Calibrating a Television

Tuesday, April 07, 2009

The Home Theater fairy, the lesser known cousin of the tooth fairy, visited me last week and blessed me with a new television. I ended up getting a great deal on a Samsung LN52A850 set and with spousal approval went and pulled the trigger. I had been thinking about getting a new television for some time as my 46" Samsung just felt a little small in the space we had and the new 52" set provides more of the larger picture we are used to from the theaters.

With a new set however comes the inevitable calibrating of the set in order to get the picture just right. In the past I have to admit I have been guilty of calibrating by simply using a movie and the Mark 1 eyeball which seems to be losing its efficiency with age. When browing the thread on calibrating the A850 at avsforum there was a post linking to a free calibration DVD put together by some of the avsforum members.

I've only had a chance to have a quick look at it but what I have seen so far is pretty impressive for a free effort. The disc contains various patterns that are displayed through a Blu-ray player or other HD source that allow you to perform a basic calibration without equipment. The disc is burned from an .iso and is navigable using a simple menu, it took me all of five minutes to burn the disc and start playing with it using my PS3. While the burning process is simple, what really makes the process easy is the sixteen page PDF document that accompanies the disc and guides you through the process of calibrating your set.

The disc allows you to calibrate the grayscale, colors, contrast, brightness, sharpness and other parameters of the television without having to use any tools. While the final results are not going to be as good as an ISF calibration they should be more then sufficient for the average joe. One thing I found useful on the Samsung set, which I assume would be available on all recent Samsung sets, is the availability of a blue mode. This blue mode allows you to adjust the colors on the set without requiring a blue filter by only displaying the color blue. In this mode different colors which have a blue component are still visibile and colors can be tuned by using the test pattern tweaking the settings until the blue appears identical.

The AVS HD 709 disc is a highly recommended tool and you owe it to yourself to check it out.

AVS HD 709 - Blu-ray, HD DVD, & MP4 Calibration

Posted by Gerald Nunn at 9:27 PM | Categories: Home Theater | Permalink |

PS3 as a Blu-Ray Player

Thursday, March 19, 2009

For the last year or so I have been using a Samsung BDP-1200 as my Blu-Ray player and it has generally gotten the job done though it has required the occasional firmware upgrade to be able to play the latest discs. While I'm generally understanding of the need to update the firmware, it annoys my wife and the last straw for her was when she rented Australia and it would not play with no firmware upgrade available. Thus she gave her blessing to get a new BluRay player with the caveat that the new player handle everything and thus my quest for a new player was born. (As an aside for you men out there, the easiest way to get agreement from the wife for a new gadget is to make sure the old one annoys the heck out of her!)

I looked around at the available players and while a lot of options were available most of the good ones were in the PS3 price range. While I hadn't looked at a PS3 previously, considering I already have a Wii and an XBox 360, given that it was about the same price as a regular player and Sony was very active in keeping the firmware up to date I decided to get this instead of a player. It didn't hurt that my eight year old son was strongly in favor of this direction since he had been wanting to try Little Big Planet for quite a while now.

So I headed down to BesyBuy and picked one up along with the Nyko IR Remote for the PS3. I needed the Nyko so that my Harmony remote could control the PS3 during movie playback since the PS3 uses BlueTooth otherwise. So I got home and unpacked the PS3 and proceeded to set it up which turned out to be a breeze since I just reused the HDMI and optical connections from the BDP-1200 it was replacing. One thing to keep in mind with the Nyko remote is that when setting up the Harmony remote the device type is the Nyko and not the PS3 itself. Also note the Nyko cannot power on and off the PS3, no big deal since you have to go to the machine anyways to pop in a disc.

Once it was up and running we popped in a BluRay and were off to the races. Overall the video quality was excellent and generally on par with the BDP-1200 I had previously. The load time for the BluRay was much faster on the PS3 which my wife greatly appreciated, the BDP-1200 was a bit of a slug in this respect. More importantly for my wife, the PS3 handled every BluRay thrown at it which made her very happy. I do have one issue with the PS3 however and that is these periodic white flashes I get only when using the XMB menu and playing regular DVDs, BluRays and games have no issues. I believe this is an HDMI issue and if I turn down the resolution to 720p or 1080i then everything is fine, it only happens at 1080p.

After doing some reading, I suspect the problem is the HDMI cable I am using may only be Category 1. Apparently a Category 1 cable is only rated for up to 1080i but you might get lucky and find it is able to handle 1080p. A Category 2 cable is rated for bandwidth above 1080p and thus should handle 1080p no problem. With this in mind I ordered a couple of 6' HDMI cables (1.3 and Category 2) for $13 from monoprice.com, a much better deal then dropping $60 at the local BestBuy. Once the cables arrive I'll post again about whether or not they fix my issue.

Posted by Gerald Nunn at 12:21 PM | Categories: Home Theater | Permalink |

XBMC

Monday, December 15, 2008

In another post I talked about how I was using the Elisa Media Center application for my Linux HTPC. Recently I decided to upgrade the application to try to fix a few minor issues I was having with it such as the remote control mappings for certain buttons not working. The upgrade process turned out to be a bit arduous since my existing install, even after removing it, was interfering with the new install.

After deleting every Elisa file the install worked and I was off to the races…and then came to a screeching halt as the 0.51.7 version I got had even more annoying issues then the other one such as interpreting a press and release of a remote button as two separate presses. This make it almost impossible to select an item from the menus.

Rather then go back to the old 0.35 version, I decided to give XBMC a try has it had been recommended previously by a reader of this blog. Installing XBMC was a snap, all I needed to do was to add the XBMC package source to my apt.sources file and then use the Synaptic package manager to install it. It was up and running in a matter of minutes and best of all the remote control worked decently out of the box.

After having used it for a few days I have to say I much prefer it over Elisa in terms of the user interface presented. First advantage to XBMC is that a number of skins are available and the out of the box install had three skins installed to choose from. The mediastream skin, pictured below, is particularly attractive on a large HD panel and this is what I am using. The second thing I like better is the attention to detail, for example if a name is too long to display it scrolls left so you can see the whole thing. In Elisa if the identifying bit of the name was at the far right you had no clue which item to select.

In short I’m really digging XBMC and looking forward to future revisions. The guys are working on a front-end for MythTV at which point it will be my single point for everything.

Posted by Gerald Nunn at 9:48 PM | Categories: Home Theater | Permalink |

The Best Home Theater Tool Ever

Wednesday, October 01, 2008

Sometimes the simplest things are the best, my wife bought me the light pictured above as a Christmas present, it attaches to your head with an elastic band and is essentially the equivalent of the old miner's hat light. When I first looked at it I just laughed thinking it was a bit ridiculous, however, once I stopped laughing and realized my wife is usually much smarter then I am, I tried it out and I have to admit it is probably the best home theater tool I ever received.

My system is up against the living room wall so that when I pull it out to work on it there is actually very little light available in terms of seeing labels on connections. This head mounted LED light is extremely bright and allows me to both see and work on things at the same time since it leaves both hands free. I no longer need to send my eight year old upstairs when working on the system since I find there is a lot less cursing going on when I'm no longer trying to dangle a flashlight between my chin and chest while working on something. I highly recommend adding this puppy to your bag of tools.

Posted by Gerald Nunn at 3:27 PM | Categories: Home Theater | Permalink |

Monoprice Banana Plugs Review

For the longest time I wired my speakers directly into the receiver and while this works well it was always a pain connecting the wires since trying to insert the bare wire into the terminal and screw it down was difficult on the back of a crowded receiver. I'm not the most dexterous individual in the world and trying to use one hand to hold the wire in while getting the other hand to screw the terminal down was often an exercise in frustration. I always meant to have a look at banana plugs but was put off by the need to solder them. Recently I was forced to disconnect and reconnect all the speakers in order to allow my wife to do some drywall work around the system and this led me to revisit the topic.

After looking around a bit I found that Monoprice had solderless banana plugs for a great price. Since I didn't really want to go through the experience of trying to wire up my speakers again I thought I would give them a try.

The ordering process was painless and convenient and my banana plugs arrived a couple of days later. Opening the box revealed several gold plated banana plugs that looked absolutely beautiful. Installing the banana plugs was a breeze, the bottom part of each plug unscrews so all you do is thread the wire in from the top and then screw the bottom back on to secure it in place. I did have to strip the wire casing back a bit since the casing would not fit into the plug but that only added a moderate amount of effort to the install. Once I was done, hooking the speakers up took all of two minutes with none of the cramped muscles and cursing that I usually incur in the effort.

Anyways, I highly recommend this product and if you ever thought about using banana plugs I would say the effort of installing them is well worth it.

Posted by Gerald Nunn at 3:27 PM | Categories: Home Theater | Permalink |

Short Review of Logitech Dinovo Mini

Thursday, July 31, 2008

One thing that has always bothered me about my HTPC was the need to use the mouse and keyboard. While I have it configured for the remote control for MythTV and Elisa, there is no getting around the fact that sometimes you need a keyboard and mouse for performing regular PC duties like finding a torrent or browsing the web. I was using the standard wireless HP keyboard and mouse that came with my HTPC and while they worked well, it was never very comfortable hunching over the coffee table to perform these tasks.

Enter the Logitech Dinovo Mini keyboard/trackpad combination.

The basic premise behind the Dinovo Mini, as you can see from the picture above, is that you can use it comfortably from a couch or armchair without having to balance a keyboard in your lap or sit at a desk. Given that I have a home theater system because I like keeping my butt planted on the sofa this works for me. The first thing you notice when you unbox the Mini is how small it is, the device is very comfortable to hold and any Blackberry user is going to be instantly conmfortable with the two hand grip/thumbs over the keyboard style used with the Mini. The unit itself has a high wife acceptance factor as it is very attractive and the smoked plastic cover means it doesn't look out of place when lying on a coffee table.

The keyboard on the Mini is an absolute delight to use, it is responsive to the touch and has a very comfortable feel when banging out short bursts of text. You wouldn't want to write War and Peace on this keyboard but for HTPC use it is a very good fit. The backlighting on the keyboard is excellent as well though I wish there were some configuration options to control how long the backlighting stays on. One problem with the keyboard is that Logitech chose to omit certain standard keys, such as the function keys, in favor of various custom keys such as PVR controls. I can understand why they did it but personally I'd prefer the standard keys as I use a remote for controlling media center operations and I would want the Mini to be the best keyboard possible, not duplicate my already existing remote functionality.

The touchpad supports two modes, in the first mode it operates as a standard mouse touchpad similar to what you find on most laptops. In the second mode it operates as a directional pad for navigation in various media center front ends. The mode switch is quite seamless and the backlighting switches color from orange to green so it is easy to see what mode you are in. In mouse mode you can click the pad itself to perform a left click, however this can also be done by using the OK button on the left of the Mini. I found the OK button a much better solution for left clicking since pressing the touchpad down invariably moved the pointer out of range of what you were trying to click.

Unfortunately in mouse mode the touchpad is nowhere near as good as the keyboard. Trying to use the touchpad with my thumb was an exercise in frustration as the mouse cursor moved along in fits and starts no matter what I chose for sensitivity settings. At this point I was strongly considering returning the Mini however a reviewer on Amazon mentioned that he had much better luck with it using his index finger rather then his thumb. His reasoning was that the touchpad is quite small and a thumb cuts a large swatch across it, a smaller finger allows it to react better.

Giving the index finger a shot I found that the touchpad was in fact much easier to use with a finger then a thumb. I'd prefer the thumb since it is already in the right position when holding the Mini but switching to a finger is no big deal given the nice form factor of the Mini. I do think the touchpad is something Logitech really needs to address in the next version, for me I'd much rather use a thumbstick then a touchpad for the mouse.

In terms of Linux support the Dinovo Mini works well on Mythbuntu 8.1. The keyboard works out of the box, however for the touchpad I did need to make some changes to modprobe.d/options as per the instructions in the AVS Forum post called Logitech diNovo Mini Wireless Keyboard- Holy Grail for HTPC?. My next job is to see if the various custom keys on the Mini can be configured for Linux but I have not taken a shot at it yet.

All in all I would have to say the Dinovo Mini represents the best keyboard currently available for HTPC use in terms of fitting in well with the typical environment home theater environment, aka the living room. Despite the touchpad being less then ideal I would still highly recommend this device.

Posted by Gerald Nunn at 9:55 AM | Categories: Home Theater | Permalink |

Graham Norton on BBC Kids

Monday, July 14, 2008

Is there anything weirder then watching The Graham Norton Show on BBC Kids? If you have not seen this show, it appears on BBC Kids on Rogers Cable at 10pm on Sunday evenings and is somewhat raunchy in nature. Seeing it on BBC kids makes for an odd experience though as you go straight from some rather coarse sexual innuendo to a commercial for bubble-gum squarely targetted at a 10 year old audience.

My wife and I got hooked on Graham's previous show when we lived in the UK in 1999. Like Leno and Letterman it is a talk show with celebrities but the similarities end there. For one, his show is quite raunchy with many jokes of a sexual nature and since Graham Norton is openly gay many of the sexual jokes stray to that side of the fence as well. For a second, Graham typically has two guests on for the whole hour and includes them in various bits and scenes often with hilarious results.

One of the best scenes was when he had Martin Sheen on and they did a bit called protect the President. The idea was to have a cardboard cutout of Sheen off stage and audience volunteers would jump in front of the cutout to intercept a paintball in order to protect the President. Ed Byrne, an Irish comedian who was also on, wanted to have a go himself and this prompted Sheen to actually stand-in for the cutout as well. You can view the clip on YouTube. This example highlights why this show is so good, you get to see a side of celebrities that you don't see on American talk shows. As another example, try to catch the episode with Dustin Hoffman and his wife.

In addition to Graham Norton, we usually watch Top Gear as well making Sunday nights a BBC evening. If the CBC would put out programming half as good as its British counterpart no one would complain about its budget.

Posted by Gerald Nunn at 9:03 AM | Categories: Home Theater | Permalink |

Hey Rogers, 1999 called...

Friday, July 11, 2008

... and it wants its GUI interface back.

Posted by Gerald Nunn at 9:42 AM | Categories: Home Theater | Permalink |

Elisa Media Center

The media center project is going strong and I finally moved the Mythbuntu HTPC downstairs to the living room where my wife could start using it (and providing QA!). My wife found that Myth was very easy to use for recording TV and playing it back but that it was pretty lacking in other areas such as video, music and picture handling. I don't think it is any secret that Myth is pretty awful in these areas but it is understandable since the focus of Myth is the recording of TV and these other plugins came after.

So looking for an alternative solution I came across the Elisa Media Center. While Elisa is still relatively new, at version 0.35, it boasts an impressive amount of usability and eye candy for a program still in the early stages. Installing Elisa was a snap as it is available in the Synaptic package manager that comes with Mythbuntu. Once it is up and running you are presented with the lovely interface pictured below.

Configuring Elisa was a little more complicated, since it is still in early days no GUI exists for performing this task. Instead configuring Elisa requires editing elisa.conf which is fortunately pretty straight forward. It only took me a few minutes to add the locations for my videos, music and pictures to make them easily accessible within Elisa.

Adding support for the remote control was more of a pain though. By default Elisa uses a lirc mapping file called streamzap.lirc which is located in Elisa's python directory. Unfortunately it looks like there is a bug in that you can only change the name of the file, you cannot point it to a new location. As a result I copied streamzap.lirc to a new file and then modified it to meet my needs.

The remote control support at this stage, while usable is still pretty primitive in that there are only a small set of commands that can be mapped to the remote. Additionally I was unable to get the Play/Pause buttons on my remote working at all, however the Enter button acts as a toggle for these functions so that was an acceptable alternative. Once the remote was configured my wife much preferred using Elisa to the Myth front-end and now my next task is to figure out a way to rename and move Myth recorded shows to an Elisa directory automatically.

To summarize, Elisa has the potential to be a killer media front end and even at this early stage it shows a lot of polish and usability A very good effort by the developers so kudos to them.

As a footnote, Elisa is written in Python which is a language often criticized for poor performance. Elisa certainly goes some way to correcting my perception of Python and even makes me interested in having a go at creating a plugin in Python.

Posted by Gerald Nunn at 9:36 AM | Categories: Home Theater | Permalink |

HTPC and Firewire Results

Sunday, June 15, 2008

In my last post I discussed how to setup the Rogers 3250HD box with MythTV using firewire in order to record channels right off the box including some HD channels, the holy grail of a Canadian HTPC and PVR setup. Unfortunately I ran out of time and did not get a chance to report on the results in terms of quality and what channels are available in HD to record so this post will correct that omission.

I went through each of the HD channels one by one to determine which ones were accessible and which were not. After that process I updated my channel lineup in Schedules Direct to just include the accessible channels and you can view my lineup of channels that worked at http://www.gexperts.com/blog/files/schedulesdirect/schedule.html. These are all of the channels that worked over firewire, trimming the non-working channels from the list makes navigating MythTV much easier and will make it a breeze for my wife to know what channels can and cannot be recorded.

With respect to the HD channels, most of the channels I am interested in are accessible through firewire. I found that I could get most of the HD Canadian channels (Global, CTV and CITY) with the notable exception of CBC but no worries there as I am not a fan of the mother corp. The standard American network channels (ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox) were all accessible on both the normal and west coast channels. Finally the only specialty channels I could get in HD were TSN, SportsNet and Discovery and this was a pleasant surprise as I did not expect any of these channels to be accessible.

The quality of the HD channels is for the most part excellent with some minor border artifacts on a few the channels. Here are some pictures of the results, you can click each picture to get a full screen image. Note that my HTPC is connected to my monitor at the moment hence why the full screen images are at 1680x1050 rather then a normal HD resolution. Here is the first shot from the west coast HD ABC channel that was showing Monsters, Inc last night.

As you can see this channel gives very nice HD output with no artifacting at all when accessed through firewire. The next image is from HD NBC which was showing Saturday Night Live last night.

If you look closely at the left side of the image you can see a thin orange bar. When you are watching it on the screen this bar grows and shrinks by a pixel or two in width every few seconds so it is more noticeable then in this static shot. Personally I do not find it a big deal though given the overall quality. Here is the next example, an image from the TSN HD channel.

Again no noticeable border artifacts here. Finally here is an image from Discovery HD.

I do not have a screenshot to show it, but some HD channels exhibit a bit of jitter when displaying an SD commercial but I've only noticed it on a few occasions. Also, some HD channels have a border artifact along the top when displaying an SD program. Neither is really a major concern for me as it does not detract from the quality of the actual programming.

In terms of useability, channel changes typically take 1-3 seconds to occur so somewhat slower then the 3250HD box itself. While not ideal it is not a showstopper for me because I plan on using the HTPC to record rather then watch LiveTV. There are no issues when flipping between channels that use different resolutions or between SD and HD channels, MythTV handles it all very gracefully. MythTV was also very good when hitting the inaccessible channels, the popup info box shows it trying to get a lock on the channel as the letters LAM slowly appear. If the channel is bad MythTV popups up a window saying the channel could not be tuned and allows you to channel change somewhere else.

Otherwise the useability of this setup is equivalent to a normal MythTV setup and all in all I'm still quite satisfied in terms of how this project turned out. I should be moving the computer downstairs to the living room in the next couple of weeks where it will get the real test with the Quality Assurance department, aka my wife.

Posted by Gerald Nunn at 4:44 PM | Categories: Home Theater | Permalink |

HTPC and firewire to cable box

Friday, June 13, 2008

Things are progressing nicely on my HTPC and it is time to move on to my next task, integrating the Rogers HD cable box with the HTPC over firewire. I stopped into one of the local stores and picked up a new Scientific Atlanta (SA) 4250HD, which is Rogers latest and greatest, for use in my office while I put the HTPC together. I could have temporarily moved the 3250HD that we already have in the living room but since this box may be in my office for awhile that wasn't an option, after all my family can only go so long without their TV fix.

Once I got the new box all hooked up and connected to the HTPC through firewire I ran plugreport which gives you some basic information about the firewire connection. I could see the 4250HD was connected so the next step was testing the connection. I compiled and ran the firewire_tester program and here is where I started having issues, no matter what I did I could not get a valid firewire connection to the 4250HD. After searching around for a bit it appeared that a few other people were having the same issue with the Rogers 4250HD box. It may be a driver or kernel issue because one person said his Mac didn't have any trouble interfacing with the 4250HD.

Unfortunately I'm using Linux so I needed an alternative. I knew the 3250HD would probably work as I had tried it under Windows previously and while the quality of the video was awful the connection was definitely there. So I disconnected both boxes and swapped them around and connected the 3250HD to the HTPC. When I fired up firewire_tester this time I still did not get a connection, however after moving the firewire cable to the second port on the 3250HD it made a connection right away. Next I configured the various sources in the MythTV backend setup and subscribed to schedule listings at SchedulesDirect. I was quite excited to see that it all worked the first time out of the gate with the exception of a couple of minor glitches.

The first issue is that MythTV would not change the channel on the SA3250HD box. After googling around I found that Mythbuntu includes a small program called SA3250HD that you can compile and setup with MythTV to handle the channel changing. Compiling it was quite trivial, I did it using the following commands:

sudo apt-get install libraw1394-dev libavc1394-dev
gunzip sa3250ch.c.gz
cc -o sa3250ch sa3250ch.c -lrom1394 -lavc1394 -lraw1394

I then copied the resulting binary to /usr/local/bin and configured MythTV to use it. After a quick test it was working like a charm. The second glitch was that whenever I went to the guide in MythTV with the live TV preview my CPU utilization would shoot up to 100% making the guide unuseable. Using the top command I was able to see that the xorg process was chewing up the CPU for some reason. I am using the NVidia drivers for the 8500GT card in the HTPC so using the default drivers was not the issue. After more googling I found the NVidia X configuration options here and saw there was an option called RenderAccel listed as experimental.

I modified my /etc/X11/xorg.conf to include this option and restarted X with the Ctrl-Alt-Backspace combo. Once X restarted I fired up MythTV and went into the guide again and sure enough CPU utilization dropped to a more sedate 20%.

Updated: I didn't have much time to play with the setup once I got it going so I will post some screen grabs and results of using the Rogers box this way during the weekend.

So now that MythTV is working with the cable box I need to setup the analog cable and ATSC tuners next. The ATSC tuner using OTA should be an interesting experience because my house is on the side of a hill towards the lower end of the hill, I suspect my line of site to Toronto and Buffalo is pretty impaired as I give up 20 to 30 feet of elevation with the hill. Anyways I'll have more on that next week.

Posted by Gerald Nunn at 12:39 PM | Categories: Home Theater | Permalink |

Configuring the HTPC network card

Sunday, June 08, 2008

I was able to do a lot of work this weekend on my HTPC as my nephew Calvin came over for the whole weekend. My son Garet is an only child so usually daddy is his #1 playmate on weekends but I was happy to relinquish my duties to Calvin for the weekend and spend some quality gadget time on myself.

So here is a new entry on the trials and tribulations of getting a network adapter going in Linux. I have two motivations for blogging about this stuff, the first is to help others who may be attempting to do the same thing and running into the same issues. The second, and most selfish, is that I'll have a handy set of instructions for myself should I ever need to go through the process again.

I'm finding that Linux is to Windows as Visual Basic is to C++. Visual Basic is easier and more productive then C++ but there are things that are near impossible to accomplish in it. C++ is not very productive but there is nothing you cannot do with that language. In a similar vein, Linux is not particularly productive but I have found that I have far more options under Linux to get things going then I do under Windows.

So on to the topic at hand, the HP m9150f I am putting together for an HTPC comes with a Realtek 8168 network adapter. The first time I booted the computer after installing Mythbuntu the network adapter worked fine, however in all subsequent steps I found that the device would never bind for some reason. After doing some reading I realized the card was using the 8169 driver which for some reason did not work.

Fortunately Realtek has an 8168 driver on their website that can be used instead of the 8169 driver. Also fortunately is the fact that other folks have had issues with this card and the forums list a variety of solutions. I found the instructions from the user energymomentum in this post to be the best. However there were a couple of minor issues you should be aware of in addition to what is in that post to resolve this issue.

The first issue is that Realtek has published a new version of the driver, r8168-8.006.00 instead of r8168-8.005.00. I did find that the 005 patch file that is provided in this post worked fine with the 006 release though so no issues there. The second issue is if you untar the driver source to the /usr/src folder you might have trouble building the driver even when using sudo. I found I was getting Permissionm Denied errors even with sudo, dropping to root using sudo -s fixed the issue for me.

The last issue I found was that when I restarted the computer the changes no longer worked. After looking at this bug report here I was able to resolve it by blacklisting the 8169 driver and running an additional command as follows:

sudo sh -c 'echo "blacklist r8169" >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-network'
sudo update-initramfs -c -k all

So I am a happy camper to have full network access going now. The one saving grace of the m9150f is it also has built-in wireless so I was able to use the wireless connection to debug the issue with the ethernet adapter.

Posted by Gerald Nunn at 4:00 PM | Categories: Home Theater | Permalink |

Upgrading lirc in Mythbuntu 8.0.4

The HP Media Center comes with a nice remote, pictured below, that I wanted to use with MythTV. While Mythbuntu has a control center application that allows you to configure the remote that you are using I could not get the remote working with it. The first time I installed Mythbuntu I selected the newer Microsoft media center remotes which corresponds to the mceusb2 device. When I went to try it it didn't work, no matter how much I stubbornly kept pressing buttons it would not kick-in so queue the troubleshooting.

I tried using irw to test the remote but it would just kick out right away and then subsequent irw attempts showed a connection refused message. After doing a bit more digging I ran the lsusb command and saw that my remote IR device was from a company called Formosa Industrial Computing, Inc. A friendly IRC person on the Mythbuntu IRC channel pointed out this device was not supported in the lirc 0.8.3-pre1 release that ships with Mythbuntu 8.0.4 so I would have to replace it with the newly released 0.8.3 release.

That same friendly user attempted to aid me with this process, unfortunately somewhere along the way things got toasted sufficiently that it was easier to just re-install Mythbuntu. I think the fault was mine, when I first tried compiling lirc I used some non-standard commands that probably screwed things up.

Anyways, I finally had some time this weekend for round 2. I reinstalled Mythbuntu from scratch and started the remote process again. I guess convential wisdon is wrong because for me the second time is the charm as I found the process to be relatively painless. Here are the steps I used to get this going.

• Download the lirc 0.8.3 release from the lirc website here. The file to download is lirc-0.8.3.tar.bz2 and is linked on the left side of the lirc page.
• Copy the file to /usr/src.
• Open a terminal and go to the /usr/src directory and execute the following commands.
• tar xjvf lirc-0.8.3.tar.bz2
• cd lirc-0.8.3
• ./setup.sh
• When you run the setup command you will get a dialog screen with options. Select option 1, Driver Configuration.
• Next pick the USB Devices option.
• Finally scroll through the list until you get to Windows Media Center Remotes (new version, Philips et al.) and select that.
• Back at the main screen, select Save configuration and run configure
• After this you can compile and install the driver. To do this, run the sudo make install command.

Now that the driver is installed, we need to fix a few more things before we can start using it. One problem we have is that Mythbuntu puts the lirc executables and module files in different locations then lirc does by default so we have to replace them everywhere. This is where I got hung up on previous attempt and went down the wrong path, this time I was able to locate a helpful forum posting that pointed me in the right direction. You can read that posting here

In addition to that posting, I also found I needed the lircd.conf from the 0.8.3 branch rather then the ones included with Mythbuntu. To copy the file I did the following:

sudo cp /usr/src/lirc-0.8.3/remotes/mceusb/lircd.conf.mceusb /etc/lirc/lircd.conf
sudo cp /usr/src/lirc-0.8.3/remotes/mceusb/lircd.conf.mceusb /etc/lircd.conf

I also copied the file to /etc/lircd.conf because lirc seems to look there for the file by default even though the /etc/init.d/lirc script looks for it in /etc/lirc/lircd.conf. Finally I adjusted /etc/lirc/hardware.conf so the line REMOTE_LIRCD_CONF would point at the correct location for lircd.conf. Here is my change:

REMOTE_LIRCD_CONF="/etc/lirc/lircd.conf"

After making these changes I ran the following set of commands to replace the 0.8.3pre1 lirc files that Mythbuntu installed with the newly built ones.

sudo cp /lib/modules/2.6.24-16-generic/misc/lirc_dev.ko /lib/modules/2.6.24-16-generic/ubuntu/media/lirc/lirc_dev
sudo cp /lib/modules/2.6.24-16-generic/misc/lirc_mceusb2.ko /lib/modules/2.6.24-16-generic/ubuntu/media/lirc/lirc_mceusb2
sudo cp /usr/local/sbin/lircd /usr/sbin/lircd
sudo cp /usr/local/sbin/lircmd /usr/sbin/lircmd
rmmod lirc_mceusb2
rmmod lirc_dev

Note the original instructions moved the driver files, I opted to copy them just in case something else looked for them here. After all these steps I could now run irw successfully and the remote works correctly with MythTV. Hopefully this positing will help others trying to get the same remote working with Mythubuntu 8.0.4

Posted by Gerald Nunn at 4:00 PM | Categories: Home Theater | Permalink |

Setting up an HTPC with MythTV

Monday, June 02, 2008

One of the reasons I wanted to move my blog to my personal site was so that I could blog about things I'm interested in other then BEA products. Make no mistake, BEA (now Oracle) products rock but when I go home at night I'm not thinking "Gee, I really feel like doing more work on WebLogic Portal". Thus you can expect to see some entries about things not related to WebLogic or Java but still of a technical nature.

One of my more technical hobbies is home theater. I got into home theater when my wife and I had our son, as any parent knows it becomes more difficult to enjoy an evening out at the movie theater and as a result we ended up spending some money putting a basic home theater system in place. Over the years equipment has come and gone but the basic structure of the system has stayed the same. Like most folks, I don't have one of those expensive dedicated home theaters in the basement that was custom built for $50K. In fact, I live in a century home and the only thing the basement is good for is storage. Thus the structure of my system is the same as most folks, a television, a 5.1 surround system and various peripherals like a Blu-ray player, XBox 360, Wii and, what most of posts in this area will cover, a home theater computer (HTPC).

I've used an HTPC for almost five years now. The primary uses for the HTPC are to watch downloaded TV shows (shhh, don't tell anyone) and to act as a PVR by recording television shows. My first system was a P4 system that I built using an Antec Aria case. The Antec Aria case was great but working on it was a pain since everything is so tight in a case that small. I was happy with that system until it got fried a couple of years ago, I never figured out what happened as it just stopped working. With that computer gone, I replaced it with a computer I originally bought for my mother-in-law but reclaimed when she found she was never using it.

So that brings me to the here and now where it is time to get a new HTPC. After looking around for awhile I decided to get an HP media center computer as I didn't really feel like building one from scratch again. The HP machines are nice in that they typically have everything you need such as a TV tuner card and a remote control. Here in Canada these machines typically come up for sale as refurbs or discontinued models.

After keeping my eye out for one I decided to pick up a HP m9150f elite media center machine as bestbuy.ca had a refurb for $699. It got to my house within a few days and I immediately unpacked and set it up. Here is a picture of it sitting on my desk in my office.

I left my current HTPC in the living room for now so I could work on this one unfettered by the demands of my wife and seven year old to use the TV. For some reason, it is really hard to make progress setting up an HTPC when you never get to use the system because of other family members. If you look closely at the picture you can see a Rogers 4250HD terminal sitting next to it, one of my goals is to get the firewire going off that box to the HTPC. This goal is what is driving the project I will likely be blogging about for the next while, setting up MythTV on my HTPC.

I always wanted to give MythTV a try but I found Windows to be good enough for my needs that I didn't want to go through the trials and tribulations of setting up Linux and MythTV. However the firewire port on the Rogers HD terminals changed my mind because apparently the firewire port works best on Linux. Looking at this thread it was apparent that both Mac and Windows users were running into issues with firewire, albeit different issues. On the Mac people could record HD fine but were unable to change the channel. On Windows people could change the channel but HD recordings were littered with artifacts. Linux users reported positive results though and that spurred me on to bite the bullet and give MythTV a try.

So keep following this blog for the trials and tribulations of working with Linux and MythTV. I'm hoping for a hassle free ride but expect a few bumps in the road, we'll see how it goes.

Posted by Gerald Nunn at 8:51 PM | Categories: Home Theater | Permalink |