ninth level down

I had a knot in my stomach when I hard the news that the Bruce Dickinson Rock Show will be dropped from BBC 6 Music. As a long time fan of rock and heavy metal music, I can remember the days of the venerable Friday Night Rock Show with Tommy Vance. Since discovering the Bruce Dickinson Show, I thought those days were back for good. The show has given me many, many hours of listening pleasure. No other show on any station or channel comes close.

How can the BBC not know what a gem of a show it is? The respect Bruce commands in the hard rock community means that he gets frank and interesting interviews from all of the top artists. On top of that, he’s an excellent DJ; knowledgeable and witty in a quintesentially English way.

The music played on the show is an excellent mix of old and new, picking the best from the broad mix of genres which fall under the banner of rock. It proves that this style of music is as strong as ever. I don’t know what I would do without it. Come on BBC – keep the show on air! It’s worth the price of my license fee alone.

It turns out that prefixing the track number onto my music files did not fix the problem with the way my car stereo plays them. It turns out that the Pioneer does not play them in alphabetical order, but the actual order that they appear on the drive. The same order you would get if you just ran “find” with no arguments on Linux.

To fix this is fairly easy, just read the files in alphabetical order using ‘ls’ and move them. A script for doing this is here: mvmp3.sh. Run it in the directory containing the artist folders and it will process all albums in each folder. It creates a temporary directory, moves the files there and deletes the original directory (backup your collection first!!!). Because it uses mv and not copy, the process only takes a couple of seconds for a few throusand tracks. What I do is copy the files onto the SD card and then run the script.

One other point, and this baffled me for a while, the above script does not work on a Linux ext3 filesystem. No matter what order you copy the tracks to a directory on ext3 the listing order does not change. I’m sure there’s a perfectly good explanation for this. Suffice to say that it works fine on a FAT filesystem, and that’s what most MP3 players use.

My kids are currently obsessed with watching home videos of themselves. They’d rather do it that watch stuff on telly. I got bored with sitting there manually clicking on videos for them to watch, so I wrote a little script to play videos randomly using VLC. Given a parent directory, it searches all sub-directories for AVI files, randomises the list and then plays each one using VLC. Change DIR to the location of your videos:

playvids

To stop it, run the following script:

stopvids

Whilst getting my sat card working I noticed a distinct lack of concise, consolidated information on Freesat in Mythtv. So, I’ve updated my guide with a section on DVB-S. Hopefully it might help a few people…

• MythTV Freesat Guide

So, I installed a quad LNB and it made absolutely no difference. Still, at least I’ve now got 3 spare outputs from my dish if I even need them. My next job was to try moving the dish, until I made a breakthrough…

The machine I’m trying my Sat card in dual boots XP, so out of interest I decided to see if the software which comes with the Hauppauge card could find all the channels. It’s called PowerCinema 5.1. I installed it and did a scan and, hey presto, BBC HD in all its glory. So, I booted back into Ubuntu and did a scan with the command line scan utility, with MythTV and with Kaffeine. No BBC HD!

Well, at least I’ve narrowed the problem down to Linux. Plus, I don’t have to get back up on the roof and start moving my dish! Software’s so much safer to work with. Even if I fell off my char it wouldn’t hurt that much.

So, my DVB-S card is working fine in myth, but I have one very annoying problem – some of the channels are missing. Whether I do a scan with the DVB “scan” utility or mythtv-setup, it can never find BBC HD, plus the other channels on the same transponder. The list of channels I get are here:

http://parker1.co.uk/files/channels.conf

I got the “BBC HD” channels.conf entry from a nice chap on UbuntuForums, but when I try to tune to that using mplayer, I get:

$ mplayer dvb://"BBC HD"
MPlayer 1.0rc2-4.3.2 (C) 2000-2007 MPlayer Team
CPU: AMD Athlon(tm) XP 2400+ (Family: 6, Model: 10, Stepping: 0)
CPUflags: MMX: 1 MMX2: 1 3DNow: 1 3DNow2: 1 SSE: 1 SSE2: 0
Compiled with runtime CPU detection.
mplayer: could not connect to socket
mplayer: No such file or directory
Failed to open LIRC support. You will not be able to use your remote control.

Exiting... (End of file)


I’ve checked the cable and it’s direct from the LNB.

The dish is quite old (was on the house when we moved in a year ago), so my next plan is to change the LNB for a new quad version.

I spent ages last night trying to scan for satellite channels from within Myth, but no luck. In the end I did a full scan from the command line using dvb-utils:

scan /usr/share/doc/dvb-utils/examples/scan/dvb-s/Astra-28.2E | tee channels.conf

…and imported the resulting channels.conf file into mythtv-setup. To my surprise, it worked! I navigated to “Watch TV” in mythfrontend and suddenly had access to hundreds of channels of complete drivel. The EPG even worked.

Next step: HD.

So, I rerouted the satellite cable to the study last night and re-ended it. The following guide was very helpful for fitting the F-connector:

http://www.satcure.co.uk/tech/fconn.htm

I’d already got the card working by downloading the latest v4l-dvb driver and firmware, following the instructions on the linuxtv wiki (the HVR-4000 and my Nova-HD-S2 are essentially the same when it comes to DVB-S2):

http://www.linuxtv.org/wiki/index.php/Hauppauge_WinTV-HVR-4000

I then ran a channel scan:

scan -v /usr/share/doc/dvb-utils/examples/scan/dvb-s/Astra-19.2E

To my surprise, it found upwards of 80 channels before I quit it, so it looks like the dish and card are working.

Next step, MythTV…

Eternity Screensaver packages are now available for Ubuntu Hardy 8.04. I’ve moved the repo to my dedicated server, so downloads should be pretty fast.

Packages are also available for Edgy, Feisty and Gutsy.

A while back I noticed that my MythTV box seemed a little sluggish, especially when I’d not used it for a while – the menus were unresponsive and recordings seemed to take a while to play. This pointed towards mythfrontend being swapped to disk and having to be loaded back into memory. As I only had 512MB of RAM I sourced another stick to bring it up to 1GB. I’d always intended to do this as my box uses dual channel memory, so two sticks should be faster than one anyway.

The difference was immediately apparent and it’s like a different system. Not only is it always very responsive, but everything just seems to happen that little more quickly.

I guess the problem really stems from the fact that I run a full Gnome desktop, which eats up most of the memory before I even start. Still, I’ve tried everything from Xfce to EvilWM to ratpoison and I just feel that they lack the polish and usability that makes Ubuntu what it is. So, I’ll stick with Gnome and say that it was £20 well spent.