geek

When putting together the new mythfrontend I hit a little trap for young players with the J&W JW-G82UM-PVHD+ motherboard that I thought I might blog about and maybe make for some Google bait. This motherboard has built in nvidia video, with a choice of VGA, DVI and HDMI connectors. You can't use DVI and HDMI simultaneously, you have to choose which one is active.

Although there is a BIOS switch that claims to control this selection, it is nothing but a filthy lie put in by bored BIOS programmers. Whether DVI or HDMI is enabled on this motherboard (and probably other J&W motherboards) is controlled by the completely undocumented JDVI_HDMI jumper. It is a large 3x9 pin jumper block located immediately behind the HDMI connector. As shipped, with the jumper in position 2-3, DVI is enabled. Move the jumper to 1-2, and HDMI is enabled.

I've taken a picture of the motherboard with the relevant jumper block circled. The jumper block is in position 1-2, i.e. HDMI enabled.

Posted by Ian Donaldson

Upgraded ffmpeg to 0.5 and was amused to see that the x264 developers have actually put in place some defensive programming against ffmpeg brokeness.

[libx264 @ 0x8b7d8b0]broken ffmpeg default settings detected [libx264 @ 0x8b7d8b0]use an encoding preset (vpre)

This messages indicates that the best way to tune the output is to use one or more of the included presets, in my case located in /opt/local/share/ffmpeg/. The new iPhone/iPod encoding line therefore becomes:

ffmpeg -deinterlace -y -threads 3 -async 5000 -i inputfile -cropleft 56 -cropright 56 -acodec libfaac -ab 128k -vcodec libx264 -crf 20 -vpre default -vpre baseline -f mp4 -s 480x320 -r 25 -aspect 480:320 -level 30 -metadata title="Title" filename.mp4

Note the use of two presets, the first to select the default set of parameters, the second to disallow features not found in "baseline" H.264 as the iPhone and iPod touch only support baseline H.264, not main.

Posted by Ian Donaldson

Old mythfrontend died. I suspect the IGP was overheating, because it became unreliable, and sometimes on reboot it would not display any red. This despite the cables being firmly plugged in. New mythfrontend is new.

Continue reading "New Mythfrontend"

Posted by Ian Donaldson

The following line does what I want:

gpsbabel -t -i garmin -f /dev/ttyUSB0 -o kml,points=0,units=m -F route2.kml

Quite interesting to see how closely (or not) the GPS and google maps line up.

Posted by Ian Donaldson

I've been fixing up a Sony Vaio laptop for a friend of Sof's. Having wasted much time on this black hole in the past, I normally avoid this sort of work, but when the missus says "Jump", I say "What colour?" The problem report was to the effect that they couldn't connect to the Internet. However, I quickly discovered the real problem was that Windows had been reinstalled, leaving the laptop devoid of drivers. Pretty much everything except basic VESA video was non-functional, no wireless, network, bluetooth, 3D graphics, sound, media reader, power management, sleep function or modem. Normally this problem can be solved by a visit to the vendor website. I tried Sony Australia first, but they led me to believe that no drivers were available for download. A bit of Googling led me to the Sony APac site, where I discovered a helpful link to the original drivers. All 29 of them. This includes such essential "drivers" as the "Sony Shared Library" and "OpenMG Setup", all of which I downloaded. At about 6 kb/sec. You'd think Sony might be able to afford a decent Internet connection, but apparently not. Installing the 29 drivers solved most problems, although as there were undocumented dependencies between them, I just had to keep installing each one until it worked. The sound drivers wouldn't install, failing with an obscure error message until I found an unofficial download of a Microsoft hotfix that allowed it to continue. I was also asked if I wanted to install in U.S. English, French or Spanish about six million times. Apparently having a system locale of English doesn't mean you wouldn't like your power driver to be in French. Just to liven things up a bit. I imagine that the usual shutdown options of Suspend and Hibernate would be replaced by "Surrender" and "Run Away" or something like that. None of the 29 drivers enable the Bluetooth, by the way. Apparently to get that working you need to edit an INF file. I kid you not. So after all of this, I'm left with a laptop that more or less works. It locks instead of powering off, and the battery never stops charging, but the owners, raised on low expectations of Windows-based machines, will no doubt be delighted. And Sony are supposed to be the Apple of Wintel hardware! Next time some moron spouts that line about Apple needing to license its OS to Dell and Sony et al in order to succeed, just knee him in the nuts.

Posted by Ian Donaldson

Encoding for iPod on my Athlon 64 3000+ ran at about 25 fps. On the new 3.0 GHz hackintosh, it is doing about 72 fps. Have to add an extra argument to use both cores though, "-threads 2". Also, they changed the name of the h264 vcodec, from "h264" to "libx264" (obviously!) Current encoding line is:

ffmpeg -deinterlace -y -threads 2 -async 5000 -i input filename -cropleft 56 -cropright 56 -acodec libfaac -ab 128k -vcodec libx264 -crf 20 -flags +loop -cmp +chroma -me_range 16 -g 250 -partitions +parti4x4+partp8x8+partb8x8 -me hex -subq 5 -f mp4 -s 480x320 -r 25 -aspect 480:320 -level 30 -title "Title" output-filename.mp4

Posted by Ian Donaldson

What do you say about something that "just works" ? That is what EFI-X does. I built a machine with components only from the (short) HCL, connected the EFI-X module to a spare motherboard USB header, switched on and then installed from a retail Mac OSX X 10.5 DVD.

Once past the EFI-X boot screen, it is just like using a real Mac. Compared to the Power Mac G5, it is very fast, and somewhat quieter. There's no hacking, disabling, fiddling, modifying or other faffing about required, even updates to OS X install from Software Update as they would on a real Mac.

No product is perfect, but the limitations are few and minor and include:

• The EFI-X booter is not Open Firmware, and therefore cannot boot from Firewire (yet.)
• Windows and OS X can't share a single drive due to the different partitioning schemes required (MBR vs GPT)
• Booting into the EFI-X environment adds about 10 seconds to the bootup process.
• Audio doesn't automatically switch between line-out and headphone out when you plug headphones in.
• Scraping the bottom of the barrel here .. System Profiler shows the graphics card as 256 Mb when it is actually 512 Mb ... cosmetic only.

So for $1000, you can have your very own yum cha brand Mac Pro.

Posted by Ian Donaldson

So now Street View has been enabled for many Australian cities and suburbs. I have a suspicion that the Street View car might've been doing some wardriving at the same time, because my entirely GPS-less iPod Touch can now locate me when at home (in the suburbs) to a high degree of precision. "Locate Me" on the Touch used to only work in the CBD, and not that accurately either.

Posted by Ian Donaldson

Looks like JoikuSpot had a competitor already - WalkingHotSpot.

Posted by Ian Donaldson

Remembers when I suggested a portable device that served a 3G connection over Wifi? Well turns out someone has already done it. A company called Joiku (those clever Finns) have written an application that does just that, turns your Symbian Series 60 (and possibly Windows Mobile) 3G phone into a Wifi access point. It is called JoikuSpot, and there is both a free and a premium edition. A significant number of mouth-breathers are incorrectly referring to this app as JaikuSpot, which is confusing all round.

Posted by Ian Donaldson

This is how I encode shows recorded by mythtv for viewing on the iPod Touch. (or iPhone. If I had an iPhone.)

ffmpeg -deinterlace -y -async 5000 -i inputfile -cropleft 56 -cropright 56 -acodec libfaac -ab 128k -vcodec h264 -crf 20 -flags +loop -cmp +chroma -me_range 16 -g 250 -partitions +parti4x4+partp8x8+partb8x8 -me hex -subq 5 -f mp4 -s 480x320 -r 25 -aspect 480:320 -level 30 -title "Title" output-filename.mp4

Explanation follows.

Continue reading "This is how we roll ..."

Posted by Ian Donaldson

Although some people (e.g. me) are lucky enough to own laptops with built in 3G, not everyone is so well endowed equipped. I was thinking that what the world needs is a small battery powered device with a 3G modem and a wifi access point that could provide you with a small personal wifi AP for your gadgets. Examples might include laptops, an iPod touch, your mate's laptop etc. Then I realised that in terms of hardware, I'd just described modern "smart phone" such as a Nokia N95 or iPhone. So perhaps it is just a matter of some clever person writing the right software. I think wifi would tend to chew up the juice, but if the power were turned right down, it might not be so bad. You probably don't need more than a couple of metres range for a personal AP. And wifi would sure beat Bluetooth for surfing the net.

Posted by Ian Donaldson

Fujitsu solved my laptop conundrum by 3G enabling the lightest entry in their T series of convertible notebooks. Although they do have a smaller and lighter option in the P series, at the moment it is a poor choice between the 3G enabled P1610 and the Core 2 Duo equipped P1620. No doubt at some point the P1620 will gain a 3G option, but you sacrifice a lot for that few hundred grams - 3" of screen, 3 hours of battery life and an active digitiser. (This means the screen doesn't know when the pen is until it is pressed down.)

Continue reading "T2010 - First impressions"

Posted by Ian Donaldson

I hate ffmpeg. The developers seem to delight in refactoring the command line options with every minor release, and now my carefully constructed iPod encoding line is failing with the following singularly unhelpful error message:

Error while opening codec for output stream #0.1 - maybe incorrect parameters such as bit_rate, rate, width or height

Thanks for the help, guys.

Posted by Ian Donaldson

I've been somewhat intrigued by the possibility of purchasing something other than the traditional notebook as my business computing device. A (relatively) recent entrant to the personal computing field has been the tablet PC and its close relation, the convertable. For those not in the know, a tablet is a portable computer without a keyboard; a convertable is more like a traditional notebook, but with a screen that can rotate and fold flat against the keyboard, facing outwards. Of course, without a keyboard one must have an alterate form of text entry. In the case of these two, it is by writing directly on the screen which doubles as a digitiser. Such an arrangement naturally would stand or fall primarily on the ability of the underlying OS to efficiently translate handwriting to text; lest all input hereafter be stored as giant SVG files or worse. With that in mind, I have been investigating the handwriting recognition capability of the major OSs.

Continue reading "Handwriting Recognition (Or lack thereof.)"

Posted by Ian Donaldson