New Years A/V cleanup

Posted by Scott Laird Wed, 05 Jan 2005 03:33:02 GMT

As part of the 4-day weekend that work gave us for New Year’s weekend, I spent some time cleaning and rationalizing the A/V system in our bedroom. Since we bought the projector a couple months ago, we’ve had 30-foot long audio and video cables snaking between the ceiling-mounted projector and the receiver and TiVo that were sitting on the floor right below the projector image. There had been a cabinet there that held them, but it got in the way of the projected image, and we couldn’t move them very far without running into the limits of our satellite cable.

The receiver wiring itself was a total rat’s nest, with TiVo, satellite receiver, and DVD player cables all tied together in a knot with a bunch of unused speaker wire. Since we cancelled the satellite and extracted all of the video from the TiVo, they could both be removed from the pile. Similarly, there was an old RCA DVD player–since we’re using MythTV for DVDs, we could remove it, too. Once we were done removing hardware, we were left with nothing but the receiver and the PC that runs MythTV. Since we weren’t tied to the cable jack in the wall any more, I moved the receiver closer to the projector, shortened the audio and video cables, and then re-ran longer speaker wires. Finally, I wired up rear speakers–the first time since 1997 that I’ve had rear speakers connected to any receiver I own. I also took the time to cable-tie the projector wires and discreetly stick them to the wall. That keep the projector from swiveling slightly ever time something bumps the cables, which makes for a more stable image.

Finally, I dragged the Xbox upstairs and wired it into the projector. Amazingly enough, in the whole time we’ve owned the projector, we hadn’t used it with the Xbox once. It works okay, but the interlacing is kind of nasty and the Xbox’s output looks fuzzy when it’s that big; I’m probably going to buy the Xbox component video kit, a component video to VGA cable for the projector, and a cheap 2-port KVM switch for switching the video input on the projector. That should give me a better image, plus the ability to use 720p on the handful of Xbox games that support it.

My one remaining job is to find a cheap IR transmitter for the PC and then program it to turn the projector off and on. Does lirc support any cheap USB IR transmitters? I notice that they have the IR codes for InFocus projectors on their web site. Given the codes and a transmitter, it should only take a couple minutes to get the PC to control the projector’s power.

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De-TiVoing myself

Posted by Scott Laird Mon, 03 Jan 2005 17:42:10 GMT

After all of the effort that I’ve went through over the years to try to sell the things to friends and family, it feels odd to be unplugging my TiVo. Now that we’ve turned off our satellite TV service, though, there’s no new content flowing onto the TiVo, which makes it a lot less interesting. All we’re left with is 75 GB of old stuff that we’d like to get around to watching sooner or later.

Fortunately, TiVo hacking has continued to move on since I first added a bigger hard drive to my first TiVo over 4 years ago. Using the tools discussed on the dealdatabase.com TiVo hacking forums, I’m currently extracting all 75 GB worth of programming from an old TiVo and putting it onto a 120 GB drive that I had sitting around. Then, once that’s done, I’ll use mencoder to re-encode them into something a bit more modern then MPEG-2, probably XviD. This will make it trivial to play things back using MythTV, which is really the point of the whole exercise. While MythTV has its problems, it’s pretty good at playing back pre-encoded video, so I won’t miss that aspect of the TiVo experience.

Once that’s done, I’ll probably put the old TiVo up on ebay. I’ll be sad to see it go, but time and technology move on.

I guess I find it kind of ironic that I’m doing this on the same day that TiVo finally officially announces their TiVoToGo service. So, if my Series 2 TiVo was still working, then I could use it to stream DRM-ified video to a small number of Windows systems. If I had any Windows systems. So, instead of doing it to official way, I guess I’m just cutting out the middleman and doing it myself. As usual.

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Turning off the TV, 2005-style

Posted by Scott Laird Thu, 30 Dec 2004 01:44:42 GMT

I finally called today to disconnect our Dish Network service. It only took 15 minutes on hold to get through to them, which wasn’t quite as bad as I’d feared. Still, the process raised the age-old question again: does hiding the “cancel my service” option really keep people from canceling?

This seems to be a phase that everyone with small kids goes through–“we’re going to stop watching so much TV and just turn the darned thing off.” My parents tried it once or twice, as have friends, siblings, and in-laws. Inevitably, people seem to turn it back on after a year or so, but they never seem to really regret it.

Watching less random TV is good, but mostly we’re trying to avoid paying $50/month when all we really watch are movies and things that are available on broadcast TV. So, the plan is to pick up a PCI HDTV tuner and use it to grab just the handful of shows that we care to see. I already have MythTV running at home, so adding a HD card to the existing setup shouldn’t be that hard (heh–everything with MythTV is harder then you’d expect), and I expect that watching HD resized to fit an 800x600 projector will look vastly better then the SD Satellite→Analog→TiVo→Analog→Projector video that we’re used to now.

Anyway, we’ll see. We’re sitting on at least 2 months worth of DVDs that we’ve never seen, plus a ton of subtitled anime, and I’d like to have more time to read, anyways.

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TV Pilots via BitTorrent?

Posted by Scott Laird Tue, 21 Dec 2004 16:40:49 GMT

I’ve noticed over the past few weeks that most popular TV shows are available via BitTorrent. They’re generally edited to remove commercials. They’re frequently downscaled from HDTV sources, which means that their quality is fantastic. Modern video codecs can compress a 45 minute show into around 350 MB, which BitTorrent can download in the background in a matter of hours. Better yet, the very nature of BitTorrent means that the more users downloading a given file, the better the available bandwidth, because each downloaded copy is also available for upload; it’s not uncommon to see BitTorrent clients start sharing pieces of downloaded files within seconds of the download starting. This means that large files can be widely shared without a massive investment in download bandwidth.

According to the news this week, Hollywood has finally noticed BitTorrent and is moving to stop the rampant sharing of their property. I’m amazed that it’s taken them so long to get involved.

However, in the midst of their attack, I think they may have missed an opportunity. Hollywood and the TV networks produce a lot of content annually, and quite a bit of that is really just advertising. Hollywood trailers are really just ads for the full-length movie. Most TV show pilots are ads for the rest of the series. They’re teasers, intended to hook viewers and get them to pay (either in movie tickets or eyeball time) for the full product. In both cases, the media companies have produced copyrighted works that they really want people to watch, even if they aren’t directly compensated for the experience. The more widely they’re distributed, the more effective they are. This should lead directly to profits on the “real” product–the movie or TV series involved.

So, logically, media companies could come out ahead by producing sharable versions of their trailers and pilots, and then going ahead and sharing them themselves. With BitTorrent, they’d even have decent download statistics–they’d know how many people had downloaded things.

Of course, I don’t see this happening anytime soon. First, the last thing that the media companies want to do is to tell people “go install a BitTorrent client.” Actually, that’s the second-to-last thing–the last thing they want to do is to legitimize P2P filesharing. Even if they can get past those two issues, and get over the conceptual hurdles that follow them (”Download TV? That’s what pirates do, not media companies. We don’t do that.”), they’d still be left with a relatively small market–I doubt that there are more then a million people out there downloading and watching TV shows.

It’s an interesting opportunity for someone, though. First, the first company to do this will get an enormous PR boost. Second, there’s no real limit on how many different versions of a show they can distribute–they could do full HDTV, 640x480, and smaller sizes, all the way down to versions for mobile devices. The mobile aspect is another PR opportunity, and possibly even a VC opportunity.

So, while I don’t see this happening soon, and I certainly don’t see widespread adoption of this sort of thing by Hollywood, I’d be amazed if someone doesn’t take it up within the next couple years, even if it’s just for the PR burst.

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More MythTV

Posted by Scott Laird Wed, 01 Dec 2004 05:04:25 GMT

I made a bit more MythTV progress today. DVD playing now works perfectly. I had had three problems:

  1. Audio was really quiet. After upgrading mplayer, I decided that this was really an issue with my receiver–it was decoding analog Dolby Surround correctly, but it wasn’t really configured for my speakers. A little bit of fiddling and it’s acceptable, if still a bit quiet. The reference source that I was using for comparisons is really loud–the meter on the receiver is peaking out all the time, while Finding Nemo (my DVD test today) is really just about where it should be.
  2. Mplayer was dropping frames while playing DVDs, but DVD rips played just fine. DMA wasn’t enabled on my DVD drive. Once I fixed that, it became perfect.
  3. I couldn’t eject DVDs without opening up a shell and umounting /dev/cdrom. I’m not sure what was up here, but something in KnoppMyth was automounting /dev/cdrom every few seconds. I commented out the entry in /etc/fstab, and everything seems okay–I can still play DVDs, but the eject button on the drive works now.

At this point, MythTV is an acceptable DVD player for me. It still isn’t perfect–it takes too many button pushes on the remote to start playing, and the remote buttons aren’t mapped quite right. In other words, it’s still kind of complex, but it works fine once you get through the complexity.

On the other hand, the image is stunning on the projector. I think the jump from NTSC DVD player to VGA DVD player is almost as big as the jump from VHS to NTSC DVD, at least in my setup.

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A few days with MythTV

Posted by Scott Laird Mon, 29 Nov 2004 23:14:58 GMT

As I mentioned briefly before, I’ve been setting up a MythTV system at home. MythTV is a Linux-based open-source PVR system. Used properly, you’ll end up with something TiVo-like. Used improperly, you’ll end up with a massive headache and a sore throat from screaming at your computer.

I should start with a bit of background. I have two TiVos, and I love them, mostly. I loved them a lot more before the hardware on one box started flaking out, and before they started sucking up to the TV networks. What I really want is a way to record the TV shows that I watch and then share them between our two TVs, so I can watch the same show on either TV, and then delete it when I’ve finished watching it. With newer TiVos, you can copy shows between TiVos, but it’s just a copy–if I record it upstairs, then I can copy it downstairs and watch it, but I’ll need to delete it in both places once I’m done with it. I’d also like to be able to listen to music and watch DVDs on the same hardware; the ability to rip DVDs would be nice. I’d like the ability to expand my storage is critical–I have roughly 1 TB of disk space in my house, and I’d like to be able to use as much of that as possible for storing video. Finally, and really most importantly, I’d like to have the ability to fix things when they break–I haven’t had any luck with that with TiVo–one system crashes daily, and there’s nothing that I can do to fix it, short of spending hours sitting on hold with their tech-support system.

What I really want is the TV equivalent of iTunes–I want to be able to take the big mound of DVDs that I have sitting around, RIP them, and move them to the basement, next to the big mound of CDs that I used to listen to. I want to be able to pick and choose from upcoming TV events and add them to the library, just like DVDs. I want to be able to watch the movies on any TV in my house without remembering where it’s stored or worrying about the kids scratching the fragile little things. I’d really like it to Just Work, just like iTunes and the iPod, or like TiVo usually does. And I’d like it to work for *me*, not for network companies, record producers, or movie studios.

The closest that I can come to this today is MythTV. It supports recording TV, playing and ripping DVDs, playing MP3s, and displaying digital images. It networks nicely. It’s open-source and expandable.

It’s also a complete bitch to install. Once it’s installed, using it isn’t exactly a walk in the park, either.

I’m certainly not afraid of Linux in any of its incarnations, but I’d had a number of people tell me what a pain MythTV is to install, so I decided to try KnoppMyth, a Linux distribution customized for MythTV. It’s based on Debian, my favorite Linux distribution, and it comes with MythTV pre-installed and configured. I figured it wouldn’t be too hard to use KnoppMyth to take MythTV for a quick spin. I even had a spare small-form-factor system with a Celeron 2.4, a Bt878-based TV capture card, and a DVD drive sitting around.

Here’s a short list of what went wrong:

  1. The KnoppMyth installer locked up in the middle of the install when I told it to do an automatic install.
  2. When I tried again with a manual install, it didn’t default to installing onto any particular hard drive partition. I had to monkey with it briefly to tell it to install onto the boot partition that I’d just created. If I skipped through with just the defaults, I got an error later on when it tried to format a drive named ‘’.
  3. Once it had finished installing, even though it had formatted two partitions for /myth and /cache, it failed to mount them. This resulted in errors that I had to fix by manually editing /etc/fstab.
  4. The MythTV setup procedure consists of an xterm that asks a handful of questions. Without a mouse, it’s non-obvious how to select the xterm so you can type into it (Alt-Tab, space, if I recall correctly), and then it’s not obvious what to do–I had to re-run the installer repeatedly to get my channel listings correct, for example, because nothing said that I needed to go to http://labs.zap2it.com/, register, and get a username and password.
  5. Once MythTV was running, I was still unable to access the DVD drive at all–putting in a disk and hitting ‘Play DVD’ would cause the menu to flicker slightly, but it didn’t play the DVD or return an error. A bit of digging showed that the /dev/scd* devices weren’t owned by the cdrom group, so MythTV couldn’t access them. Once that was fixed, DVDs played correctly (plus or minus CSS problems, but we’ll ignore that little issue–it’s political, not technical).
  6. DVD ripping complained about the transcoding daemon not running, and never seemed to actually do anything.
  7. Dropping video files into /myth/video didn’t seem to make videos visible to MythTV.
  8. Live TV video worked, but recording TV produced files that were way too dim to view. Live TV audio didn’t work, even though it should have been available directly from the Bt878 decoder chip, but loading the btaudio driver doesn’t seem to produce any effect that I can see.

Most of these are just stupid integration issues; there’s no reason for them to exist in any even slightly polished product. KnoppMyth is at version 4r5; you’d think the CD ownership settings would have been fixed by now, right?

At this point, it had taken me about a half day to get MythTV to work, and all I could do was watch broadcast TV via rabbit ears and play DVDs. I could have accomplished the same thing by plugging the rabbit ears into a TV and buying an $18 DVD player (that was the cheapest “black friday” ad that I saw this year).

I probably would have dropped the project if an InFocus X1a projector hadn’t fallen into my hands. The InFocus is a 800x600 DLP projector that works with composite, svideo, HDTV, or VGA sources, but it’s happiest with VGA. So I had a project–mate the MythTV box to the projector. A few quick tests with MythTV’s DVD player shows that it looks way better then the same DVD via NTSC from my old RCA DVD player. Finding Nemo was gorgeous.

So, here’s all that I’ve had to do to get this to work right:

  1. Go to Fry’s on Black Friday to find a 25-foot stereo 1/8” plug to RCA cable.
  2. Pick up the cheapest USB remote control gizmo they had there.
  3. Recompile LIRC to support the StreamZap remote that Fry’s had sent me. This required re-creating KnoppMyth’s patched kernel so that the StreamZap patches would build.
  4. Figure out how to debug LIRC problems. Hint: use irw, because strace on lircd is pointless.
  5. Set up key mappings for MythTV and mplayer for the new remote. Half of the keys aren’t mapped to anything right now, because I can’t find the right feature to map onto.
  6. Set up NFS so I can store videos and music on my home file server.
  7. Copy 15 GB of music out of iTunes and into MythTV.
  8. Point MythTV to my home picture library.
  9. Upgrade like half of the software on the box to get MythPhone and Torrentocracy to compile. I ended up hand-patching Torrentocracy, and it still crashes MythTV whenever I try to use it.
  10. Figure out how to import videos. It turns out to be trivial–just copy the file into /myth/video, then go to the “Utilities/Setup” menu, then “Video Manager,” and then edit the metadata so the video has a reasonable name. Once you’ve done that, it’ll show up in the menu under “Media Library”/”Watch Videos”. Yes, this *is* a new meaning of the word “trivial” that you haven’t seen before.

Things that still don’t work:

  1. Playing DVDs or DVD rips with AC3 audio produces really quiet audio.
  2. Ripping DVDs doesn’t always work right. Of my two test disks, one just fails silently in the middle of the process, while the other seems to work, but has video from the “making of” feature combined with audio from the main feature.
  3. Recording TV is still broken, I think.
  4. TV audio is still broken.
  5. Playing DVDs results in frame drops, which produces jerky video. Playing the same DVD ripped to the hard drive works fine, which leads me to suspect DVD read speed issues.
  6. I can’t skip chapters in DVDs, but I can fast forward and rewind several minutes at a time.
  7. DVD menus don’t work.
  8. Image gallery slideshows are weird–they overlay the image on top of the menu’s background, when a black background would make a lot more sense. The image gallery in general doesn’t look quite right, but that might just be a theme issue.

So, what does work?

  1. I can play DVDs with audio, if I turn the stereo up really loud.
  2. I can watch live TV, if I can lip-read.
  3. I can listen to MP3s.
  4. I can watch .avi files that have come from various sources.
  5. I can browse JPEGs.
  6. I can do all this using a remote control instead of a keyboard.

Not a whole lot in other words. But I’m making progress–I’ve had a couple suggestions that might fix the DVD audio problem, and I suspect that the DVD ripping problem isn’t much harder. Once that’s done, at the very least I’ll be able to import a handful of the kids’ shows and have something useful.

I have a huge usability rant to make here, but I’m going to put it off a few days–I actually have some hope for MythTV, ever though it’s proving to be a massive time sink. It’ll take a few days to get all of my ducks in order, though–I need to finish a couple minor projects and do a few little tests. Fundamentally, I want to believe that MythTV can be fixed, but it’s so far from usable today that I’m amazed that it has the number of users that it does.

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MythPhone

Posted by Scott Laird Wed, 03 Nov 2004 21:41:25 GMT

I keep telling myself that sooner or later, I’ll install MythTV at home to replace one of my ailing TiVos, but I’ve never really got around to it. I like the idea of an open, networked PVR that I can easily fix when it breaks.

During today’s semi-monthly visit to the MythTV web site, I noticed a new feature: MythPhone. It’s a SIP-based videophone for MythTV. It’s new, and probably doesn’t work right, but it’d be a nice addition to my home Asterisk setup.

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Torrentocracy

Posted by Scott Laird Wed, 18 Aug 2004 04:32:44 GMT

One of these days, I’m going to get around to setting up a MythTV box at home. I love my TiVos, but I lost another hard drive on the living room box last week, and there are so many things that they Just Can’t Do. Like rip all of the kids’ DVDs so I can put them in storage, next to the CDs, so the kids can’t scratch them anymore. Like burning programs onto DVDs. Like playing AAC-encoded audio. Like sharing video between units in a reasonable manner.

I found another thing to add to the list today: TiVos can’t download programs via BitTorrent, either. Go check out Torrentocracy–it’s a MythTV plugin that lets you download content directly onto your TV. Deeply cool concept, but I don’t have any way to test the execution yet. Give me a few more months, and I’ll report back.

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The joys of exploding TiVos

Posted by Scott Laird Tue, 09 Mar 2004 23:18:43 GMT

I love my TiVos. I have two, one for each TV. I can’t cope with TV without them anymore. I suppose I’m a TiVoaddict.

With the addiction comes a fear, though–what happens when they die? How do I cope? Even if they replace it, I still lose all of the shows that I’ve saved and never quite got arond to watching. Worse, the replacement won’t know me the way that the old one does. I’ll have to re-train it, adding all of the season passes for all of my favorite shows. I’ll have to tell it that I love “Mythbusters” and hate Pokemon. I’ll have to convince it that I’m not gay.

Unfortunately, the day that I’ve been fearing for over three years has arrived. I always assumed that the upstairs TiVo would go first. It’s an old 14-hour Series 1 TiVo, as old as they get. I added an extra hard drive as soon as I got it, so it’s been spinning away for over 3 years, completely out of warranty. But no, it was the other one that died. The pristine 60-hour Series 2, just over a year old, that started locking up. Sometimes it’ll make it a day or two, and sometimes it’ll lock up again before it finishes rebooting. It’s frustrating, and it’s getting increasingly useless for watching TV.

I’ll call their tech support people when I get a chance. It took most of an hour on hold last time, and I don’t have time for that right now. I’m currently casting a lustful eye over the MythTV boxes that a couple friends have built. They aren’t as well-designed as TiVo, but since it’s free software running on Linux running on a normal PC, they’re easy to expand, they network well, and I can fix them myself when they break.

I just don’t know if I have the heart to abandon my TiVos, though.

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