Here is a link to my article on Linux.com.  It is my first effort, and while it turned out pretty well, I think I’ll do some things different next time.  And there will be a next time.

http://www.linux.com/feature/144179

Give it a read and let me know what  you think!

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.

]]> http://www.fourthlaw.com/2008/07/31/keep-the-joint-running-podcast/feed/ http://www.fourthlaw.com/2008/07/28/smart-home-media-project-xebian/ http://www.fourthlaw.com/2008/07/28/smart-home-media-project-xebian/#comments Mon, 28 Jul 2008 16:04:41 +0000 Tanstaafl http://www.fourthlaw.com/?p=141

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.

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.

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.

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.

It is official - I am a MythTV user.  Well…let’s ammend that:  I am in the possession of a fully installed and functional MythTV backend server.  There were two things wrong with the Channel Changer program:

1. I didn’t know that the current directory is not in your path.  SO–just because you are in the same directory as a binary file, it can still be “unfound.”  When I typed in /usr/local/bin/channel to define the path explicitly it worked–I should have tried that.  I probably would have, but I was pressed for time that day.
2. Once I could get the channel binary to work, then I faced a different issue.  By using the -p switch on the channel changer program, the individual serial ports can be specified.  Here’s what I got:
   • /dev/ttyS0 - Input / Output Error
   • /dev/ttyS1 - No communciation
   • /dev/ttyS2 - Input / Output Error
   • /dev/ttyS3 - Input / Output Error

Great.  What now?  I found several postings on the web talking about the dialout group–but I checked and my user account was already in that group.  I was pretty sure that the serial cable to the Motorola box was hooked up to COM1 (/dev/ttyS0) so I thought I better do some more investigation.  I found this tidbit:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-hardware-18/cat-devttys0-inputoutput-error-397212/

Which instructed me more perfectly in the way of the SETSERIAL command.  I ran SETSERIAL -a for each port and got the following info:

/dev/ttyS0, Line 0, UART: , Port: 0x03f8, IRQ: 4
Baud_base: 115200, close_delay: 500, divisor: 0
closing_wait: 30000
Flags: spd_normal

/dev/ttyS1, Line 0, UART: 16550A, Port: 0x02f8, IRQ: 3
Baud_base: 115200, close_delay: 500, divisor: 0
closing_wait: 30000
Flags: spd_normal

/dev/ttyS2, Line 0, UART: , Port: 0x03e8, IRQ: 4
Baud_base: 115200, close_delay: 500, divisor: 0
closing_wait: 30000
Flags: spd_normal

/dev/ttyS3, Line 0, UART: , Port: 0x03e8, IRQ: 3
Baud_base: 115200, close_delay: 500, divisor: 0
closing_wait: 30000
Flags: spd_normal

Wow.  Do you see what I saw?  Three out of four of my serial ports aren’t detecting the UART.  I can understand COM3 and COM4 not being there–they were not setup in the computer’s BIOS, but COM1 and COM2 should be fine.

A quick shutdown and boot to CMOS configuration proved my memory to be correct–but obviously there was something wrong.  This motherboard only had one physical serial port (the other one can be added with via a pin header) which I assumed to be set to COM1.  So, I reset it to COM2 (2F8 / IRQ3) and disabled all the rest.

And presto, it works.  I added that line into MythTV and away we go.

Playback on the computer monitor is a bit jerky, but I don’t think that it will be a problem.  This is an underpowered machine, after all, that is only supposed to be the backend.  Dividing the workload up as planned and letting the frontend machine do the playback should fix any jerkiness in the video.

The tactical plan for this box is to get a 150GB or larger hard drive in this box as soon as possible.  While I’m doing that, I might as well get a 1GB stick of RAM as there’s only 256MB in it right now.  (I thought there was more.)  Ideally, if this is all working pretty well over the next month or two I’ll buy a second PVR card, split the cable, and be able to record basic cable as well as the digital.  This will essentially duplicate the TiVo we used to have–one basic line and one digital line.

Long-term strategy will be to add a third PVR card and move one of the other cable boxes down to the backend server, fix whatever is wrong with COM1, and be able to do 3 recordings at once (or 2 recordings and one live TV).  As long as they are MPEG hardware-based encoders, this shouldn’t tax the system too much.

Oh, and I’ve still got to pay SchedulesDirect my $20.00 for this year…

Anyway, time to move on to the Xbox MythTV Frontend.  But first, I think I have one more MythTV article in me–I found two or three really nifty applications for Myth that I wasn’t expecting.  One is a Windows player for Myth that can watch recordings and livetv (no scheduling, but that’s what MythTV has a webpage for).  The other main one is a MythTV to iPod appliation that can synch your TV shows up like video podcasts.  I’ll test them out and post the results.

See you, Space Cowboy.

Allow me to make with the status.

First, the Cable box is connected back up, along with a serial cable to COM1.  Inside MythTV Backend Setup, I set the input pretune to channel 4 (which is what the cable box requires).  Going just that far, I can start the Myth frontend and watch Live TV, but I have to change the channel manually by pushing the buttons on the front of the cable box.

Ok.

So, obviously I need something to send a signal out COM1 and into the Motorola serial port that tells it to change the channel.  Doesn’t sound too hard, right?  Sure didn’t to me–however, it is seriously hard to track down information on this subject.

I finally found this link:

http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/Motorola_DCT-25xx

However, it seems to be pretty old information–it certainly didn’t work flawlessly.  Matter of fact, MAKE returned tons of errors and missing files.

So, went back to the well and fished up this little beauty:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MythTV_External_Channel_Changer

However, when I try to test the program, the console returns:  COMMAND NOT FOUND.  I don’t know what the deal is…  I’ll get back to you.

Well, this would all be easier if I wasn’t trying to do it so low rent.  Right now in the Myth box there is only 512MB of RAM and two 40GB Western Digital Hard drives.  After everything is setup that only gives me about 65-ish GB for video recording.  Not alot, but not great either–right around 40 hours of recording space.

So, I should get a larger hard drive…

Well, when I do, I’ll have to repeat this same process.  Obviously, first one has to install the hardware and make sure that the BIOS can see it.  If you don’t have this, you don’t have anything.  Now to the Linux part:

1. Partition - Setup the drive to hold data.  The main drive is probably /dev/sda, making the OS install to be on /dev/sda1 and the swap partition to be on /dev/sda5 (at least on my box).  The second hard drive will probably be /dev/sdb, and so a third physical hard disk will be /dev/sdc, and etc.  I created one big partition on the new drive.
   1. sudo fdisk /dev/sdb
   2. n (new partition)
   3. p (primary partition)
   4. 1 (first primary partition)
   5. <enter> (default first cylinder)
   6. <enter> (default last cylinder)
   7. w (write the new partition table to disk)
2. Format - Prepare the new partition for data.  Nothing big here, but one small caveat.  Since this is not a the boot drive, theres no need for reserve space.  Usually a format reserves 5% space incase the drive fills up–this helps keep from crashing on full drives.  I set the second drive to 1% reserve.
   1. sudo mkfs -t ext3 /dev/sdb1
   2. sudo tune2fs -m 1 /dev/sdb1
3. Mounting - Add the new space to the filesystem.  Linux sees everything like one big directory tree–there are no C: and D: drives.  So, to mount this new drive I created a directory called /video on the root and some subdirectories called /video/livetv and /video/media.  And while I was doing it, I made a backup spot for my Myth database.  After the directories are made, I changed the file rights so they could be used by Myth.
   1. sudo mkdir /video
   2. sudo mkdir /video/livetv
   3. sudo mkdir /video/media
   4. sudo mkdir /var/dbbackup
   5. chmod a+wrx /video/livetv
   6. chmod a+wrx /video/media
   7. chmod a+wrx /var/dbbackup
4. FSTAB - Edit the /etc/fstab so that the drive is mounted on bootup.  I don’t know if you like Vi, but I hate it.  So, I installed GEdit to make my life easier.
   1. sudo apt-get install gedit
   2. gksudo gedit /etc/fstab
   3. <add a line>/dev/sdb1   /video/media  ext3    defaults     0     0
   4. Save and Reboot (or sudo mount -a)
5. Test - Make sure that the new drive is seen (sudo mount -l)
6. MythTV Storage Groups.  I wanted to help utilize my space as well as possible.  Inside the MythTV Backend Setup, I set:
   1. LiveTV to /video/livetv/
   2. Default to /video/media/
   3. DBBackup to /var/dbbackup/

My theory is that the Live TV buffering will all happen on the drive with the least amount of space, as well as the dbbackups.  And (hopefully) all of the actual recordings will go to the second hard drive.  We’ll see how it works out.

It has been running Live TV on The Weather Channel for the last sixteen hours and the capture files are all going to the right spot.  One problem is that my demo subscription to Schedules Direct has ran out–I’ll have to pay the twenty dollars before I can go on to the last step–changing channels on the cable box.

Bryan said he doesn’t remember if he ever got this working a few years ago.  It is probably easier to do, now, with the new releases.  After I accomplish this last step, I will post a quick recap and include some other extremely cool stuff I found that works with MythTV.  Until then.

See you, Space Cowboy.

I found it.  And was subsequently able to record over 12 Gigs of The Weather Channel!  Yippie!  (That was just the channel I left it on for testing.)

Ok, here’s how it went down:  I finally swallowed my pride and dug through the mythtv-backend.log.  Well, actually, I opened up a terminal, switched to Myth, tried to watch Live TV, and then used “tail /var/log/mythtv/mythtv-backend.log” to see what just happened.  Much easier than “digging.”

Anyway, I got the following junk:

2008-06-20 12:52:10.501 TVRec(2): Changing from None to WatchingLiveTV
2008-06-20 12:52:10.531 TVRec(2): HW Tuner: 2->2
2008-06-20 12:52:10.797 SampleRate: Attempted to add a rate 32000 Hz, which is not in the list of allowed rates.
2008-06-20 12:52:12.846 AutoExpire: CalcParams(): Max required Free Space: 2.0 GB w/freq: 15 min
2008-06-20 12:52:13.248 NVR(/dev/video0): Won't work with the streaming interface, falling back
strange error flushing buffer ...
VIDIOCGMBUF:: Invalid argument
2008-06-20 12:52:53.280 TVRec(2): Changing from WatchingLiveTV to None
2008-06-20 12:52:53.310 Finished recording WGN News at Noon: channel 1004
2008-06-20 12:54:09.771 Expiring 0 MBytes for 1004 @ Fri Jun 20 12:00:00 2008 => WGN News at Noon

The sample rate thing didn’t seem too important as I knew where that setting was in the interface–however, I was strangely drawn to the bit about /dev/video0 (which is the location of my capture card).  So, apparently, it tries to access the card, fails, and drops back to the interface.

All of this time I was starting to form a picture that the Hauppauge PVR-350 was more than a little bit different than the average card.  I’ve seen quite a bit of stuff seeming to indicate why Kaffeine wouldn’t work for me, because the PVR-350 or the IVTV driver may not be Video4Linux (V4L) compatible.  Now, after searching on the above error, I find this thread where the user wilkinnh posted:

the “Unknown video codec” is what caught my attention, and i did a quick search and figured out that mythtv had automatically associated my capture card with the V4L (video4linux i believe…), but it’s actually an MPEG2 card with built-in hardware MPEG2 compression. so, i redid the mythtvsetup (the backend) and made sure when i selected my capture card that i selected it as MPEG2. once i did that and saved it, everything started working!

Suddenly, it was clear what was wrong!  Even though it said PVR-350 on the Capture Card Setup screen, I was still trying to use a V4L card!  I quickly go back in to setup and…but…wait a minute…what?

Where do you change this?  And then I discovered that I was missing some graphical clues that probably would have prevented this from happening in the first place.  The drop-down button was completely missing–making the dialog look like a static field!  I didn’t think that “field” was changeable–so I never even tried!!!

This picture is straight from the installation manual–I circled the part that I don’t have.  It’s not off the edge of the screen or anything.  It just isn’t there.  On my machine, under “Probed Info” it reported finding a PVR-350, leading me to believe that everything was hunky-dory.

Now I don’t feel so stupid.

Edit:  I forgot to mention that this also happened in KnoppixMyth, so there is something up with the Nvidia video card driver or the MythTV setup in general.  I did not try MythDora in this case, but I suspect the same problem would occur there too.

Next step is to get my second hard drive in use for storage groups.  Should be easy enough.  After that, I’ll hook the digital cable box back up and work on changing channels with the serial cable.

See you, Space Cowboy.