ninth level down

Keeping MythTV up-to-date on Ubuntu

Garry — Wed, 16 May 2012 14:29:34 +0000

If you want the latest features of MythTV without the hassle of upgrading Ubuntu then the easiest way to do it is using the Mythbuntu repositories. The folks at Mythbuntu backport new releases of MythTV for both regular and LTS versions of Ubuntu. Regular Ubuntu releases get just the next version of Myth, while the LTS releases get new versions for the lifetime of the release.

Instructions on using the repos are here:

http://parker1.co.uk/mythtv_latest.php

Mythtv – Purple lines when viewing HD

Garry — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 15:10:49 +0000

Quite a few people have queried me about purple/blue lines appearing when viewing HD. It turns out to be a bug which can be worked around quite easily by changing your Video Playback Profile. See the following discussion for details:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=11360074

Hope that helps someone!
Garry

MythTV Guide Updated

Garry — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 13:29:50 +0000

I’ve recently updated my MythTV guide. It was getting quite out of date, so I’m sorry if I’ve confused anyone.

My fourth child, Nathan, was born this month so I’ve been extremely busy!

I’ve included updated information on DVB-S2 for Freesat HD and also some information on Freeview HD, plus lots more stuff on supported tuner cards. If you spot any mistakes be sure to let me know.

http://parker1.co.uk/mythtv_freesat.php
http://parker1.co.uk/mythtv_freeview_hd.php
http://parker1.co.uk/mythtv_novafw.php

Cheers.

HD Flash in Ubuntu Maverick

Garry — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 14:55:14 +0000

The latest proprietary Adobe Flash drivers (10.2) now support VDPAU for accelerated Flash playback. That means if you have a compatible nVidia graphics chipset you can watch full screen HD content streamed from sites such as YouTube. See my MythTV site for instructions:

http://parker1.co.uk/ubuntu_flash_hd.php

Bruce Dickinson Rock Show Axed!!!

Garry — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 07:41:35 +0000

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.

iGoogle problems

Garry — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 13:14:21 +0000

I’ve recently had a problem with iGoogle not working very well. Most of the gadgets were broken including Gmail and Picasaweb. I tracked it down to the fact that my homepage was set to:

http://www.google.co.uk/ig

Changing it to the following fixed the problems completely:

http://www.google.com/ig

MythTV and the Winter Hill Switchover

Garry — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 08:16:01 +0000

On November 4th, BBC One and BBC Two were moved to a new transport on the Winter Hill/Granada transmitter. I retuned my MythTV box, but it did not picked up either channel. After trying out a few things it turns out that I had to tick the “ignore signal timeouts” box and retune the 801833000 transport. Made me realise just how much my household watches BBC 1 and 2!

Adam John Parker

Garry — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 06:25:56 +0000

My third child, Adam John Parker, was born on 17th August 2009. He weighed a hefty 9lb 10oz and was 58cm long. He must have been cosy in there because he was 2 weeks overdue and had to be given a little encouragement to come out. He’s now 3 weeks old and is doing extremely well. How old does he have to be before I can buy him a Scalextric?…

Changing the Order of Music Files on an SD Card

Garry — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 06:45:10 +0000

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.

iTunes – Filenames with Track Numbers

Garry — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 21:23:50 +0000

Yes, I use Linux for most stuff, but I organise my music using iTunes under Windows. I’ve done it this way for years.

Last night I brought the music system in my car into the 21st century by installing a Pioneer DEH-P4100SD. As well as CD and radio it’s got an aux in, iPod compatibility, USB and an SD card slot. I picked up a 16GB SD card for £20 and stuck a few tracks on there. Unfortunately, even though the head unit supports ID3 tags for artist/album/song names, it only supports browsing based on filename. This had the effect of playing albums in alphabetical order! Heresy against the Gods of Metal!

This is where iTunes comes in. It was storing my music without the track number in the filename. In iTunes 8 there is no longer an option for this, so I was a bit baffled as to what to do. It turned out to be very simple… iTunes 8 actually defaults to including the track number, so all I had to do was reimport my library:

Go into Edit->Preferences and select the Advanced tab.
Uncheck “Keep My iTunes Music Folder Organized”.
Exit preferences
Go back into the preferences and recheck “Keep My iTunes Music Folder Organized”.

iTunes will then add the track numbers onto all of your MP3s! Surprisingly it only took a couple of minutes for 3,000+ songs.