Allow me to take a break from our regularly scheduled blogging to present the “Keep the Joint Running Podcast” from Bob Lewis of IS Survivor Publishing with yours truly.

It is available by searching the iTunes store or directly via RSS with this link:

http://www.avmypodcast.com/file/KJR/273.xml

We’ve been working on this cast now for several months, and–quite frankly–I’m pleased with the results.  It appears weekly and basically covers the same text as Bob’s weekly column of the same name.  So tell all of your friends.  They simply cannot survive a moment longer without listening to this podcast!

Seriously, give it a shot–the subjects are concise, topical, and helpful.  If you are in Information Technology at all, I think you’ll enjoy the podcast.

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It’s been a little too long since my last post–apologies.  Here’s what I’ve found out since:

1. The pre-built Xebian/Myth distro seems to have trouble finding my backend server.  Which is strange, as they are both on the same 100MB network segment.  It complains about no UPnP sources.
2. Apparently no one can watch live TV on the XBMCMythTV script…I am giving up.  This will apparently be folded into the next major release of XBMC–the script developers are working directly with the XBMC team.
3. The 1.3 release of PFSense will include support for OpenDNS via their DNS-O-Matic site.  This has nothing to do with XBMC…just thought it was cool.  All firewalls should be doing this!

My PFSense firewall might be dropping all the UPnP packets from the network segment–they are sorta like broadcast datagrams, so it would make sense that they would hit the segment gateway interface.  I found a switch to turn UPnP support on…we’ll see if that works.  And then I can see if Xebian will suffice for me.

If not, I will set the Xbox back to booting to XBMC and setup the shortcuts for the the MythTV script.  It works pretty well for watching recorded shows.  Actually, really well.  And…I guess just wait for the next version of XBMC to come out.  My biggest fear is that the XBMC project will die out as time goes on and that these features will never be successfully implemented.

If it seems like I neglected to cover the install of Xebian, well, mainly it’s so simple it doesn’t really warrant the space.  Download it, uncompress it, and ftp it up to the Xbox’s E: drive.  After I did that, I just switched back to the EvolutionX dashboard (by renaming the files via FTP).  Now, I can just use the EvoX dash to browse to the Xebian launcher.  Works fine for testing purposes.  If I get it all working and like it, I’ll swap out the EvoX loader with the one from Xebian permanently.

I think I need to build an actual HTPC next, but I’m torn.  Should I upgrade the backend server (mem, hdd, and additional tuners) first?  I’m leaning toward the HTPC even in spite of the expense.  Since hooking up more tuners would require the relocation of the cable box in the bedroom, I’ll need the HTPC to already be there.

In my research I’ve discovered that VMWare does not have an accelerated video driver for a Windows host OS.  So, I can’t install Vista on the HTPC and use the Mythbuntu frontend in a VM.  Even the peppiest boxes can’t seem to get the framerate high enough for streaming video.  (I’ll probably give it a shot, anyway, just to make sure.)

In other words, I’ll be dual booting the machine unless Wine gets much easier to configure in the near future.  Part of my goal is to be able to play old(ish) adventure games on this machine.  All of the Tex Murphys, Mysts, Journeyman Projects, GUI Zorks, etc.  This may be more effort than I want to expend on Wine.

Also, this HTPC machine will sorta serve as a testbed for our homeschooling PCs.  We are (probably) switching to a DVD-based curriculum to make things go smoother now that the baby is a factor.

See you, Space Cowboy.

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Well, this little issue hit me with a brief feeling of deja-vu.  It is the exact same trouble that I faced trying to get Nessus security scanner frontend to write data to a MySQL database.  I don’t know when exactly it changed, but new versions of MySQL writes passwords in a hashed table (and perhaps a new location, too) so that older apps trying to connect simply cannot read (or find) the password to authenticate the transaction.  In other words, the biggest issue I was having with the XBMCMythTV script was this authentication issue.

And that was only after finding the sneaky place that Mythbuntu recorded the actual password in the first place!  The setup never asked me to assign one–it just popped a random password on the MySQL mythtv account.

Yeah…just open up etc/mythtv/mysql.txt and there it is…obviously.

Anyway, once I had the actual password (psst–it wasn’t “mythtv” like all the docs said) I thought I was good to go.  No wonder the XBMCMythTV script couldn’t connect, right?

WRONG!

Even with the proper password, the connection test would still time out.  That was when I remembered this little gem.  I had to setup the account “mythtv” to use the old password style inside MySQL.  So, I opened up a terminal on the backend server and did this:

$ mysql -u root -p
mysql> UPDATE mysql.user SET password=OLD_PASSWORD('XXXXXXXXXX') WHERE user='mythtv'
mysql> flush privileges;
mysql> quit

Naturally, I replaced the XXXXXXXXXX business with the real password.  Gee, suddenly XBMC could connect.  Amazing.  Now about those Samba shares…

Since I had added that other hard drive, I remapped all the file locations.  No big deal, I just added them as shares in the Network GUI of Mythbuntu.  Doing so was far easier than I thought it would be.  Simply a matter of matching up the where the files were shared and where XMBCMythTV thought they would be.

After all of this was completed, I could watch recorded shows on the Xbox.  However, it is pretty slow…and feels…well…confining.  The picture quality is great–probably due to the PVR-350.  It’s just that the MythTV part of the interface is really clunky.  I know that the next version of XBMC supposedly is bringing all of the MythTV script functionality into the package officially, but I’m not sure I’m ready to wait for it.

As it stands, I’m not sure that this can pass muster with my wife.

I still cannot watch Live TV on the Xbox.  This is a huge issue and falls way short of full DVR functionality–pausing, skipping, and rewinding live television.  I’ll jump into troubleshooting this ASAP.  Being gone for a week at Family Camp slowed my progress a bit on this project.

Another minor issue is the lack of volume controls on the Xbox DVD remote.  I already knew about this one–and it’s nothing that a good learning universal remote won’t fix.

I would really hate to scrap all of the Xbox work and move onto install Xebian on the hardware with a full-blown MythTV frontend.  For one thing, I am given to understand that it is a touch slow.  For another, I don’t want to accept defeat.

We’ll see how it turns out.

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Yes, I will now be referring to these efforts as the Joseph Baxter’s Smart Home Media Project ™.  There’s no way I’ll be able to resist coming up with some sort of logo for that, I’m sure.

So, now to the part that, quite frankly, spooked me a little.  Yeah, the Myth stuff was fairly hard, and my Linux knowledge is somewhat lacking, but it was just computer stuff.  Nothing really too far outside of my comfort level.  But this - hacking an xbox?  That’s something only DJ Micro can do!

Well…it turned out to be far easier than I thought.

The hardest part is actually getting all of the ingredients together.  The hack itself only took 10 or 12 minutes.  So, here’s the list to follow my (borrowed) method.

Hardware:

• Original Xbox
• M/F USB Extension Cable (that you don’t want anymore)
• Xbox controller dongle (that you don’t want anymore)
• Xbox DVD Remote Kit ($6.00 used on ebay)
• Any USB memory key / thumbdrive (preferably 512MB or more)

Software

• Original (not a copy) Splinter Cell Game
• Action Replay Software
• 7Zip Compression Software (freeware)
• Filezilla FTP Client (freeware)
• USBView (freeware)
• mIRC Chat Client (shareware)
• Softmod Installer (Splintercell Exploit)
• XBMC from T3CH

Step One

The first thing I did was get a cat5 cable behind the TV cabinent.  This may seem like an obvious step to someone who uses an Xbox or 360 to play games on Xbox Live - but I don’t.  Nor do I care to do so, that’s why I’m hacking it. 

Please Note:  If you hack your Xbox you will probably be banned from Xbox Live!

The next step was to solder up a USB-to-Xbox adapter.  Since I rec’d 4 wired controllers with the used Xbox, I sacrificed one of the off-brand ones to this step.  I cut the cable a few inches beyond the actual Xbox connector.  I also took a USB extention cable and cut off the female end.  This is essentially the walk thru posted here–but with a different goal.  (The writer of that article wanted to play PC games with an Xbox controller.)

Actually, I guess if you solder up the two remaining pieces, you could still use the Xbox controller…but who cares?

Throw away the yellow wire and then solder up the remaining ones:  red, black, green and white.  If you don’t want to solder, just twist them together really well and tape them individually.  Ordinarily I would stagger my solder joints so that they weren’t in one big wad next to each other…but this project wasn’t worth the effort.

I individually taped each joint and wrapped as much of the foil and the mesh as possible back around it the cable.  Two or so layers of tape put some rigidity back into the product, to keep from snapping wires next to the solder joints.

Now a quick test.  Plug a different controller and the new cable into the Xbox with no disk in the drive, insert the USB key, and boot it up.  Under Memory you should be able to drill down to see the memory key in Port 2 or whatever.

Step Two

The Action Replay software won’t just work with any old memory key…you have to configure it to see the USB key you are providing.  Plug in the USB key and load up USBView.  You need to grab a few hex numbers to put into the Action Replay configuration file.

Once that is done, then you have to load the Action Replay driver on your system and set your USB key to use it rather than the generic Windows driver.

Here is the tutorial that spells out exactly how to do all of this.

Lastly, you can start up Action Replay and work on transferring those exploit files.

Step Three

Follow the guide here to complete the hack.  The hard work is over.  Obviously the difference is that the author paid for an Action Replay kit and I used my mad skillz.

XMBC doesn’t “install” exactly, it really is just a matter of copying files over to the Xbox via FTP.  But, anyway, once that was done I started it up via the Evox menu.  It had a really well done theme that was filled with Xbox controller images…  Cool, but not what I wanted.  So I went in and configured the simple, tasteful, blue skin.  If I could have figured out how to kill that stupid scroller from the bottom of the default theme, I probably wouldn’t have bothered.  And my wife likes the blue one better anyway.

Step Four

I wanted to load XBMC automatically on boot.  So, I followed option one of this article to make that happen.

Final Thoughts

This was remarkably easy to do…up to this point.  Now I’ve run into some trouble working with the MythTV Python script, so I’ll cover all of that in the next posting.  I have the feeling that I’m about to learn a lot about Samba network shares.

See you, Space Cowboy.

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I’m very happy with MythTV up to this point. It is no where near as fragile as I feared it might be–in fact, it seems to be quite robust. A recent power outage knocked its pins out from under it, but by the time I checked, the machine was already back up and running. Part of that is the BIOS setting “Last State on Power Restore,” but if the software wasn’t up to the task no hardware setting is going to help.

Which reminds me, I need to get a separate UPS for all of these machines that will form the backbone of my home network.

I found this website for refurbished APC units, that has great prices, but will add shipping charges. However, for the savings on some of the larger models, those fees would be negligible.  For the 300VA model they only ask $29.00 (very reasonable).  Matter of fact, for the firewall certainly, 300 is all I would ever need.  Or I could get this 350VA Eaton Power model from 3btech, with free shipping…

I just want to cover the power “blips,” not the extremely rare two hour plus outages.

There are two remaining “issues” that are probably related.  The first is the channel changing speed on LiveTV, it’s a bit slow.  The second is the “Listings” on the MythWeb page from the same server–also slow to come up.  I will be adding a much faster and larger hard drive that will probably do a great deal to help this.  Also some fiddling with hdparm will probably help.  This link outlines the basic idea.

Finally, I want to point to two 3rd Party applications that work with MythTV.  The first is MythTV Player.  This is a Windows client for Myth that can play recordings and live TV.  It works like a champ.  There is no scheduling capability, but then, that’s what MythWeb is for…  I’ll add in the screen shot from the program’s homepage, because I forgot to grab one of my own.

The last little thing I’ll throw out is Myth2iPod.  I haven’t tested this one yet, but the idea should be pretty obvious–synch your recorded programs to your video iPod.  Even if this doesn’t work–and I don’t know why it wouldn’t–the idea is out there.  Adding an RSS feed for the videos in iTunes shouldn’t be too much work.

And that’s about it.  This has been a fantastic learning experience–and a highly inexpensive one.  I have four “nice to do” purchases ahead of me–none are in the “have to do” category.  And all of them together won’t even add up to $150.00.  They are:

1. Bigger Hard Drive
2. Moderate UPS
3. 512MB RAM
4. Additional Tuner Cards

On to the Xbox hack!  See you, Space Cowboy.

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