User:Thealey

21 - internal player, ISOs, Mac OS X

Trying to play an ISO with the internal player in 21, Mac OS X hangs then crashes maybe 60% of the time. I guess I am going to have to play them with mplayer.. find some workaround. 20 played ISOs on the same Mini without any problems.

Mac mini frontend

I recently bought a new Leopard mac mini to be a frontend. So far it works great, no issues. It plays hidef content captured by my HDHomerun with no problems at all. It looks great. It was a little tricky getting my plasma to work with it, I tried DisplayConfigX and then SwitchResX and SwitchResX did the trick. The mini is tiny and silent. I am going to put it on a shelf behind the plas. It took really only about an hour to unpack the thing and be watching hidef content from the backend. I don't see any reason to use BootCamp to install ubuntu or mythbuntu on there, I thought I would be but I don't see any benefit now.

Wifi Hidef? No

I was hoping I could watch hidef content over wifi potentially just so as to not have to run ethernet to the mini.. but no dice. I have an airport express, the little white one, maybe 6 feet away on the wall.. but it doesn't really work at all for hidef. The airport extreme apparently has 80211N, which is supposedly way faster with 80211G, that I have. That said, the mini doesnt support 80211N at least out of the box. So the choice is, spend like $170 on a new wifi box, and then $80 on a new card for the mini, and even then, it seems like 80211N needs multiple antennas to work, and the Mini has only one. I don't know if that is true. Anyway I am off that now, gigabit ethernet is the way to go.

Remote Control, Remote Buddy

I bought the Sony BD bluetooth PS3 remote off Amazon for $20. I like it. It's kind of a strange remote in that there are no volume controls on it for example. I bought the KeySpan Express remote and I don't like that, too small for me. it's credit card sized which maybe people think is great but not for us. The Apple Remote is useless, to me, I want to be able to delete a TV show without going through a ton of menus, etc and the apple remote is just too "elegant" meaning too few buttons to be useful.

There is an application called Remote Buddy that works really well, it's fabulous. http://www.iospirit.com

The one problem I had is that the keys repeat with any of the remotes in MythFrontend. Like you hit down and the selection goes down on your screen 2, 3, 4 times.

To fix this, go into the Mapping screen in Prefs in Remote Buddy. You can see where the Up button on the remote is mapped to the action Up. Change this by selecting the action and change it to "Custom Action". Hit the + button to make sure you are not overwriting another action, make sure it's on Keystroke (I think). Click into the keystroke edit box, and hit the up arrow on the keyboard. You will see this show up in the edit box. The key thing is, there is a dropdown that lets you decide how you want the keystroke to happen. On mine this was set to something like, Press and release the key with auto-repeat. I changed this to Press and release the key. Problem solved.

I thought I would be setting up the equivalent of lircd, irw type stuff to fix this but it was very easy with remote buddy if you know where to look. Probably like the volume control you would want the autorepeat on so you can hold down the button but everywhere else, it's annoying.

Remote Control and upgrading to 21

Upgrading to 21 broke remote buddy, for me anyway. There is something in OS X that is called an application bundle that identifies an application for the OS.. When remote buddy needs to send its commands to a different app, I guess you need to tell it what the new app is. I could not for the life of me figure out how to map the existing Behavior to the new app I downloaded. I am sure it's possible.

So, I went to iospirit.com and watched the video of how to create a new behavior, and did that. It went fine, took maybe 15 minutes. You make an Action, and you drag the app into it to affine the Action to the app. Then you make each action available in the Behavior. Then you click on the little sprocket to deploy the Behavior into Remote Buddy. If you watch the video, it's very helpful. It's in the Dev section of iospirit.com I believe.

I had to get my 21 binary from macvana.com. When I got one from the Sniderpad and tried to copy the app into the Action part of Remote Buddy, it picked up the path instead of the application bundle name which is like org.mythtv.etc. This could also have been user error, not sure but the one from macvana.com worked great.

One more thing, moving the app to another spot breaks some things. The Video Manager scripts that parse data from imdb break, and need to be changed in Setup. If you go to View Contents on the mythtv apps you can see folders in there, there is a resource folder with scripts.

Lost fstab on a frontend

I lost the fstab on an FC6 frontend and it took a little bit to restore it. If you boot from the rescue cd and need to restore your root volume in FC6, it appears you have to use:

lvm> help vgchange
  vgchange: Change volume group attributes

vgchange
        [-A|--autobackup {y|n}]
        [--alloc AllocationPolicy]
        [-P|--partial]
        [-d|--debug]
        [-h|--help]
        [--ignorelockingfailure]
        [--monitor {y|n}]
        [-t|--test]
        [-u|--uuid]
        [-v|--verbose]
        [--version]
        {-a|--available [e|l]{y|n}  |
         -c|--clustered {y|n} |
         -x|--resizeable {y|n} |
         -l|--logicalvolume MaxLogicalVolumes |
         -s|--physicalextentsize PhysicalExtentSize[kKmMgGtT] |
         --addtag Tag |
         --deltag Tag}
        [VolumeGroupName...]

vgchange -a on the VolGroup00 etc to make it active before you can mount it like you would anything else. If you don't do this step then it will not appear in /dev.