what i’m working on

I figure it’s time for another post that details just what I’ve been poking at recently.  Work has been really busy for me, and I’ve got a lot going on at home to, so I’ve been bordering on burned out for the last month, but somehow I’m still chugging along.  If anything, that explains the half-coherent posts I’ve been spilling out lately … they are more afterthoughts of notes rather than good posts.  Ah, well.  I figure at times it’s better to just get something documented at all.

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.