oh well.  I don't really think I should pull it out now.

There's no timeline on pushing this one out, though.  It's mostly done, but I don't really feel like packaging it.  If someone wants a copy though, drop me an email and I'll send you a tarball.

drip

drip is my console interface for ripping all my TV shows, that I've been working on and off for years.  This thing is a total mess and a packaged release will probably never see the light of day -- not because the code is crappy, but because there are so many complexities to it, way too many options for customizing it that I'd have to support, and such an incredibly small audience of people that would want it either.  As such, it works great for me.  Basically what I do is I first archive my discs.  I'll grab all the relevant disc info I can just by reading the DVD (disc id, disc title, tracks, chapters and lengths), then I have a web frontend where I specify what I just archived (episode names, which tracks to ignore, which are bad, etc.) and then I use the console app to rip the episodes to the harddrive, and mux them into Matroska with all the relevant metadata stored in the database by the frontend.  It works really great.  Maybe I'll add some screenshots sometime.

Anyway, I've been working on that for a variety of reasons.  The first is that now that I've got ffmpeg reading Matroska metadata and hacked mplayer to pull it back out, when I actually mux the episodes, I have drip create the XML file of the global tags.

The other thing is that I've started looking more closely at specifying exactly which season an episode is on.  What happens is that DVD sets released as a complete series, it's pretty common for one disc to have the end of one season and the start of another.  I've always had drip setup assuming that one disc would only hold the same season all the way throughout, so I'm having to once again cast aside my old assumptions and fix half the database schema.  That's a bit of an undertaking, and I'm putting it off right now.

gentoo stuff

Gentoo is keeping me busy as well, though I haven't been doing as much as I'd like to, mostly because of all my little projects keeping me busy.  In fact, just in writing this, I keep thinking of more I need to add to this list.

I have gotten the bug again to work on finishing the rewrite of importing the portage tree into postgres.  That whole project is unnamed, but it's basically the backend to my packages website and GPNL.

Every single time I open this thing up and start hacking on it again, I'm totally blown away by how much faster and more efficient it is.  When I first started on the rewrite, I really picked a much cleaner design implementation, for the code and the database, and it is just so much easier to hack on.  The first one was a total stumbling of the dark that I was coding while I was researching what I could do, and it is just a nasty mess.  This one, the format has been specific from day one, and it's a total breeze working on it.  I can't wait to get it done.  I know I've said this a lot, but once it's finished, up and running, it will be soooo much more  portable, and able to handle a lot more stuff.  I've already got a few ideas planned on what to do with it once it's ready to go, but I'm keeping them under wraps.  I'm really excited for it though.

mini-itx madness

I haven't said a peep about the new Zotac I got.  Initial review is very positive, though.  I want to be fair and not write about it right after I got it, instead putting it through the paces for a few weeks, after the novelty has worn off.

It's working fine though, and one thing I want to do is setup the image on a USB stick.  No more onboard SSD IDE drives.  That would be really nice, since a USB drive would be so much easier to update since I could pull it out easily of the clients.

my qt media gui

Yet another unnamed project ... not that I really have anything to show for it anyway.  But basically as I'm learning Qt / C++, I've decided to just take the basic elements from MythVideo and write my own frontend to my media library.  That's coming along.  Still learning a lot.

seekrit projects

I've got two things in the works that I'm really excited about, totally unrelated to everything mentioned above, but I don't wanna say anything about them.  I've decided I'm not going to unveil them until they're done this time.  Yeehaw.

Alright, that's enough for now.  Back to work.

The coolest thing is that two of my patches got submitted upstream, one for mplayer, and one for ffmpeg.  In both cases, they needed to be changed a bit, but I'm still happy with the results.  The ffmpeg one was the patch I wrote about previously, to have the LAVF demuxer pull out all the metadata that's in the Matroska container.  That's in there as of revision 19184.  Thanks, aurel.

There's no way currently of cleanly pulling it out of MPlayer for display, though my hack works just fine.  The demuxer for mplayer needs a new function to iterate through all the metadata that's available, and add it to the demuxer info.  Currently, it's only pulling out a few named keys specifically.

Here's a screenshot of how it looks where I'm pulling it out, in this case I'm just using it as an OSD menu screen display.

The actual documentation on how to access the OSD menus and work them is pretty non-existent.  I'll try and write some up and get it submitted when I get a chance.  In the meantime, if you want to see what my menu configuration looks like, have at it.  I haven't cleaned it up at all.

I'm too tired to lay this down in story format, so I'm just gonna dump it out best I can.

The other week, I noticed that a new version of mkvtoolnix had come out (the tool to mux audio/video files into the Matroska container), and it totally flew under my radar. I started playing with it, and noticed some real improvements in speed, with regards to parsing MPEG-2 video. After playing around a bit, I started reading some more of the documentation, and found out about this excellent tagging system that the specification declares.

You can read all the gory details about it here, but basically, when building a Matroska file, you can create an XML file that has global tags that can store pretty much every metadata tag I could ever dream of possibly wanting.

I never really had the itch to pack much metadata into the container up until this time, when I realized just how much factual data I could stuff in there and not depend on the database for. Pretty much the only thing I really cared about was the title. In fact, all I wanted originally was to be able to get MPlayer to display the metadata title that was in the file.

Going off on a tangent here, I poked an open bug I have on MPlayer's bugzilla, and Reimar, an mplayer dev, was kind enough to oblige me once more and updated the code so that I could pull it out. If you're using a recent snapshot (for Gentoo, the 20090530 one has it), you can pull it out using "get_property metadata/title" in slave mode. If you wanted to display it on-screen, you would map a keypress event or LIRC event to this: osd_show_property_text "${metadata/title}". Quotes and all.

Anyway, Reimar added that in for me (thanks, man), so I started poking around with mplayer's features to see what else it could pull out for me. Now that I was going to be storing lots more data in the container, I wanted to be able to pull it out, too.

Jump forward a bit to today, where I woke up this morning and was determined to get it out somehow. My original plan that I had decided on was, since I can't really hack on C code, to just work around the limitation by using a fifo for mplayer. I'll spare you the ugly details, but basically I was going to have an event send a command to an external script that would query the .mkv file for the metadata tag I requested, and send a command back through the pipe to print that out to the screen. Quite a run around.

Well, I've tried before to grep the code of mplayer a bit to see if I could wrap my head around the stuff and see if I could figure it out for myself, but it hasn't worked out real well. I decided to give it another whirl today, though. This time, however, my approach was a little bit different. Normally I would just search for keywords where I *think* mplayer would be doing what I would think it was doing, tinker with the code, recompile it, run it, and see what it does. A really slow process, but sometimes it works. And I really don't mind spending the time on it, either.

This time, I did things a little bit differently. I found a file where I was sure that it was accessing matroska metadata, and I read the entire thing, and took copious notes, explaining to myself the whole time, basically what I thought the purpose of each major element was, trying to figure out the pattern to this. Now, bear in mind, that I'm still learning some C++ myself, and the C syntax is pretty similar (in fact ... I still can hardly tell the difference, myself), so a lot of times I have a vague understanding of what it *might* be doing, but never enough to be sure ... so there is still a lot of guesswork involved.

Anyway, after about 10 hours of going back and forth, making notes, testing code, printing out functions and variables and metadata, I got it figured out. And the final patch is something like 2 lines long, heh. All I did was add one if statement. But, that was enough to get me going, and it solved a nagging issue for me. But, what is far more valuable, is the fact that I've learned how I can go into this code and figure out how to fix things myself. That's gonna really come in handy. I'm sure I won't be submitting patches upstream anytime soon, but if I can get what I want hacked in there, and working, I'll be happy as a clam.

For the record, the problem with the metadata was this: MPlayer has a single key=value pair that it assigns to metadata values with it is parsing it with the libavformat demuxer. That is normally well and good, except in the case of Matroska, the tags can be nested with similar names.

So, for example, say you have two target tags in your matroska container: Collection and Episode. If it were a TV show, let's say it's CHiPs. Great show, btw. Now, in the tagging specification, both of them can have a title. The title for the collection would be CHiPs. If you had a Matroska A/V file that was just one episode, then the title for that would be "Ponch Delivers A Baby on the Disco Floor" or whatever (which really does happen, I kid you not). They key for both of those would be "title", but the values would be different. The LAVF demuxer just overwrites the old value and assigns it to whatever comes last. Kind of a problem.

So all I did was told the demuxer to prefix the key names with whatever the name of the target tag was (Collection, Season, Episode, etc.). That way you can have distinct key value pairs, but they are just more verbose. The metadata property names now are metadata/collection/title instead of metadata/title. Pretty simple, really.

That was the easy part. The second part, I haven't figured out yet -- how to get it out. The metadata is all in a separate object created by the LAVF demuxer, which I don't know enough C to figure out how to access that outside of that class. So, I just hacked it to add it to the metadata myself in a rather ugly, but working fashion. Upstream probably wouldn't be interested in that patch.

Another hard day's work, and I'm still not done. And I've got a lot more to write about it, so I'll just stop here for now. I'm gonna go port the patches to my frontends.

Edit: For reference, the clean version of the patch, a sample XML file of what I would mux in with an episode, and the ugly hack I personally am using to get it all out where my lack of C knowledge is very much publicly exposed.  Note that you have to use -demuxer lavf with mplayer for it to work.

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.

Currently, we have three packages just for binary codecs to be used with media players in the tree: win32codecs, amd64codecs and realcodecs.  I'm not gonna go into the difference of the three, because I've done that so many times, and that's one thing I'm actually trying to avoid here.  Suffice it to say that a lot of users think they need them, when they don't.  They see "win32" and think, "Oh, I want to be able to playback WMA and WMV and DivX so I must need these, right?"  Wrong.  Support is already native in libavcodec (the backend library for playback in about every multimedia app in the tree) for, well, most everything.  I won't get into the details of specifically what's missing, but 90% of the time, a user won't need the binary ones.

Anyway, that aside, what I'd like to do is roll all three into one ebuild.  I can't come up with a real original name, so media-libs/binary-codecs seems to suffice.  As long as it doesn't have "win" in there, I'll be happy.  The idea seems simple enough, and it makes sense on paper, and I already have a base ebuild  that does everything, but I thought I better throw the idea out there to see if I can get any feedback.

For what it's worth, here's a link to the unfinished ebuild so you can see what I have in mind.  I'm tossing the idea around in my head of adding a use flag for every binary codec that it installs.  That could help with any future security issues where we'd have to mask the use flag.

From Rhymes With Orange.  A great strip.

I don't know if this is to spec or not, but some version of Wordpress sometimes will set the updated date to all posts, regardless of their original publish date. The default planet configuration is to display the posts that fall within the recent date range, using updated over published when pulling the Atom XML files.

What I have been doing is just tweaking each user's config whenever the problem arises and then flushing the cache and repulling everything, and that has worked out well. Today, I finally went on the warpath a bit for Planet Larry, and just changed everyone's config who was using an Atom feed to use their RSS2 one instead. Plus, I globally set the config to ignore the "updated" tag in feeds (in case any Atom ones do creep in).

I guess I'll see what happens for now. Hopefully, less issues.

Edit: And, of course, after clearing the cache ... one gets through. Rawr.

Edit: That won't work either, it screws up LiveJournal posts.  Bleh.  Well, I think it's all fixed now, though Google Reader might be whacked for a bit ... but they're doing some caching on their end, too, not much I can do about that.

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.

Anyway, it's dead.  I can't believe it lasted this long, really.  It was a 22" (or so) CRT Dell monitor that I bought used from a surplus sale about five years ago for something like $40.  It always had this little nasty green tint overtone to it that could be mostly fixed by adjusting the other colors.  Aside from that, it worked great.

It was always a little too big for me, though.  Not the display size, but the wide load behind it.  I swear that thing weighs at least 80 pounds.  I hurt my back getting it off my desk this morning.  It certainly kept me from wanting to go to LAN parties.

I guess I'm finally gonna have to bite the bullet and get me a widescreen monitor.  I've been holding out on 4:3 displays as long as I could.  I remember when widescreen TVs were first coming out, and I totally scoffed at the idea and how strange it was to see everyone on TV stretched.  I swore I'd never get one (of course, this was many years ago).  I do remember seeing a Sony TV long ago that I wanted to get that wasn't 16x9 but instead was something like a 2.35 ratio ... basically, scope.  It was really awesome and I wanted to get *that* one, since I figured if you were gonna widescreen, go all the way!  I haven't seen it since, but I still swear I saw it on display at Circuit City a long time ago.

I found a nice Samsung monitor that I wanna get.  It's also 16x9.  I noticed that they sell monitors now that are 16x10 as well ... I found a really nice one in that ratio as well, but I can foresee having three sets of aspect ratios displays in my house would drive me mentally insane.

I still have one 4x3 TV in my house, it's an old 27" CRT TV, and it's awesome.  I fear that I'll someday replace it and go all widescreen in my house.  Fortunately, I'm already used to seeing stretched faces, and watching stuff in original format actually makes me think it looks wrong.  We'll see, though, I'm infamous for being stubborn and holding out.  That, or the same thing will probably happen ... that TV will die and I'll  reluctantly buy a replacement that's 6x the cost and 20x the quality, complaining all the way.

I totally forgot about it til just now, and this is the last weekend for the one in Utah, so I'm just doing a public service and sending out an announcement.

Here's the website: http://utahrenfest.com/

If you stop by, you'll probably see me there. I'll probably be wearing one of my Georgia Renaissance Festivals t-shirts from oh so many years ago and stuffing my face with as many turkey legs as I can get my hands on.

In some ways, it actually reminds me a lot of where I'm working at right now.  I started here about 9 months ago, and I love this job.  This is the first one since working at the movies (10 years ago) that I want to stick around for years.

When I was interviewing for the job, I met with the CEO and he said something that really stuck with me.  He said that the #1 reason someone will accept a new job is because of the payrate, but the #1 reason they will leave is because of cultural differences.  As a result, he said, they place a very high emphasis on corporate culture.

I was, of course, a little skeptical ... but after seeing how nice the place was, I thought he must be pretty serious.  Well, he was.  This place treats its employees incredibly nice, and in a lot of ways the culture reminds me working at the theaters.  The similiarity is that the environment is especially social (we're mostly a call center, sort of ... kind of a hybrid) so that people who are social and dynamic and easy going and fun to be around stay here and build up others.  When you walk around on the floor you just get a feeling of connectivity for everyone.  It's really cool, and pretty rare.

Anyway, I love my job, and I don't think I've ever said that since I worked at the movie theater so many years ago.

That said, the *schema* is actually complete and ready to go. It pretty much has been for a while, but yesterday I got around to doing some more optimizations. I also thought I had the Access ones cleaned up, but I had a few issues in there which have now been resolved. I still have a few nitpicks about it, but I'll probably let it slide.

So, downloads for the actual data are available right now for MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite 2 and 3, and Access 97, 2000 and 2002. You can get them here: http://spaceparanoids.org/nephi/lds-scriptures-3.0/

I still have a few formats to export to (CSV, XML, etc.), so I'm not finished, and then I need to write the documentation because the entire schema has changed since the 2.0 release series. The major change is that the data is completely normalized now. Another small bonus is I threw in a sample view there. Oh, and the obligatory bugfix is that I accidentally missed some of the text in one of the Doctrine and Covenants sections. Whoops.

Anyway, I'm tired of waiting for my perfect release to make it out the door, so at the very least, there's the raw data that everyone's going to want, anyway.

I'm glad that at least that's done!

The first reason is, I don't like "collection" packs. I prefer to buy stuff individually, and avoid them wherever possible (for movies, at least). Plus, it goes without saying that Star Trek V and Star Trek VI are painful to watch. The first four are the only ones worth watching, and I actually like Star Trek III quite a lot myself for some reason. Wrath of Khan is undeniable, of course. Ah, heck, I like em all.

Another reason is they didn't do such a great transfer on them. It looks like Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan is the only one that they went back to the original film and did an HD transfer. All the other ones, they just took a current digital copy and cleaned it up. Double meh.

The third reason is, this is Star Trek ... and Paramount has a long history of milking fans for all the money its worth by dangling a barebones release then coming out with a much better package later on in the game. Just look at Star Trek: The Original Series on DVD for an example. I think it's been released three times, and it just barely came out on Blu-Ray too.

So, me, I'll be a-waitin for the individual films. And a better HD transfer.

One thing is certainly for sure, though ... if TNG, DS9 or Voyager ever get Blu-Ray releases, you can bet your bippy I'm gonna snatch those up in no time flat. I've been watching Deep Space Nine on and off, and they really did not do a great job on the digital transfer -- they used a really low compression level for it, and I can always see blurring on it, even on my old 27" CRT (480i). That's pretty bad. By comparison, I've been watching season five of Voyager recently, and on my HDTV, the picture is still very nice. They did a good job on it.

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.

Anyway, writing a small GUI app to replace MythVideo for my needs seems like it'd be pretty simple.  It's nothing really more than a visual filesystem frontend to my multimedia library, with cover images to individual files and folders.

The thing that is really driving me, though, is that in spite of the simplicity of the basic functions, I am extremely picky on presentation, navigation and UI.  I'll never be able to pick up an "out of the box" media frontend package that is becoming so popular on the market now.  I just have so many ways that I want to organize and display the stuff that I'd never be able to live with a narrow set of parameters.  I don't have an interface just to watch videos.  Mine is setup so that I can watch an entire series of a TV show, have it resume playback from each indivual file by itself and in relation to each other.  I also have random playlists that I generate myself.  And then I categorize, tag and shuffle my files all around the place.  Plus I'm getting to add movies as well as MP3s -- not just music, but records, sometimes with accompanied video (kind of a slideshow effect).  Simple solutions just don't fit me.

So, I finally bought a Qt programming book online today, so I'll see where that takes me.  I don't know why I never really thought about trying to integrate learning C++ with a GUI language as well ... it just makes more sense, plus I have the example project that I can hack on.

And everytime I dive into C++ I just love it even more.  It's cryptic, it's confusing, it's extremely strict and barks at you if you do the slightest thing wrong.  I'm a real perfectionist when it comes to writing code that I intend to be reliable and I love how C++ just whips you into shape.

I've toyed with the idea of rewriting my DVD ripping scripts in C++, but I don't really see the point.  It'd be an idea, but not really a driven one.  I would, however, love to learn how to hack on libdvdread a bit to either fix some small bugs I've run into, or try to help me address some of the more rare issues that I've run into with my collection.  For instance, I got a bad DVD in a TV series the other day, and while my settop DVD player could kind of skip around it, dvdread absolutely choked and stopped reading.  Just little stuff like that would be fun to try and figure out if I could workaround.

Anyway, we'll see.  I picked up a copy of this book for $5.  The reviews don't look that great, but it might get me started a bit.  That'd be 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.

Actually, dang it, it looks like I'm splitting off into two possible scenarios *again* ... the other one I wanted to cover was a case of newer, recent media that has never been available commercially.  Lemme do the other one, first.

A great example of a category that covers both scenarios, though, would be abandonware.  Abandonware can be either computer games that were once released for personal computers, and so people obviously had physical copies, or ROMs for video games where the consumer would buy hardware, but couldn't duplicate it themselves.

For old computer games, that were once published and had a legal channel to purchase a copy, there is still the option of tracking down a copy somewhere, but it is usually difficult to do and cost prohibitive.  Collectors are willing to do it, because of the sense of ownership of owning an original piece of the production, but for people who just want to play the game, there is a demand without any marketed supply.

I've really waffled with the moral considerations of this one for a long time, and I personally don't have a clear cut decision on what I think is "right."  It seems obvious, though, that if there is the chance of getting a legal copy, even as a collector, that that would be the right thing to do, and in a lot of cases that is is what I've done.  I've hunted down copies of old games (LOOM comes to mind) that I never played but wanted to, and then once I had an actual copy, I'd feel justified in getting a digital one somewhere that I could run on an emulator (assuming I couldn't use the original disks for whatever reason ... usually because I don't have a floppy 5 1/4" drive).  But, I'll admit, I've also downloaded copies of games that I've wanted to try out just to see what I think of them as an attempt to demo it and see if it's worth my time to track down.  Generally, though, I'll either delete the copy once I've found it not worth my time or track down a copy once I decide it is.

Computer games is just one example though.  A much more modern one would be television shows and movies.  There are, for some reason or another, modern day shows on television that just never make it to DVD.  And I'm not talking about stuff from 20 years ago that I'm being nostalgic about, either, I'm talking about really recent shows from this decade.  One example, just off the top of my head, is an older show called "Still Standing" that is running in syndication right now on a couple of channels on TV late at night.  It's a great, hilarious, original family sitcom that I love watching, and if there were DVDs out, I'd most likely buy them.  It ran from 2002 to 2006, and hasn't seen so much as a blip on the radar of TV shows on DVD.  I have no idea why.

Now in a case like this, I'm also not sure what the "right" thing to do would be, but I'll at least share my own line of thinking on the matter.  This is my take -- that since they were originally designed for public consumption, and publicly aired at one time for anyone to see, anywhere, then I don't have any issues with downloading copies of them and watching them.  In my mind, it's just a case of extreme time-shifting.  I couldn't watch it 7 years ago, so I'm just now getting around to it.  It was originally free and public, and so how could there possibly be a harm to the market -- especially since there's no other way to watch them?

A second example is a crime drama that's being aired right now, called "Cold Case."  It's a show that I think is fun and worth watching, but it's not out on DVD either, and so if I want to watch them, I'm pretty much on my own again to find the archives since there's no market for them.  Another case of demand with no supply.  CBS' website does have some clips of the show (big whoop), but again, I don't understand the logic of not putting them all online somewhere ... aside from the infrastructure cost, of course.  It just doesn't make sense in my mind how studios can broadcast a show, for free consumption, and then have an issue when it is, technically, rebroadcast by being downloaded somewhere else.  Of course, I should also throw in that I don't mind having commercial breaks during those since I recognize that's their source of revenue.  Personally, though, I've been voluntarily ignorant of TV commercial influence since I was about 5, but that's a whole other story entirely.

A third example is of a show that started to release some DVD sets, but then stopped after the first season -- Malcolm in the Middle.  In that case, I do know what the issue is -- licensing.  Everyone who originally signed up now wants a bigger piece of the pie now that it's getting redistributed.  And, as a result, of course, it ends up in *zero* revenue versus any at all.  Once again it shows how boneheaded people can be with their rights.  It's seriously like little children who say if you can't play how they tell you to, then they're just going to spitefully take their toys and play by themselves, always ignorant of the fact that people adapt and do just as well *without them* and the missed opportunity is really the loner's.

Anyway, it's really interesting how "piracy" is creating the market and supplying the demand that is out there that businesses either cannot create or are not willing to invest time into.  It's rather interesting, really, that an ocean of people would willingly provide the infrastructure and shoulder the costs to share all this information, media and entertainment by themselves.  What's even more interesting is what people *will* do when there are legally licensed marketplaces to acquire the exact same stuff digitally (a la iTunes) -- they'll pay for it!

I don't really think it's fair to "blame" copyright owners for not seeing the demand and investing their futures into providing virtual marketplaces for all these digital goods.  After all, there is a risk in doing so.  But on the flipside, I also don't think it's reasonable for them to chase down scofflaws who are copying stuff when there's really no way to legally get it in the first place.  There needs to be a happy medium somewhere.  I have no idea what it is, though I have a few ideas -- a simple licensing framework website where the digital goods are hosted and sold ... kind of a cloud for cpoyrighted digital good or something, who knows.  I'm not a businessman, thank goodness, just a savvy consumer.  But I imagine that if the entry barrier into the marketplace was lower for investors to setup shop, that things would quickly streamline and we'd see "piracy" dwindle quite a lot.  I don't think people are being intentionally bad breaking copyright laws, I just see them as being reasonable and practical first.

In fact, that's where the real problems are created, when copyright and commercialism intersect and they don't exactly meet up.  Specifically, the question I want to ask is, what would be the right thing to do when a work has never commercially been available, or has fallen out of publication completely.

While the two situations are slightly different, they both deal in the same area -- archiving our public knowledge as a culture.  First, a throwback to an uncommon issue, one that I've personally run into quite a lot.

I'm a big fan of old time radio -- radio shows that were broadcast over the air a long, long time ago, in the 1930s, 40s and 50s.  There is, without a doubt, some really great stuff that is out there, an entirely dead medium for the most part, dramatized storytelling, that has been pretty much ignored since it's original broadcasts.  The problem is that this stuff is so old, and that recording this stuff for commercial use wasn't even a consideration in the commercial world back then.  It is, in fact, a miracle that recordings of this stuff even exists at all.  A lot of stuff was on the airwaves once, never to be heard again.

An analogy comparing today's technologies may be helpful.  Imagine that we had all our television broadcasts, satellite and movies as outlets to consume entertainment, but there was no way to record any of it.  No DVRs, no VCRs, no DVD players, personal video cameras, Blu-Ray, CDs, cassette tapes or DVDs.  The television show, live event or movie release would have its short day in the sun, its fifteen minutes of fame, and then disappear from the public mindset completely, and only live on in memory.  That's exactly what has happened here, with old time radio.  It was all produced with no expectation or option of being recorded and redistributed later.  It was flash-point entertainment.

Now one effect of there being no option for public recording and copying and such is that the question of what the copyright status of these old entertainment shows is largely in question, across the board, for the entire medium.  If there's no way to even create a copy, why bother with strict copyright laws or even securing a copyright in the first place?  As a result, the question of *who* owns the copyright on the original recordings is largely in question for almost all the series.  There have been cases where it's properly been tracked down and secured, but these are by far the minority.  And even then, the owners generally shoot themselves in the foot and insist that no-one can copy them without their permission, thus removing them from people's archives and getting passed over for the other stuff anyway.  It's ironic how people often exercise copyright law in an effort to prevent "piracy", only to ensure obscurity.

So, the question for this scenario is -- what's the gray area when there is no clear cut status on the copyright of a large part of media.  Is it okay to archive, download and share?  Most certainly, it's public domain, either because copyrights were never secured or re-applied for.  Either way, though, nearly all of it was never commercially packaged and released anyway, and so there's never been a legal way to obtain copies.

There are, of course, business enterprises out there who will sell you the recordings on cassette, CD, MP3 or otherwise, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the question of copyright has been resolved in those cases.  For instance, you can go look at archive.org for lots of old films that have been put in public domain, and still go buy them on Amazon.com on DVD from a range of distributors.  The fact that a lot of old time radio is out there, both commercially and free, indicates that it's clearly not a solid situation that has been resolved.  And I'm not talking about underground torrent, warez and other seedy sites that host this stuff, but rather lots of outlets that have been around for years that have this stuff for free, and haven't been shut down.  I realize that's a poor argument -- assuming that someone hasn't broken the law because they haven't been prosecuted -- but it seems to support my point that, if there's no way to get it through the more "proper," common commercial channels, it seems perfectly reasonable to just get it however you can.

Looks like I'm gonna have to split my second case up again, in another post.  This one's already gone a lot longer than I expected.

Oh, and for the record, I have a large collection of old time radio.