weekend multimedia notes

I’ve been spending part of the weekend working out small annoyances in my myth setup, trying to get it inching closer to my “perfect” setup.  I’m actually really close now, minor stuff is all that’s left.

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.

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