iPhone 3G S & AT&T

If you’re unlucky like me and happened to buy a new iPhone 3G with a contract less than 30 days from the release of the new one (on or after 20th of May), AT&T will allow you to either 1) Pre-order and pay for the new one now, then exchange the old for the new on the 19th when they arrive (you will have to pay a restocking fee which varies by location, in Chicago it’s about $40). 2) If you can find a new iPhone in stock at an AT&T store before the 30 days expire, you can just trade them (and once again pay the restocking fee) without having to front money like you do with the pre-order. 3) Have $100 credited to your wireless bill in the next cycle.

These all seem like reasonable options to me. I’m glad that AT&T has chosen to do the right thing and not screw the unlucky among us. There are a lot of rumors flying around and very little actual information about this, but i can absolutely assure you that what i’ve said is true. I’ve already preordered the new one (16GB) for $199. If you don’t believe me, just give your local AT&T store a call.

Lirc the pcHD5500 and E\/il

A couple days ago, (at least 100 years ago) i managed to break the ir receiver’s connector to my Hauppauge PVR-150 leading to Epic FAIL. I had the device and the remote working perfectly with lirc using the hauppauge driver that comes with lirc. Being the lazy person that i am, i’m very irritated in having to get up and walk to the keyboard near the TV to change channels or volume (or anything else) with MythTV.

Just when all seemed lost, i remembered that the pcHDTV card that i have also has an IR receiver. I remembered that when i purchased the card, this feature was unsupported, but i assumed being several years later that developers would be all over that. I was wrong. It seems like it can be done, but it’s certainly not a self-explanatory process. Hopefully my journey will be useful to others:

First off, all i really had to go on was this newsgroup thread from 2006: pcHDTV – Infrared Chip. It looks like very little to no work has been done in this area (which seems typical of the pcHDTV team).

The first thing that must be done is to modify the kernel source slightly:

if you look at the cx88-input.c file in ./linux-2.6.X-whatever/drivers/media/video/cx88 in the kernel sources, you can see two places where there’s a line:

case CX88_BOARD_HAUPPAUGE_HVR1100:

In both places add the following line directly under the previous:
case CX88_BOARD_PCHDTV_HD5500:

now recompile:
make clean
make modules

I’ll let you decide how you want to get the new cx8800.ko and cx88xx.ko files into the tree. (I did it the “bad” way, but technically you should completely regenerate the kernel and module tree.) Whatever you do, don’t forget:

depmod -a

I’m using Gentoo, so my instructions from this point are specific to this distribution. If you’re using a different distro, your mileage may very. Next edit: /etc/make.conf add the line (or change the existing line) to be:

LIRC_DEVICES="devinput"

Now (as root, of course) recompile lirc.
emerge -v lirc

Here’s where it starts to get a little dodgy: You need to edit the keyboard entry in /etc/X11/xorg.conf add the lines:


Option "Dev Phys" "isa0060/serio0/input0"
Option "CoreKeyboard"
Option "Protocol" "evdev"


into Section "InputDevice"

The reason for doing this is because X11 will detect the input device that will be created (/class/input/input5 your input# may be different) as being a keyboard. The arrow keys and the enter key will work, but none of the other keys on the remote. To have lirc working properly, we don’t want X using the remote as a keyboard as well. The above lines explicitly specify the keyboard by bus ID. You can check which device your keyboard is be running:
cat /proc/bus/input/devices

At this point, reboot your machine. This will allow the newly created cx88 and lirc kernel modules to be loaded.

This is where i currently am. I’ll be updating this as i proceed in the debugging process

~~~-edits: 4:08PM CST 1/3/09

Okay 180 degree turn in strategy here. It appears that the kbd driver is somehow being assigned to the ir device. It seems when most other people have this problem it’s the Hardware Abstraction Layer of Linux, but i don’t have HAL installed, so it must be something similar, but not quite the same. Current suspect is udev. It appears that it has all to do with lircd being able to “lock” the input. Clearly this isn’t happening. It seems like all the codes in /etc/lircd.conf may need to change because of the different input interface. Also the way the kernel module works it assigned keycode to most of the bottens on the remote anyway.

It just so happens there’s another very small, simple program called inputlirc It’s very simple, but it interfaces with all the apps that lircd does, but take only one configuration file (since the buttons are already assigned codes, there’s not need for two set of files).

The program can be compiled easily by checking it out of subversion:

svn co http://svn.sliepen.eu.org/inputlirc/trunk/
cd trunk
make


The program created is the entire inputlirc system. Further updates (and the .lircrc file) i end up using once i’m done.

Web pages with useful or related information:

http://www.pchdtv.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1529
http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/LIRC
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=985311
http://parker1.co.uk/mythtv_tips.php
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=678835

The Hitachi Struggle

I just got a 500 GB Hitachi Deskstar P7K500 HDP725050GLA360 to put into my MythTV box, effectively tripling my video storage, which would be nice with my newfound ability to record WSMH-HD (FOX 66).

I got all excited today when the package arrived, think today would be the day that i upgrade. I upgraded MythTV a week or so ago in anticipation so that i could have multiple storage drives which MythTV 21 has the ability to do without using LVM.

The first problem i ran into was that this drive is that it didn’t have an LP4 connector, and my power supply doesn’t have any SATA power cables. So i had to jump back on Newegg and grab a converter (which nobody locally has), of course shipping is three times as expensive than the part itself, plus i have to wait for the damn thing to get here.

Next is going to be the hard part. My SATA controller only supports 1.5Gb/s, and appearantly some older controllers don’t have the ability to negotiate the data rate down from 3.0Gb/s to 1.5Gb/s

from Wikipedia

According to the hard drive manufacturer Maxtor, motherboard host controllers using the VIA and SIS chipsets VT8237, VT8237R, VT6420, VT6421L, SIS760, SIS964 found on the ECS 755-A2 which was manufactured in 2003, do not support SATA 3 Gbit/s drives. To address interoperability problems, the largest hard drive manufacturer Seagate/Maxtor have added a user-accessible jumper-switch known as the Force 150, to switch between 150 MB/s and 300 MB/s operation.^[3] Users with a SATA 1.5 Gbit/s motherboard with one of the listed chipsets should either buy an ordinary SATA 1.5 Gbit/s hard disk, buy a SATA 3 Gbit/s hard disk with the user-accessible jumper, or buy a PCI or PCI-E card to add full SATA 3 Gbit/s capability and compatibility. Western Digital uses jumper setting called “OPT1 Enabled” to force 150 MB/s data transfer speed.

I have a VT8237, but it’s not the SATA controller, it’s the PCI bridge. From /sbin/lspci:

VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8237 PCI bridge [K8T800/K8T890 South]

The SATA controllers are:

00:0d.0 RAID bus controller: Silicon Image, Inc. SiI 3114 [SATALink/SATARaid] Serial ATA Controller (rev 02)
00:0f.0 RAID bus controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VIA VT6420 SATA RAID Controller (rev 80)

The VT6420 isn’t supposed to work (but that’s the RAID controller), The SI 3114 IS supposed to work. I figure i’ll plug the drive in to the SATA connector that’s NOT part of the RAID controller.

SO. . . is this thing going to work or not? That is the question.

If it doesn’t, there are two things i can do. 1 will probably work, but is a massive pain in the ass: Take the drive to somebody who has a SATA II controller and use the drive’s software ftool to set the drive to run at 1.5Gb/s. OR 2 the drive has was appears to be a jumper (or some unknown connector), i’m hopeing that maybe, JUST MAYBE this is a jumper to fallback the speed to 1.5Mb/s. (either that or it’ll short the drive out) Once i get the power converter i’ll update my progress.

Update 8/6/2008~~

After receiving the power adapter, i plugged the drive into the Si 3114 RAID controller, and low and behold the drive works perfectly.  It appears that this controller may have a slower interface to the PCI bus than the VIA controller, but it works, and it’s fast enough for MythTV (at least at the moment).  I haven’t tried the VIA controller, mainly because i don’t want to fuck with that “jumper” (or maybe it’s not a jumper, who knows, it’s not in the documentation).  Anyway, with the Silicon Images controller it was a plug and play issue.  YEA!!!

Creating high quality DVD Rips in h.264 format

This is test 1 to get the absolute best rip of a movie on dvd encoded into an MPEG4 format with a size <1G.

The first test is on the movie Mallrats

This fixes the 3:2 pulldown (telecine) problem when movies are converted from 24fps (in the theater) to 30fps (on your tv) with the

 -vf pullup, softskip

which must be done before any cropping and

-ofps 24000/1001

which fixes framerate

I’m also using the h.265 because it’s new and shiny, not because i know anything about it. I’m doing 2 pass just like i would with XVid.
First pass:

mencoder dvd://1 -vf pullup,softskip,crop=704:464:8:6 -ofps 24000/1001 \
 -oac mp3lame -lameopts br=192 -ovc x264 -x264encopts bitrate=1024:pass=1 -o /dev/null

Second Pass:

mencoder dvd://1 -vf pullup,softskip,crop=704:464:8:6 -ofps 24000/1001 \
 -oac mp3lame -lameopts br=192 -ovc x264 -x264encopts bitrate=1024:pass=2 -o /mnt/external/Media/Movies/Mallrats.avi

The picture looks great, it actually looked really good when i didn’t specify a bitrate and it came out somewhere around 600 kbps.

The problems so far seem to be that the audio bitrate is too low, i don’t understand why the br=192 flag isn’t getting picked up, i think it ended up being 44kbps which is too low, i’d also like to turn the volume up a bit more. I’m also still looking for more options to tweak to get the absolute BEST conversion available.

Once it’s perfected, then we do Trainspotting again.

Update: 5:17 (6/14/09)

Wow, i did an encoding of Mallrats in both high-bitrate xvid(~1500kbps) and low-bitrate x264(~940kbps), the x.264 looks vastly superiour. Supsequently i encoded an episode of Nova which was broadcast and recorded at 1080i from 28.1

I did a 2 pass encode:

mencoder /mnt/mythtv/1038.nuv -vf scale=1024:576 -af volume=18 -oac mp3lame \
-lameopts br=192 -ovc x264 -x264encopts pass=1 -o /dev/null

and

mencoder /mnt/mythtv/1038.nuv -vf scale=1024:576 -af volume=18 -oac mp3lame \
 -lameopts br=192 -ovc x264 -x264encopts pass=2 -o /mnt/external/out.avi

Which took a 6GB input file and the output was 886MB. I scaled it down to 1024×576 (which is still 16:9) because the monitor on my Myth box currently is 1024×768, so it’s really the largest resolution that i’ll need in the near future. I also added the “volume=18″ because PBS broadcasts always seem to have very low volume, and this jacks it up pretty good. I’m still trying to perfect it, and once i do, i’m going to do Trainspotting.

After that we get to encoding full length movies so they can be played back on my palms (with MMPlayer).

Special keys on my Thinkpad R60

I’ve been using Gentoo on my notebook for the past year or so which is why my HOWTO wiki on Thinkwiki has started to fall into disrepair. Anyway, i got something working (which was really not a problem, but just something i hadn’t gotten around to.) The special keys are now (almost) fully functional.

I created the file ~/.Xmodmap

with the contents:

keycode 115 = F13
keycode 162 = XF86AudioPlay
keycode 164 = XF86AudioStop
keycode 144 = XF86AudioPrev
keycode 153 = XF86AudioNext
keycode 117 = XF86Calculator
keycode 234 = F20
keycode 233 = F19

and then ran:

xmodmap ~/.Xmodmap

for now i’m just concerned about keycodes 234 and 233 which are the forward page and backward page keys, just above their respective arrow key. Keycode 115 is the right-click properties menu, but it seems to be tripping something in KDE that is making it difficult for me to get the key to do anything. I used F13 and F14 because there’s no chance of a collision, and i know that they don’t already have a function assigned to them.

I then installed the extension Firefox extension Keyconfig and additional buttons for keyconfig extension.

After restarting, by setting the F19 and F20 to be the keys mapped to the function f4kc_PrevTab and f4kc_NextTab respectively i can now flip through all my open tabs in Firefox with these previously inert keys.

Success!!!

Knoppix on a usb flash drive – Part 3

Well, i’ve managed to eliminate all the other possibilities besides the Sony service partition on the flash card.  It looks like it might have something like that,  but it doesn’t show up in fdisk.  It also appears that (at least without Vista) there is no way to remove it.  (seems like it might fuck up \/\/1/\/D0Z3 \/1$+A) so Sony provides a utility to remove this, but the program can only be run with Vista which, of course, i don’t have.  Well, now i just need to see if i can return this damn Sony flash card and get a Lexar Firefly instead;  i’ve had nothing but good luck with these, plus they’re really small.

Knoppix on a usb flash drive – Part 2

Well i tried installing it on my 1GB flash drive (Verbatim) So that’s

750M on /dev/sda1 FAT 16

250M on /dev/sda2 ext2 (for persistant disk image)

It worked. . . now that makes the fact that the Sony 4GB flash drive doesn’t work even more unusual.

Possible causes:

-on the sony flash card there may be a hidden partition with Sony software that’s preventing the boot

if there was a partition, it’s long gone, so i suspect that this wasn’t the problem

-might have something to do with the 4GB drive geometry

-could have something to do with the extra FAT32 partition on the Sony

-ran syslinux -sf /dev/sda1 first on Verbatim Drive (and used rsync and used different copy order)

-Sony memory stick may simply not be bootable due to other unforseen limitations.

Knoppix on a USB flash drive

I’ve been trying to install the Knoppix 5.1.1 on my Sony 4GB flash drive with the following configuration:
(my flash drive mounts as sdb)

/dev/sdb1 – FAT16 <750MB> (partition with Knoppix on it)

/dev/sdb2 – ext2 <250MB> (partition for persistent image)

/dev/sdb3 – FAT32 <~3GM> (additional storage for Linux and WinD0Ze)

I’ve been following the instructions on this page:

USB KNOPPIX 5.1.1 persistent install from Linux

and this page:

Bootable USB Key

(or at least a hybrid of the two documents)

So far. . . .no luck. I’m going to try it again on my 1GB flash drive for proof of concept since i have had other linux distros on it using syslinux. If this works, then i’ll have to figure out what’s preventing it from working on the 4GB flash drive.

persistant X Server host rules

We11 i’m certainly not f33ling v3ry 1337 +0day; i still haven’t figured out how to solve the damn xhost problem. I have a clue though. I have found that this persistent behavior is normally configured through /etc/X0.hosts

I say normally because i’ve found that Gentoo sometimes works in quirky ways in terms of it’s general adherence to Linux principles. Anyhow, i have no idea the syntax of this file since it doesn’t exist on any of my systems (Gentoo, Slackware). Anyway, i’m fucking around with it, maybe i’ll sort it out here when i have a chance.

Turn the display off at night

I usually fall asleep watching MythTV, but when the program ends, it leaves me with a blue screen on all night long. In addition to makeing it more difficult to sleep, it’s definitely shortening the life of my LCD monitor. Anyway, my quest was to be able to use cron to turn the monitor off (since MythTV turns dpms off and i couldn’t find a way around this.) I think i’ve finally succeeded: i just stuck this stupid little script:

#!/bin/bash

export DISPLAY=:0
/usr/bin/xset dpms force off

in a file called /usr/local/bin/monitoroff.sh

which is sudo chmod +x  /usr/local/bin/monitoroff.sh

This is, of course after having run the

xset +local:

command.

I’m currently trying to figure out exactly where i need to drop that xset +local so that this is default. I need it on my notebook and my MythTV box.

On my notebook, so it can prompt for fingerprint entry upon attempting to log into kde at startup (right now it’s a bonus “feature” that only i know that only the fingerprint scanner will allow a successful login into KDE) On the consoles, the prompt is in text, but before KDE starts up and before i can issue the command manually, this kinda hacked screen saver and my initial fingerprint prompt are not going to work until i figure out exactly where this actually goes. . . further updates as events warrent.