[Luna] Luna Digest, Vol 17, Issue 4

[Andrew Roazen]

Kyle wrote:
> Andrew,
> Well to continue from your first response (that just brought up more 
> questions), can this be done in one night at USGS? 
The worst two offenders on time are bandwidth (Myth doesn't recompile 
the kernel, but it uses the kernel source to compile a few parts, and 
Ubuntu cheerfully downloads the kernel source for every platform Debian 
supports rather than the three Ubuntu does) and CPU speed (Hyams thinks 
ffmpeg can be compiled in 15 minutes. On a 450MHz CPU, that's more like 
two hours. Myth0.19 is about the same).
> And the IR receiever, can that be added/tweaked later (or should  I 
> find one here in town/ order one now)?
Dirty little secret: Whether it's Myth on Linux, AlchemyTV on OS X or 
MCE in XP, IR receivers all translate IR pulses into generated 
app-specific keypresses. AFAIK Myth is a completely keyboard-driven 
application, for which external frameworks make a remote behave like a 
keyboard by mapping button presses to their equivalent function.

Assuming you aren't using a tuner card that came with its own remote and 
receiver, I have a USB receiver I picked up at Fry's that I'm willing to 
part with. If you don't have front-mounted USB ports on your case, 
either put it on an extension cable and tape it to the top of your box 
or figure out a way to internally mount it.
> We have a seperate DVD player, so I don't think I would have any 
> interest in using the DVD-ROM for playback...
My wife's grandfather, a genius who performed stage magic in the 30s, 
helped shape the field of industrial psychology in the 1940s, as a 
civilian envoy helped establish South Korea's civilian government in the 
1950s, and was hacking PCs as late as Windows 3.1, made GM factory-build 
his last Buick because he refused to pay for an FM band he didn't plan 
to listen to. Trust me on the DVD ROM, even if you stick with your 
set-top DVD players. FWIW, I don't use myth's phone or image gallery, 
but I didn't omit them from the plugins.

If you *have* to have media burning capability, OfficeMax's clearance 
aisle has dual layer DVD burners for $70 gathering dust on their boxes. 
Before anyone pooh-poohs the usefulness of this, I experimented over the 
weekend with the open source DVDstyler 1.5; as an iDVD veteran, I have 
to say that DVDstyler is going to give Apple a hell of a run for their 
money. It slurps Myth's MPEG2s with no effort and cranks out DVD ISOs on 
a woefully CPU-underpowered machine, then lets you test drive them in 
xine before burning.

If I can (this week) write a Myth plugin for directly selecting 2 hours' 
worth of recordings and cranking out a DVDstyler project file (it's 
XML), or find someone else has beaten me to it, you can see why this 
isn't me just flapping my lips.

Jeff wrote:
> I actually fixed the original ir 2.6 kernel port (modularized) and 
> some of the ivtv updates when 2.4 -> 2.6 was still ongoing. If you 
> have any low level driver issues, lmk. -Jeff 
So far ivtv has been painless and error free, beyond the unbelievably 
beautiful error messages ivtv gives about moving conflicting modules 
(the ones that print out the exact command you need to fix each one and 
what you have to do afterward). They bring tears to my eyes. I want 
James Blunt to write a drippy love song to them.

Wifi's another story. Gnome's network configurator doesn't recognize WPA 
encryption, and the solution has been to create a separate, redundant 
applet to manage WPA networking... an applet which doesn't store its own 
passphrase but relies on a new Keyring Manager... that runs far too late 
in the services to be useful. If this is consistent across Gnome based 
distros, I pray a Novell shareholder starts asking uncomfortable 
questions at a meeting as to how much time the SuSE team spends being 
unpaid Gnome fixers.


-- 
------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Andrew Roazen, Application Systems Analyst
| Cline Library, Northern Arizona University
| ? 928.523.6764 vCard <http://www2.nau.edu/%7Ear24/aroazen.vcf>

The opinions expressed are those of the guy who sits at this desk, not 
his employers.
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