Updates from December, 2007 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts

  • Dark Liquid 7:28 am on December 28, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Sony rant 

    Sony piss me off. They are a shitty company that seems to hate Europe and the rest of the world in general.

    They did the shitty evil rootkit thing on their audio CDs
    They took out native PS2 hardware on their European model PS3s from the word go, thus limiting backwards compatibility and performance for European users of older games.
    The PS3 doesn’t support open, free, libre, codecs like OGG Vorbis for music, even though there really should be nothing stopping an implementation of it. The only reason they don’t support it is so they can push a proprietary standards agenda. Obviously cost is a factor in developing it, but really, the code must be pretty portable and the userbase for OGG Vorbis can’t be so small as to be ignored, surely?
    They are a big DRM proponent.
    Nothing good by Sony gets released in Europe, especially the UK, until months after a US/Japanese release. Even with their online store. Seriously, what is the deal, in this modern age of being able to transfer huge amounts of data anywhere in the world at ridiculous speeds, what possible reason is there for not doing simultaneous releases, at least for online content? Nothing but bureaucracy and hating Europe as fair as I can see.

    Despite all this, I own a PS3, but Sony consistently makes me feel unvalued as a customer and generally a second class citizen compared to the US. Fuck you Sony!

     
  • Dark Liquid 3:53 am on December 26, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Media Box Revisited 

    Well, after messing around with the media box, my solution is to just run a bunch of programs manually and setup the desktop to be 3 large icons, namely Browse Media, Play DVD and Play Music. Browse Media just uses nautilus starting from the Media directory, Play DVD is just the command for running DVD fullscreen via vlc and Play Music toggles the display of Amarok. Downloads are done using azureus or firefox and I can use the box remotely via vnc using x11vnc to share the existing display.

    Most interesting though has been the video setup.

    When I started configuring the system, I went for Mythbuntu gutsy – I hated it. I later switched to openSUSE 10.3 and being a previous user of SuSE (9.2 was the last time I used it properly on my desktop) I was quite impressed. Once I was happy with the installed software, I assumed that using the fglrx ATI drivers would yield better performance than the default setup (i.e. VESA). I was right – kinda.

    The problem lies in that I’m running fairlymodern, integrated chipset hardware since the core of my media PC is a ASUS P2-M2A-VM, a nice little box that looks really good next to my TV.

    SaX2 detected my monitor (a Hanspree 32” TV JT01) perfectly and I got the fglrx driver working easy enough. Turns out though that while the performance was better, I was plagued with issues:

    • screen artifacts
    • corrupt mouse pointers
    • random X crashes
    • incredibly poor openGL performance (not that I plan on using 3D, but it would have been nice to have been able to for acceleration purposes)
    • any video larger than around 640×480 suffered tearing and had a a really noticeable split from corner to corner when there was a lot of motion

    Basically, it was shit. I tried messing around with the Vsync to avoid tearing, no avail with the diagonal line of discontent though. Nothing I did – including running the Xserver at 640×480 (UGLY!) – helped.

    In the end I thought, hmm, lets try the latest RadeonHD driver, the nice open source one, the one that says it has no acceleration of any kind, no Xvideo support, no anything that I would expect would be recommended for flawless video playback. Well, running it now, I can watch videos at fullscreen at 1366×768 without any artifacting, tearing or crazy diagonal lines of the apocalypse. Hurray for open source! Even ATI’s own engineers can’t make a driver that can out perform, on their own hardware no less, a driver that purports to have no acceleration features. Pretty poor. What exactly did ATI do, make their driver have a deceleration ‘feature’?

    Well, the good news is that the new RadeonHD drivers should be getting better and better all the time. AMD are being cool and releasing specs to the driver developers for their newer cards (so my integrated RS690 should hopefully be included in that list) and with the open source model behind the development, things should pick up pretty quickly (hell, anything is quick compared to the glacial pace ATI release their so called ‘drivers’ at). Time and again I’m reminded how open source is so awesome.

     
  • Dark Liquid 2:42 pm on December 19, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Media PC Woes 

    I’m fed up with most media center software out there. MythTV I’ve found to be unstable and irritating to use at best, elisa apparently still doesn’t have DVD playback support and none of these the ones I’ve used so far seem to provide a simple way to configure how files are stored and to automatically manage things like downloads for things like trailers and what not and store them in places based on user definable criteria. They often seem to focus too heavily on being a TV viewer/PVR and I don’t want TV viewing or PVR stuff.

    Here is what I want:

    • A simple, friendly media browser that:
      • can list media by genre (e.g. Action, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Comedy)
      • can list media by name
      • can list media by category and subcategories (e.g. TV > Series > Family Guy > Season 2 > Episode 1)
      • can start up a player for the media full screen without any fuss
      • can add the media to a queue of things to play
      • can add media folders to a queue
      • has a way to move media from one place to another or generally organise media in some simple way
      • can automatically list files from any attached device (e.g. will index files on network drives, upnp devices, usb harddrives, etc) and optionally categorise it into an appropriate media folder
      • list recently added media
    • A download app that:
      • can download files and store them in appropriate media folders based on user-definable criteria (e.g. store stuff downloaded from apple trailers in a Film > Trailers directory or something)
      • can schedule downloads
      • can automatically download items from RSS feeds (e.g. podcasts)
    • A simple app to configure the two previous ones that:
      • can add new auto-file storing criteria
      • can add new devices or directories to index
      • add new RSS feeds to download items from (and ways to match against specific content in the feed)

    All I want is a file browser with a download manager and a media player that all work together. I don’t need or want half the crap in pretty much any solution out there. So far, elisa is pretty close to my goals, as I can set up a download thing separately in the background, but if it doesn’t have DVD playback its unusable. GeeXbox was also pretty close, but doesn’t seem to offer anyway of setting up stuff like downloading and has no capabilities for metadata-based media browsing. Maybe I’ll just try and hack up my own thing – I need to hack up a distro to actually run it on first as currently I can’t get audio over HDMI with Mythbuntu 7.10 (with the latest updates and ATI drivers) on my Asus M2A thingy (I did at one point before I installed the latest ATI drivers, so I know its possible).

     
  • Dark Liquid 8:48 am on December 18, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Quick update 

    Wow, long time no post!

    Things are coming together oh so slowly. The new flat is looking good – we still need more storage (like shelves, etc) but all in all its turning out nicely. The out-goings look all right as well, so far we aren’t spending much more a month than we were before (maybe one to two hundred pounds more). Of course, with christmas and moving and all that jazz, the spending hasn’t really been stable so its been hard to make an accurate budget – probably wont be able to until January.

    My PS3 is getting a lot of use recently, I now have about 12-13 games for it, plus a bunch of PS2 and PS1 games. I really need to stop spending money on it – I’ve been curbing the expenditure by purchasing via eBay since I can get games much cheaper (and often earlier than the UK release date). I wish they’d release Pain in the UK already, I really want that game, I don’t understand the hold up. Burnout Paradise looks awesome and I’m already enjoying being lame at the demo :)

    Work has been a little hectic – the joys of multiple deadlines, bugs and other things have culminated in in crazy overtime and what not but hopefully things will settle. I’m hoping to be on holiday end of this week anyway and it will be a welcome escape I think!

    Speaking of crazy overtime – haven’t gone home since 0900 Monday, so excuse me while I curl up into a ball and die ;)

     
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