Blogs

We'll have some boots on the ground at this CES 2013, if you'll be there too make sure to stop by the DMZ + HSS CES 2013 Meetup. I will be.

 We’ll be meeting in the Marriott Courtyard Bistro lounge at the Courtyard hotel immediately across the street from the convention center. If you’ve attended CES before, you know what a hassle it is to grab transportation once the show floor closes. So skip the mayhem and spend an hour or so with Dave McCabe, Josh, and Richard. We’ll be less than a 10 minute walk when you leave the convention center.

DMZ

Hi all, I thought I would start a series of off-topic random blogs.  If you don't like off-topic content sorry, but feel free to ignore :).  I also apologize for typos, grammar, etc...these are quick 5 minute blogs.

A little background...lately I do the bulk of my development on a MacBook or MacMini. It offers the best of all worlds, at least in my humble opinion. Very stable hardware, a stable operating system, a good collection of free or cheap essential software (Adium, iTerm2, FreeRDP, Homebrew, Growl, Sublime Text 2) along with useful native applications like Mail. I digress, my essential software may be a different post.

I do the majority of my work using Sublime Text 2 (even in Windows using MSBUILD in lieu of VS.NET) and iTerm2 but I also need access to Windows 7, Windows 8 and Fedora 17 for different builds. While I have different build slaves running on my Hyper-V 2012 server I also use Parallels Desktop for Mac so I can be self contained. This is great but a few tweaks can really make it a powerful yet simple development environment, and that brings me to the point of this blog post.

Using symlinks, both in Windows and Linux, you can simplify management of common config files like .gitconfig, .ssh, .bash_profile, etc. Parallels does a lot of the work for you so we'll start with that. If you haven't already, install "Parallels Tools" on your virtual machines. You can do that from the Virtual Machine menu.

Congratulations go out to Rob Wright, winner of the Ceton InfiniTV 4 USB Tuner, and Jace, winner of the Ceton InfiniTV 4 PCIe tuner!! I'll be sending an e-mail to both of you to confirm shipping address. 

Thank you to all who participated! Hope everyone had as much fun with the responses as we did reading them!

THIS CONTEST HAS ENDED!!! THANK YOU ALL WHO PARTICIPATED AND GOOD LUCK!

In honor of Father's day Ceton is currently running a save $30 when you buy two InfiniTV4 (USB or PCIe) over at Amazon. Generously, they've provided us a PCIe model to help you (or your dad) have an awesome way to celebrate paternity via a give away here at Missing Remote. Thanks Ceton!

HOW TO ENTER

We have made some changes, so please READ all the rules.

To change things up, we've also added several other methods to increase your chances of winning by adding more entries possible.

The only requirement to enter is to reply and answer the following:

• What are the top three shows you and your dad enjoy (or would enjoy if you had a InfiniTV 4)?
  

Add your comment below to enter, plus you can gain up to two additional entries to increase your chances of winning:

Have a Ceton InfiniTV? Testing Windows 8 Consumer Preview? Check out the new Ceton blog post InfiniTV on Windows 8 Consumer Preview.

Don't have a Ceton InfiniTV? Buy one from our Amazon store via http://www.amazon.com/Ceton-InfiniTV-Digital-Cable-Quad-tuner/dp/B003B4VLJQ/.

Disclaimer: I think most know this already but I work for Ceton and this is a shameless plug. But hopefully it is still helpful to any brave enthusiast willing to risk death threats (it happens, I know) from their significant other by using a "Consumer Preview".

Netflix has provided over the top (OTT) video streaming via its "Watch Instantly" service for quite sometime, but until yesterday there was little to fundamentally differentiate that service (besides convenience, and the need for high-speed Internet) from a trip to the video store or the mailbox. Introducing original programming changed that - moving the company in a more interesting, welcome, and potentially disruptive direction.

Another year is about to conclude, and I wanted to take the chance to highlight some of our most popular articles throughout the year. Real life sometimes gets in the way of reading the site, so hopefully this will help if you might have missed a certain special review or guide. Feel free to contribute what YOUR favorite article has been.

Here are the top 10:

1. How to Enable Concurrent Sessions in Windows 7 Service Pack 1 RTM
   No real surprise here. Still our most popular guide to date, showing you how to get multiple logins at the same time on your Windows 7 box without having to kick off a user.
    
2. Intel Core i3-2100T and DH67CF Mini-ITX Motherboard / Intel Sandy Bridge: Core i5-2500K and DH67BL Motherboard / Intel Core i5-2400S and DH67GD Micro-ATX Motherboard
   I combined these reviews from Andrew since I think they deserved to share the top spot. Sandy Bridge was truly revolutionary and was great news for all us HTPC enthusiasts. Even 11 months later, these boards are still solid.
    
3. How to Watch TV without Cable
   Examining all the various non-traditional cable TV options available for watching your favorite television programs, without having to pay a fortune.
    
4. Beginner's Guide to HTPC Software
   Taking a look at what software exists for use on your HTPC as your media center. This category is more than alive as some of these interfaces have become so beautiful you almost want to just sit at the home screen and drool. Maybe that's just me.

I'm happy to say that after weeks of work (I can't believe that it actually took that long.  I'm so ashamed) I have a frontend that works very nicely.  I should have posted this a few days ago but I've been happily enjoying my new setup.  For the most part it's been working great. I have really been enjoying the quick suspend/resume.  This is the first time that I've been able to get it to function properly on this system.  It's much nicer than the 2 minutes or so it used to take.  Anyway, I noticed that I have a couple of button mismappings on my remote - commercial skip forward and backward are swapped.  Easy enough to fix.  

I haven't had a chance to test out DVD and BluRay playback.  I can report back when I've had time to do that.  I don't think I have BluRay setup quite right yet but if I get DVDs to playback reliably I'll be a step up from my old setup.  It used to work on my old frontend (an installation that I had before my previous setup) but then when I upgraded to what I was previously working it was very hit or miss and I eventually gave up and hooked up a dedicated DVD player to the TV.

I think that my HD playback has gone up a notch in image quality as well from this upgrade.  The new drivers (and possibly the underlying video rendering system) seem to be allowing me to run a much smoother playback.  In the past, high speed panning scenes (football) would have a tear in the middle of the screen but I haven't seen it since the update.  Audio continues to work well - optical out to my receiver; that TV doesn't have HDMI.

In the end I'm very satisfied with this upgrade.  I have everything working as well as or better than my previous setup with the sole exception of Mythweb which I still need to setup.  But that'll be for another day.  For now, I'm going to go back and play with my newly functional toys.

Today was spent primarily on cleanup work.  Most of the time was creating the lircrc file for MythTV to use, which maps the remote control button codes to commands within an application.  Luckily for me I had a backup of the lircrc files that I had been using before the upgrade.  The only problem is that all of the button names changed with the update of LIRC. So instead of "Play" I had to change the config file to act on "KEY_PLAY".  They standardized all of the names on me.  So most of my time was spent figuring out what the proper name was for all of the buttons on my remote and mapping those to the correct commands in MythTV.  

Once that was done I had all of the functionality that I had in my previous install. I figured, however, that as long as I was doing this I might as well go for gold.  There were two scripts that I had found and tweaked early in my MythTV days that I was never able to get working on my previous installation of MythTV.  The first script cycled the MythTV frontend application via a button press - so if it hung I could kill the app and if it crashed and died I could restart it.  The second script suspended and woke up the computer via a button push.  I was able to wake up the frontend via a button push but was not able to get suspend to work prop ferly; every time I wanted to watch TV I would have to wait for a minute or two while the frontend booted.  Annoying, but luckily my wife was very tolerant on this problem.  As luck would have it, the frontend cycling script only needed a couple of tweaks to get it running.  The suspend script ended up using a completely new power management interface to get suspend to function properly as a user and not root, but luckily someone had already figured out how to do it and it was a non-trivial matter of Googling to find the solution.

Well, it turns out that I'm a moron.  Apparently everything was pretty much working for me already.  I had all of the pieces, I just didn't put them together correctly.  After days of work I finally have LIRC recognizing my remote inputs properly.  Basically what happened is that I configured the startup script for LIRC to load the correct driver for my IR receiver with the correct device and the correct parameters.  I had the correct config file being used to interpret the key presses correctly.  I had it all.  The problem was that I was doing all of my testing by launching the LIRC daemon from the command line instead of via the startup script that I had configured so none of my tweaks were being taken [facepalm].  Needless to say, after verifying this by running the command line with all of the correct parameters and then again verifying by rebooting the system and having it launch automatically, the remote control is now being properly identified and controlled via LIRC.  I can now launch irw and see all of my key presses as they happen.

At this point there seem to be only a few tweaks left to make before the system is ready for use again.  First, I need to setup the MythTV frontend application to automatically launch at login.  Next, I need to make MythTV always appear on top of the screen; it is currently being covered with the top and bottom panels of the window manager.  Finally, I need to configure the LIRC configuration file to interpret the button presses and pass them to the various applications, like MythTV.  Once I've got that in place, I think that all of the major components will be in place and I can put the unit back into service.  Yay.

I've done a bit more research into this remote control thing and found a couple of commands to use for debugging.  First is ir-keyboard.  If I run ir-keyboard with no options it will show me what device is found, what protocols it is capable of and which one( it is using.  In my case the output looks like:

Found /sys/class/rc/rc0/ (/dev/input/event5) with:

        Driver imon, table rc-imon-mce

        Supported protocols: RC-6

        Enabled protocols: RC-6

        Repeat delay = 500 ms, repeat period = 33 ms

In addition, I can run ir-keyboard -t and it will put the IR receiver into test mode.  Every time I press a button on the remote it puts up the codes and key names that it decodes.  According to this, everything it being seen properly and should be working.  I guess it's just an issue with the handoff to LIRC that's the problem.  I'm a step closer but still confused...

Again, I can say that the hardware is working fine and it's a software config issue that's holding me back.  Now to figure out what that is...

Ok, after a good night sleep I have cooled down enough to be productive again.  I decided to reinstall Fedora 15, this time using KDE as the desktop instead of Gnome.  I'm sure that if I had dug into it far enough I could have figured out how to resolve the windowing issues that I was facing.  Maybe there was a desktop effect that I could have turned off somewhere or something but I didn't feel like figuring out that problem when all I want to do is get the MythTV frontend up and running.  So I decided to kill that installation and load up Fedora 15 with KDE as the desktop environment this time.  The rest of the install process was identical as far ask I can tell.  After I got the graphics drivers and MythTV installed I found that I did not have that screen corruption issue.

I did still face the second problem that I reported in my last entry - MythTV playback was corrupted.  This problem turned out to not be as big of a problem as I originally thought.  To fix it I went into the setup options for TV Settings -> Playback and changed the profile to High Quality.  Once I completed that, playback proceeded as normal.  I'm sure that down the road I may tweak the playback profiles some more to get a bit more out of it, but at least it works now.  That's as far as I'm going for now.  I'm still a little annoyed that I had to go through that in the first place.  

Needless to say, WAF is not at its highest right now.  Hopefully there will not be many more setbacks in this process.  Need to get that remote figured out...