Re: [Freevo-users] The future of Freevo(.org)
, to those who applied little tweaks that made all the difference. And especially to those who dared to document it all. It's been amazing, and it sure as heck isn't over. It's just... changing. Evolving. James Trietsch Oregon, USA On 1/20/2014 10:38, Dirk Meyer wrote: Hi, I have no idea how many people still read this list, how many people still use Freevo 1.x, and how many people use 2.0 from git (I guess that is only me). I failed to get a release of Freevo 2 out. I changed too much, a complete rewrite and some parts are also written three or four times. My fault, I know -- an error made years ago and when noticed, it was too late to change it. And since I started a new job four years ago my time working on Freevo got smaller and smaller every month. Jason also is completely busy with his job. I still say Freevo 2 is ready to use, but I will not release it. I'm not sure it works with the latest clutter or gstreamer, I only know it works for me. It lacks many important features such as DVD playback (I have a BluRay Player) and TV recording. I do not need it and I don't have time to code it. Besides that, XBMC has a much bigger community, UPnP is enough for many people (even I use NAS + BubbleUPnP + TV sometimes) and new development such as Chromecast will reduce Freevo's usefulness even further. I will continue to use Freevo 2, I may even write an Android client for it (after learning Python with Freevo which was useful for getting my current job, hacking Android is a good next step), but I see no real future for Freevo without a live community and more people hacking code. If someone contributes something, I will add it. If someone needs help to get Freevo 2 running, I will provide it. Since we also lack someone maintaining the server we host and I do not want to pay for something we don't need, I will shut it down at the end of February. This means the SVN and the Wiki will be gone. If someone wants a backup of the Wiki please tell me. The code is already on github and will remain there. The mailing list on SF will continue and so will the mail server hosting freevo.org and all mail addresses will continue to be valid. Maybe after some time someone resurrects Freevo. I would love to pass the maintainership over to someone just as I took it over from Krister years ago. Maybe someone takes the kaa-stuff and writes something new and better. I'm happy to assist and I think the same is true for Jason. Maybe I will release something someday based on the current code. It was a great time, I learned a lot and it was much fun. Regards, Dischi -- CenturyLink Cloud: The Leader in Enterprise Cloud Services. Learn Why More Businesses Are Choosing CenturyLink Cloud For Critical Workloads, Development Environments Everything In Between. Get a Quote or Start a Free Trial Today. http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=119420431iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk ___ Freevo-users mailing list Freevo-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freevo-users -- CenturyLink Cloud: The Leader in Enterprise Cloud Services. Learn Why More Businesses Are Choosing CenturyLink Cloud For Critical Workloads, Development Environments Everything In Between. Get a Quote or Start a Free Trial Today. http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=119420431iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk ___ Freevo-users mailing list Freevo-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freevo-users
[Freevo-users] M2TS streams in Freevo (was: The future of Freevo 2.0)
Phil and Jason: I was talking about a metadata parser for M2TS containers. Right now it seems like it's hit or miss... sometimes it will pick up the data and give me a duration, but most of the time I get a duration of 'None'. I know I said I could look into it... but between being busy and then being unmotivated, I admit I haven't really made progress on that front. If anyone else happens to be looking at adding metadata parsers to kaa.metadata, don't wait for me... -_- Phil, the HD PVR sounds like a good solution to consider. Having the video show up on /dev/video0 would definitely be less of a headache. Right now I'm using a slightly-hacked copy of dvgrab to grab the stream over firewire and it works, but it fails more often than I'd like. The direct-firewire capture does have a few major features to its advantage. It captures the raw M2TS so any video overlays the cable box might add such as the programming guide or info window don't appear in the recording. The videos are recorded in their broadcast aspect and resolution with no black bars: HD channels are 1920x1080, local TV stations arrive in 1280x720 and the SD channels are 640x480. It also records full A52/AC3 surround audio and it even includes the closed-captioning stream, which I've played back as subtitles through VLC. Jason, I had a few notes to add to the conversation about my experience with MPlayer and M2TS playback. It does it, but it's not perfect. One of the major problems is that seems to assume the internal video timing (time code?) will start at zero, but with video grabbed from a stream, this isn't always the case. This leads to weird time displays like 2:10:05 / 1:00:00. It correctly reports the video is an hour long, but the internal time code started at two hours. This usually doesn't affect playback and is just cosmetic. Also MPlayer occasionally has difficulty finding the proper length of a video, but this doesn't affect playback either. In fact, it may be somehow related to bitrate issues, because everything is proportionally changed. For example, if you have a one hour video that MPlayer somehow decides is only 30 minutes long, it plays back fine and the on-screen timer will be moving at half-speed (i.e., it counts up one second for every two real seconds of video). I first noticed this when hammering on the video thumbnail creator to make it work with M2TS... some videos were detected as the wrong length, but if you set your seek to half that value, you still landed in the middle of the video. Finally, a non-cosmetic problem I've had is the audio sync suddenly going way off track. I have a suspicion of what's happening... that the network video stream has one time code, but when the local cable operator breaks away for local commercials, the inserted video has a different time code. MPlayer sees the time jump and says !!! and tries to resync the audio and video. And of course when the channel comes back out of local commercial, the time code jumps again. I have a file with an example of this and about 2/3 of the way through the audio falls out of sync and never really recovers by the end of the show. I tried re-encoding the video (even to a different format/container) and the sync issues persist. They don't appear on the HD concert videos I grabbed from Palladia, but in retrospect, Palladia doesn't have any local advertising that I could see (at least not during those concerts): It was all network video, so there weren't any time code breaks. For the first and last problem, it almost makes me wish there was a command-line option for MPlayer to make it use its own internal free-running timer for its calculations, but still use the video time code for the video output... I know it's needed to figure out frame orders if they arrive out of order. So having said all this, I know there's probably not much we can do, since MPlayer is its own entity, and as discussed previously, we (the Freevo community) aren't keen to hack on MPlayer just for our own purposes. But perhaps this could be something to consider when thinking of what video playback method to use in the future. And of course, as far as recording goes, I think a built-in raw firewire capture would be awesome! But I may be a demographic of one. No worries, that's what makes Freevo good in my book: Need something more? Write it in yourself! Cheers! James Springfield, OR USA -- BlackBerryreg; DevCon Americas, Oct. 18-20, San Francisco, CA Learn about the latest advances in developing for the BlackBerryreg; mobile platform with sessions, labs more. See new tools and technologies. Register for BlackBerryreg; DevCon today! http://p.sf.net/sfu/rim-devcon-copy1 ___ Freevo-users mailing list Freevo-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freevo-users
Re: [Freevo-users] The future of Freevo 2.0
I thought I'd chime in here too. I admit I haven't even tried any other HTPC packages out there. I went with Freevo from the start and have been using it ever since, from it's humble beginnings (in my hands) playing back video and audio in a beige box tower, to the TV-tuning, cable box controlling, radio streaming, podcast-playing powerhouse that it is now (and in a nice Antec HTPC case, too). I do like the customization and plug-in architecture. It allows me to put in just the idlebar stuff I want, or if I'm not playing games I can take that out completely. I will admit I feel you need to be more knowledgeable to do the configuration... wading through the local_config file can be daunting at times. It will be nice when it's eventually an easy to use system of menus (either on-screen or via web). And speaking of web, love the web interface. I use it almost exclusively for scheduling and keeping tabs on programs. Just last week I was over 100 miles from home when I realized I'd forgotten to set a recording for the Formula One race. All I had to do was whip out my phone, call up the web page and set the recording. Piece of cake! But the number one reason I love Freevo is because Python is not a terribly hard language to learn. If Freevo had been written in C/C++, I might have gotten enough motivation to contribute. But with it being in Python, it was easy to jump in and start twiddling and tweaking and see the results immediately, without any recompiling. The barrier to entry for anyone who wants to contribute or even just modify their local version is a lot lower, in my opinion. And that is good! As for the future of it, I'm eager to see Freevo 2.0. Just listening to everyone talk about the plans in these last few e-mails has gotten me excited all over again. I don't know how much I can contribute just yet, but a few things sparked my interest: * Streaming source - I don't know if I can help make it happen, but I vote for it. I haven't been dabbling in the direct-over-firewire recording I was working on before, mostly because I don't have the grunt to play back anything more than SD resolution and haven't found a good re-encoding solution/setting for what is recorded in HD. I should dust it off and give it some more work. But this leads me to... * M2TS parser - Obviously goes hand-in-hand with the above, since the output from the cable box is a raw MPeg2 TS stream. I'd be willing to give it a look and see if I can make heads-or-tails out of the spec and how to adapt it to the metadata parser. I wouldn't count on me for this... but if I get some spare time I'd give it a try. I had a few other issues with the direct-recording... but that's a discussion for another thread. Regardless, I love the way things are looking. James Springfield, OR USA -- Got Input? Slashdot Needs You. Take our quick survey online. Come on, we don't ask for help often. Plus, you'll get a chance to win $100 to spend on ThinkGeek. http://p.sf.net/sfu/slashdot-survey ___ Freevo-users mailing list Freevo-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freevo-users
Re: [Freevo-users] Play From Start / Resume
On 2/15/2011 17:57, Jim Duda wrote: The latest svn beta release has a new feature that allows you to play a video from the start or resume from where you left off. Sometimes I get the option when I start a video and other times not. I cannot seem to find any consistent behavior. How is this supposed to work? (Using mplayer). Jim, as far as I know, it depends on if there's a resume bookmark associated with that video file. There's been code in place for a while to set a bookmark when you manually stop a video, and you could go into the submenu for the video and pick 'Resume Playback' and it would start from where you left off (plus or minus a minute or so). Once the video finishes 'normally', this resume bookmark is removed. Now it's a little more noticeable, popping up the menu when you go to play an item, rather than making you pick the option out of the submenu. I think it's a good idea in the long run, although a little part of me still thinks there should be an option to disable it. But that's for further consideration at a later time. James __ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com -- The ultimate all-in-one performance toolkit: Intel(R) Parallel Studio XE: Pinpoint memory and threading errors before they happen. Find and fix more than 250 security defects in the development cycle. Locate bottlenecks in serial and parallel code that limit performance. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-dev2devfeb ___ Freevo-users mailing list Freevo-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freevo-users
Re: [Freevo-users] What is freevo doing while Idle?
On 2/13/2011 06:17, Jim Duda wrote: I have always found the LIRC remote with freevo rather annoying. It certain doesn't work anywhere near as smooth as a remote works with like a Cable TV box. It would be wonderful if the remote experience could be improved with Freevo. I just assumed that it was as good as could be given that the remote is so fundamental to the HTPC framework. It never even occurred to me that something might be wrong. I seem to have missed the start of this conversation somewhere (when Adam was talking about his remote woes and hoops to jump through). I was curious what kind of annoying things your LIRC remote does? I've been using LIRC with Freevo for as long as I've had a remote for my Freevo, first with a home-built IR receiver (from the LIRC webpage schematics) with a variety of remotes, and now with an iMON VFD. I've never had any problems with them that I would classify as annoying. I'm sure it's not as smooth as a cable box remote, but it's certainly been a smooth, happy experience. My only minor gripe right now is that when a key is held down on the iMON remote, it sends the repeating commands rather quickly. Not a problem, I set most of the buttons to not repeat... except for the directional buttons, because it's better to hold down and zip through a menu than to press down each individual time. You have to use a light touch on it when you only want to send one direction command... I've had times I've pressed it to skip forward in video and suddenly found myself watching three minutes later. ^_^ Just my own curiosity of what issues you're having. Or maybe it's a relative thing... and that a minor gripe to me is an annoyance to you. James -- The ultimate all-in-one performance toolkit: Intel(R) Parallel Studio XE: Pinpoint memory and threading errors before they happen. Find and fix more than 250 security defects in the development cycle. Locate bottlenecks in serial and parallel code that limit performance. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-dev2devfeb ___ Freevo-users mailing list Freevo-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freevo-users
Re: [Freevo-users] What is freevo doing while Idle?
Nver mind! Turns out I had unread messages before read ones and I thought I was up to date when really there were older ones (in this thread) that I hadn't read. Sounds like I need to look into this LIRC_KEY_REPEAT config variable. It might be just what I'm looking for to slow down the repeat rate on the remote. James -- The ultimate all-in-one performance toolkit: Intel(R) Parallel Studio XE: Pinpoint memory and threading errors before they happen. Find and fix more than 250 security defects in the development cycle. Locate bottlenecks in serial and parallel code that limit performance. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-dev2devfeb ___ Freevo-users mailing list Freevo-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freevo-users
Re: [Freevo-users] Strange behaviour of music player on 1.x svn
On 2/13/2011 11:17, Manuel Borchers wrote: Hi all, after upgrading to 1.x svn, I am seeing a strange behaviour of the music player component: When the playlist reaches its end, the music stops and freevo goes back to the directory view (where I started the player), but it doesn't react on any keypresses. When I hit ESC, the screen goes back to the last player view (i.e. last title played, time stopped at the last position). When hitting up / down, freevo returns to the correct directory view and reacts again as expected. [edit] Anything I'm missing here or should I fill in a bug report? I can confirm this one too... it's one I first noticed when audio podcasts would finish and I thought I had screwed something up when I made the podcast item inherit from Audioitem instead of just Item.. It was later I'd discover this wasn't the case and that it also affected playlists when they ended 'naturally'. It's been around for quite a while in SVN, from what I remember, I just haven't remembered to bring it up here on the list yet. And I can't blame anyone for missing it... I figure a lot of audio playing activity doesn't let a playlist end on its own, either because it's a live stream (I do those a lot) or the user decides to end the playback before the playlist is done. For me, once the playlist ends the Freevo goes back to the directory/menu view (LCD follows too) but it won't respond to commands. Pressing ESC has no visible effect, but now the menu responds. It's like the player view is deleted/destroyed, but control is never returned to the underlying menu until the user presses ESC. I'm pretty sure this doesn't happen when the player has been detached, only when the player view is on screen. James __ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com -- The ultimate all-in-one performance toolkit: Intel(R) Parallel Studio XE: Pinpoint memory and threading errors before they happen. Find and fix more than 250 security defects in the development cycle. Locate bottlenecks in serial and parallel code that limit performance. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-dev2devfeb ___ Freevo-users mailing list Freevo-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freevo-users
Re: [Freevo-users] Wonderful work everyone! (And first impressions of the latest SVN)
On 1/20/2011 08:46, Adam Charrett wrote: I've used cancel to allow me to restart the freevo interface by adding a while loop in the shell script that start freevo, means I can easily restart the interface without waiting for the whole system to reboot. Can you raise a feature request for this on the tracker. Hey, now that's a neat idea I never thought about. Granted, usually when I need to restart the interface, I'm either already hacking on it (so I'm logged in) or it's crashed/wedged so bad I can't get back to the main menu through the interface. I'm just thinking out loud here, but wouldn't it be interesting to have a hidden 'restart interface' button, like the 'hibernate' option in Windows XP? XP normally shows 'Standby', 'Shutdown' and 'Restart'. But if you hold down shift, 'Standby' turns into 'Hibernate'. What if pressing Display while at the shutdown menu, 'Reboot' turned into 'Restart Interface'? Again, just thinking out loud here. ^_^ Try out the proper skin 'blurr' rather than my amateur he's what you can do with this base skin :-) Oh ho! 'Here's a quarter, go get yourself a real interface skin?' ^_^ I'm using Blurr, as selected through the interface. I checked and short of some local modifications I'm playing with, all the files in share/freevo/skins are up to date with SVN. Of course as I admitted in the last e-mail, things in my local copy got a bit wonky for a while. I'll back up my changes to the skin fxds and revert them and see if it changes anything. In the meantime, is there somewhere else I need to go to get this proper 'Blurr' skin? Or is it affected by something outside of share/freevo/skins? Thanks for your help. Always appreciate it. James __ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com -- Protect Your Site and Customers from Malware Attacks Learn about various malware tactics and how to avoid them. Understand malware threats, the impact they can have on your business, and how you can protect your company and customers by using code signing. http://p.sf.net/sfu/oracle-sfdevnl ___ Freevo-users mailing list Freevo-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freevo-users
[Freevo-users] Wonderful work everyone! (And first impressions of the latest SVN)
So for reasons I won't get into (complicated story, and probably
embarrassing too), despite SVN updates my files were being held back
because the old copies were considered my working copies and the current
revisions were being overwritten... I finally sat down today and
untangled the mess (thank you, revert command!) and fired it back up.
Some little growing pains (see below) but I got it going and all I can
say is:
Holy Smokes! It's looking sharp! Great job and many kudos to both the
developers and everyone out there running Freevo and testing it and
making suggestions. Maybe it's just because it's been so long since I've
seen an actual update, but this leap was huge.
Quick things that come to mind:
Biggest problem I had was the system exiting two seconds into playing
any audio, no traceback or anything. If I started audio and immediately
kicked it into the idlebar (pressing 'display'), it would play fine.
When I tried to 'Show Player', it finally coughed up a traceback:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File /usr/local/lib/python2.6/site-packages/freevo/main.py, line
296, in eventhandler
consumed = app.eventhandler(event)
File /usr/local/lib/python2.6/site-packages/freevo/menu.py, line
858, in eventhandler
self._handle_play_item(menu, event)
File /usr/local/lib/python2.6/site-packages/freevo/menu.py, line
663, in _handle_play_item
action(arg=arg, menuw=self)
File /usr/local/lib/python2.6/site-packages/freevo/menu.py, line
106, in select
self.function(arg=self.arg, menuw=menuw)
File
/usr/local/lib/python2.6/site-packages/freevo/audio/plugins/detach.py,
line 157, in show
self._attach(menuw)
File
/usr/local/lib/python2.6/site-packages/freevo/audio/plugins/detach.py,
line 142, in _attach
gui.show()
File /usr/local/lib/python2.6/site-packages/freevo/audio/player.py,
line 151, in show
self.refresh()
File /usr/local/lib/python2.6/site-packages/freevo/audio/player.py,
line 183, in refresh
skin.draw('player', self.item, transition=transition)
UnboundLocalError: local variable 'transition' referenced before assignment
It would appear the definition of 'transition' is held inside an if
statement, although the skin.draw statement is not. When the if
statement is bypassed, 'transition' is never set. I fixed it by adding
'transition=None' before the if statement, but this may need to be
better fixed.
LOVE the new text entry screen, and I love the triple-tap shortcuts. I
just was a little thrown when it came time to enter the line after
triple-tapping it in. I pressed 'Enter', but since the selector was on
the 'A', it added an A to the entry box. Perhaps if the triple-tap is
used, the selector jumps to 'Search', so all you have to do is press
'Enter' to go?
I also love the new shutdown screen with the colorful icons. The option
to reboot is very welcome! However, I think it needs a more obvious
'Cancel'. I pressed 'Exit' thinking it meant exit the dialog box...
oops! I know now I can use escape to get out of it, but that's not
immediately apparent. Perhaps under the three buttons have a long bar
for 'Cancel'?
And speaking of 'Exit', is there an option to get rid of that button for
those of us with stand-alone dedicated Freevos? On my box, pressing
'Exit' will drop you to a terminal window (on the TV) full of leftover
log information and the only way to restart it is to power cycle or ssh
in and restart the front-end service. For me, better to just have 'Power
Off' and 'Reboot'.
Tried out the Category Search... I really like it, but I think it needs
some kind of indicator when there's more than one episode for a listed
show. Obviously you should select a category to find shows, but I
couldn't figure out why some shows immediately displayed information and
some didn't... until I selected one that didn't have any info and found
the whole submenu of episodes. Again, something that isn't immediately
obvious. I'm not sure how to do it yet (perhaps something like the icons
in the Recordings Manager, or display episode names in the info area,
also like RM?) but it's something to consider.
Finally, and this is purely aesthetics... the new dialog boxes look a
little strange. I think it's because they have lightweight borders (one
pixel?) and light font weights, when the rest of my interface (Blurr)
has heavy borders and bolder fonts. It just doesn't look like it fits. I
also liked the old progress bar (white bar inside blue box) rather than
the new red bar, but I _do_ like it showing numerical progress (like
5/10) when available. The bouncing red bar for the indefinite wait bugs
me... I'd rather see a throbber of some sort that stays put and animates.
Which reminds me, I see the clock icon for the lower right corner is now
animated. That was a great surprise.
Okay, I think I've said enough (for now). And I'll probably have changed
my mind on some of these things an hour from now. But I just
[Freevo-users] Videothumb broken in latest SVN (and beta?)
Hi guys. I just went back to the Freevo after a bit of a break and realized that the video thumbnails aren't generating, automatically or manually. I've had a long standing issue (that nobody else seems to have?) where kaa tries to import distutils.util and it throws an exception saying there is no module util: Traceback (most recent call last): File /usr/local/lib/python2.6/site-packages/freevo/util/videothumb.py, line 40, in module import util File /usr/local/lib/python2.6/site-packages/freevo/util/__init__.py, line 73 , in module from fileops import * File /usr/local/lib/python2.6/site-packages/freevo/util/fileops.py, line 47, in module import kaa.imlib2 File /usr/local/lib/python2.6/site-packages/kaa/imlib2/__init__.py, line 31, in module from version import VERSION File /usr/local/lib/python2.6/site-packages/kaa/imlib2/version.py, line 4, in module from kaa.base.distribution.version import Version File /usr/local/lib/python2.6/site-packages/kaa/base/distribution/__init__.py, line 2, in module import distutils.util ImportError: No module named util I've always had luck fixing this by renaming util/distutils.py to something else, but that was just a lucky guess long ago. I really have no idea what's wrong or why that would 'fix' things. Now, it looks like a whole new kettle of fish. Now I get this: Traceback (most recent call last): File /usr/local/lib/python2.6/site-packages/freevo/main.py, line 299, in eve nthandler consumed = app.eventhandler(event) File /usr/local/lib/python2.6/site-packages/freevo/menu.py, line 856, in eve nthandler self._handle_play_item(menu, event) File /usr/local/lib/python2.6/site-packages/freevo/menu.py, line 661, in _ha ndle_play_item action(arg=arg, menuw=self) File /usr/local/lib/python2.6/site-packages/freevo/menu.py, line 106, in sel ect self.function(arg=self.arg, menuw=menuw) File /usr/local/lib/python2.6/site-packages/freevo/video/videoitem.py, line 511, in create_thumbnail util.videothumb.snapshot(self.filename) File /usr/local/lib/python2.6/site-packages/freevo/util/videothumb.py, line 112, in snapshot image.mode = 'RGBA' AttributeError: can't set attribute This is beyond my understanding at present... apparently you can get image.mode but not set it? Regardless, it's causing the thumbnail generation to die and not make any thumbnails for videos. Hopefully this is an easy solution? James __ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com -- Gaining the trust of online customers is vital for the success of any company that requires sensitive data to be transmitted over the Web. Learn how to best implement a security strategy that keeps consumers' information secure and instills the confidence they need to proceed with transactions. http://p.sf.net/sfu/oracle-sfdevnl ___ Freevo-users mailing list Freevo-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freevo-users
Re: [Freevo-users] Xine audio stream metadata
From: Paul strifek...@users.sourceforge.net To: freevo-users@lists.sourceforge.net Sent: Fri, November 12, 2010 11:49:58 AM Subject: [Freevo-users] Xine audio stream metadata I have set up arch linux on a new hard drive to run freevo 1.9 and found to my dismay that mplayer still has the same issues it had on Ubuntu (skipping stuttering play of CD's and audio files) I thought this was due to pulse audio on Ubuntu but clearly not. Thus I will have to return to Xine for audio playing which is fine except I have never been able to get Freevo to broadcast audio stream metadata (song tite, artist) from Icecast/shoutcast stations using Xine, however with Mplayer it works fine. Has anyone had success with this? Paul: What kind of skipping and stuttering are you having playing CDs in mplayer? I have a problem where the buffer runs out while playing, although not until after track 3 or 4 on any given disc. It's not a stutter so much as a gap in playback about 5 seconds long while the drive gets sorted out and starts reading data again. Setting a bigger cache helps a little, setting the CD speed to around 8x (-cdda speed=8) clears it up, but this seems odd to me, since should anything better than realtime be able to fill the buffer? It seems to be that my CD-ROM reads out enough data to fill the buffer, then while waiting to read more, it spins down. By the time it gets the next read command, it can't spin up fast enough and find where to read from before the buffer empties and the music stops. I thought it was a problem with the CD-ROM so I tried playing in Xine and like you, I found there are no problems. Very odd. Still stranger, I know it didn't always do this. I was able to play back CDs with the drive ticking over at 2x, with the read light blinking almost steadily. Now it seems to read a strip to fill the buffer, then wait for the buffer to get down to 15% before attempting to read more. I believe I've tried to lower the cache or even remove it, but that just ends in disaster all around. Anyone have an ideas, especially some setting I may have made with hdparm that I didn't think mattered but it turns out made a big difference? Oh yes, this happens in Freevo and on the command line, so it's definitely something to do with MPlayer, or some other external widget. Thanks guys. James -- Beautiful is writing same markup. Internet Explorer 9 supports standards for HTML5, CSS3, SVG 1.1, ECMAScript5, and DOM L2 L3. Spend less time writing and rewriting code and more time creating great experiences on the web. Be a part of the beta today http://p.sf.net/sfu/msIE9-sfdev2dev___ Freevo-users mailing list Freevo-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freevo-users
Re: [Freevo-users] freevo password protect directory not working
- Original Message From: John Molohan john.molo...@gcd.ie To: freevo-users@lists.sourceforge.net Cc: Senufo fce.vale...@libertysurf.fr Sent: Mon, October 4, 2010 2:38:08 PM Subject: Re: [Freevo-users] freevo password protect directory not working On 04/10/2010 08:33, Senufo wrote: Hi, I have write a small patch. You can found it on the bugs traker. http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detailaid=3079625group_id=46652atid=446895 Thanks for the patch Senufo. John, Senufo, Dana: This used to work a while ago... I have at least one directory that I put a .password file into and it would ask for a password before entering it, but somewhere between then and now it stopped working. I haven't tried the patch yet, but I'll give it a shot. I wanted to bring this up so we didn't have a patch with all new code to do something that's still in the code, but broken. Of course if the patch fixes the broken code, then it's all good. ^_^ James -- Beautiful is writing same markup. Internet Explorer 9 supports standards for HTML5, CSS3, SVG 1.1, ECMAScript5, and DOM L2 L3. Spend less time writing and rewriting code and more time creating great experiences on the web. Be a part of the beta today. http://p.sf.net/sfu/beautyoftheweb ___ Freevo-users mailing list Freevo-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freevo-users
[Freevo-users] It's upgrade time!
Back when I first put together this box (at least 5 years ago) I was just tinkering, seeing if it could be done. Maybe looking for something to play back AVIs on CDs over the TV set. Getting the capture card and recording TV was a bonus, but never an original plan. Back in those days, HD wasn't even on my mind. Now... well... what with my successful experiments in capturing full-res MPEG-TS from my cable box, I've found that it can play back SD captures easily, but doesn't have the oomph to play back HD (not by a long shot for 1080i). So I'm coming to the community for some upgrade advice. Right now, I've got an AMD XP1900+ and the tried-and-true Matrox G400 MAX. What I'm hoping is that I can get an XP3200+ CPU (the last and greatest of the 32-bit AMD CPUs) and keep my existing motherboard. I'm a little less clear when it comes to video cards. Now that I'm using the VGA input on my TV, I can let go of the Matrox (don't need the great NTSC output anymore). I'd also like something that can do 1280x720 or 1920x1080 (or maybe 960x540 for 1080i) so I could dial up natural HD resolutions. Hardware acceleration would be a big plus, but MPEG2 hardware playback isn't a necessity, since I've heard that's straight-output without the ability to filter or scale or whatnot. I would like a card that will take me into Freevo 2.0 territory, when the time arrives. I remember someone mentioning quite a while ago an nVidia card (8xxx?) that performed well and even had a passive heatsink, so no extra fan noise. Anyone have any ideas in that direction? Also, with the direct-MPEG capture comes AC3 digital audio... any advice on a low-cost audio card that has a digital output that works with the direct AC3 output in MPlayer? That's all I got so far, I hope it's not too confusing. Follow-up questions are always welcome, of course! And thank you in advance for any advice you can send my way. James P.S. The Freevo can play back direct-captured SD video and I swear it looks better than HD that's been scaled down and letterboxed by the STB, sent to the Freevo via composite (I know, but it's the only option), captured and then cropped and scaled for playback. And even more silly, the direct-captured SD not only looks better, but the file size is smaller! ^_^ -- Beautiful is writing same markup. Internet Explorer 9 supports standards for HTML5, CSS3, SVG 1.1, ECMAScript5, and DOM L2 L3. Spend less time writing and rewriting code and more time creating great experiences on the web. Be a part of the beta today. http://p.sf.net/sfu/beautyoftheweb ___ Freevo-users mailing list Freevo-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freevo-users
Re: [Freevo-users] Insecure String Pickle when starting Recordserver
I think I solved it on my own, after a bit of hammering and research. The .pickle may have gotten truncated somehow, possibly when I did a hard-reset one time during some recent tinkering. I trimmed up the end of the file (as best I could tell), then spent way too long battling an EOFerror. Turns out Pickle was looking for the 's.' at the end of the file. Once I added that, it re-loaded into the recordserver without throwing an exception. Nothing has complained yet... so we'll see if it has its memory back. James - Original Message From: James Trietsch kero...@yahoo.com To: Freevo Users List freevo-users@lists.sourceforge.net Sent: Thu, September 23, 2010 10:08:14 PM Subject: [Freevo-users] Insecure String Pickle when starting Recordserver Did some recent upgrades to Debian and I seem to have broken the recordserver. It throws an exception trying to load the previouslyRecorded.pickle: 2010-09-23 21:49:47,517 INFOrecordserver.py (275): Got ScheduledRecordings (version 3). Traceback (most recent call last): File /usr/local/lib/python2.6/site-packages/freevo/helpers/recordserver.py, line 1612, in module main() File /usr/local/lib/python2.6/site-packages/freevo/helpers/recordserver.py, line 1578, in main recordserver = RecordServer() File /usr/local/lib/python2.6/site-packages/freevo/helpers/recordserver.py, line 142, in __init__ self.updateFavoritesSchedule() File /usr/local/lib/python2.6/site-packages/freevo/helpers/recordserver.py, line 1449, in updateFavoritesSchedule self.removeScheduledRecording(prog) File /usr/local/lib/python2.6/site-packages/freevo/helpers/recordserver.py, line 782, in removeScheduledRecording self.removeRecordingFromSchedule(prog) File /usr/local/lib/python2.6/site-packages/freevo/helpers/recordserver.py, line 474, in removeRecordingFromSchedule self.removeDuplicate(prog) File /usr/local/lib/python2.6/site-packages/freevo/helpers/recordserver.py, line 421, in removeDuplicate self.loadPreviouslyRecordedShows() File /usr/local/lib/python2.6/site-packages/freevo/helpers/recordserver.py, line 322, in loadPreviouslyRecordedShows self.previouslyRecordedShows = pickle.load(open(cacheFile, 'rb')) ValueError: insecure string pickle 2010-09-23 21:49:47,563 WARNING recordserver.py (1620): insecure string pickle I'm researching the error as we speak, but I thought I'd throw it to the list and see if anyone had a quick fix. Obviously this isn't a killer error; I can dump the existing .pickle and Freevo will start a new one. But I've done this kind of lobotomy at least once before and it's always a hassle for it to start recording all the shows it recorded before and was skipping the re-runs. Any help resurrecting the existing previouslyRecorded.pickle would be greatly appreciated. But if it can't be done, then it can't be done. Thanks guys. James Springfield, OR USA -- Nokia and ATT present the 2010 Calling All Innovators-North America contest Create new apps games for the Nokia N8 for consumers in U.S. and Canada $10 million total in prizes - $4M cash, 500 devices, nearly $6M in marketing Develop with Nokia Qt SDK, Web Runtime, or Java and Publish to Ovi Store http://p.sf.net/sfu/nokia-dev2dev ___ Freevo-users mailing list Freevo-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freevo-users
Re: [Freevo-users] Insecure String Pickle when starting Recordserver
- Original Message From: Elizabeth Dodd ed...@billiau.net To: freevo-users@lists.sourceforge.net Sent: Fri, September 24, 2010 2:04:52 AM Subject: Re: [Freevo-users] Insecure String Pickle when starting Recordserver could you summarise this gem for the wiki? Sure. I'm suspecting that when I did a hard reset not too long after starting the Freevo, it may have caused an incomplete write to the previouslyRecorded.pickle file. Either way, the recordserver would not start, throwing an exception: Insecure String Pickle. (By the way, that's got to be the most awesome exception message I've run into. I've been amusing my friends with it all day long.) It appears in an attempt to keep harmful tampering to a minimum, (c)Pickle does basic checks before loading a pickle file. Judging from the posts on the web, things like Windows-style EOL characters (\n\r) instead of Linux (\n) will cause problems. In this case, the last line of the file was truncated mid-line and I think that was setting off alarm bells. I neatened up the end of the previouslyRecorded.pickle file, trying to end it at a proper boundry, but I think I didn't hit it exactly. It doesn't seem to cause too much trouble, but that last object is probably missing bits. Hopefully nothing important. Trying to start recordserver now yeilded an EOFerror exception when trying to load the pickle file. I did way too much searching and trying small Python scripts to read in the file and write it back out and properly close it and doing tests in the freevo prompt shell... all no good. My research turned up that pickle files end with a '.', and that gave me a clue. It wasn't until I started up recordserver and let it create a new pickle file I found that the file ends with 's.' on the final line. I added that (taking steps to eliminate the final EOL character that vim adds by default) and the previouslyRecorded.pickle would then load properly into the recordserver. I haven't had a chance to see if it's really working, or if nothing that I've already recorded is in the schedule right now. But that's just laziness on my part. Suffice to say, recordserver is reading the file without throwing an exception, so I'm happy again. If you let me know where you think this should be put in the Wiki, I can give it a go myself... James -- Start uncovering the many advantages of virtual appliances and start using them to simplify application deployment and accelerate your shift to cloud computing. http://p.sf.net/sfu/novell-sfdev2dev ___ Freevo-users mailing list Freevo-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freevo-users
[Freevo-users] Insecure String Pickle when starting Recordserver
Did some recent upgrades to Debian and I seem to have broken the recordserver. It throws an exception trying to load the previouslyRecorded.pickle: 2010-09-23 21:49:47,517 INFO recordserver.py (275): Got ScheduledRecordings (version 3). Traceback (most recent call last): File /usr/local/lib/python2.6/site-packages/freevo/helpers/recordserver.py, line 1612, in module main() File /usr/local/lib/python2.6/site-packages/freevo/helpers/recordserver.py, line 1578, in main recordserver = RecordServer() File /usr/local/lib/python2.6/site-packages/freevo/helpers/recordserver.py, line 142, in __init__ self.updateFavoritesSchedule() File /usr/local/lib/python2.6/site-packages/freevo/helpers/recordserver.py, line 1449, in updateFavoritesSchedule self.removeScheduledRecording(prog) File /usr/local/lib/python2.6/site-packages/freevo/helpers/recordserver.py, line 782, in removeScheduledRecording self.removeRecordingFromSchedule(prog) File /usr/local/lib/python2.6/site-packages/freevo/helpers/recordserver.py, line 474, in removeRecordingFromSchedule self.removeDuplicate(prog) File /usr/local/lib/python2.6/site-packages/freevo/helpers/recordserver.py, line 421, in removeDuplicate self.loadPreviouslyRecordedShows() File /usr/local/lib/python2.6/site-packages/freevo/helpers/recordserver.py, line 322, in loadPreviouslyRecordedShows self.previouslyRecordedShows = pickle.load(open(cacheFile, 'rb')) ValueError: insecure string pickle 2010-09-23 21:49:47,563 WARNING recordserver.py (1620): insecure string pickle I'm researching the error as we speak, but I thought I'd throw it to the list and see if anyone had a quick fix. Obviously this isn't a killer error; I can dump the existing .pickle and Freevo will start a new one. But I've done this kind of lobotomy at least once before and it's always a hassle for it to start recording all the shows it recorded before and was skipping the re-runs. Any help resurrecting the existing previouslyRecorded.pickle would be greatly appreciated. But if it can't be done, then it can't be done. Thanks guys. James Springfield, OR USA -- Nokia and ATT present the 2010 Calling All Innovators-North America contest Create new apps games for the Nokia N8 for consumers in U.S. and Canada $10 million total in prizes - $4M cash, 500 devices, nearly $6M in marketing Develop with Nokia Qt SDK, Web Runtime, or Java and Publish to Ovi Store http://p.sf.net/sfu/nokia-dev2dev ___ Freevo-users mailing list Freevo-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freevo-users
Re: [Freevo-users] Streaming Audio Oddities fixed
Just wanted to follow up with my problem with Sky.fm and DI.fm. I found a work-around, but not something I would consider a fix. On the other hand, I'm convinced the true fix has something to do with Sky and DI's servers. I noticed Duncan had suggested using the mplayer_options in the fxd file but I thought he was referring to the audio podcasts for that. For the streams, he had suggested adding arguments by type, but I didn't want to force AAC decoding on all PLS playlists, because if it wasn't AAC, then Mplayer wouldn't play it. The other day while sniffing around the Freevo files for another series of tweaks, I stumbled across the fact you can put mplayer_options in the fxd file. This was pretty much what I needed, since handing over '-demuxer aac' to force Mplayer to use the AAC decoder would make the streams work. I added mplayer-options to each of the Sky and DI entries (yay sed!) and now they play back again. Problem worked-around. While testing, I did notice something strange. I tried a few AAC streams from SOMA FM, and when you run Mplayer with verbose output, it dumps the HTTP header. SOMA's stream replies with the status 'ICY 200 OK', which is proper for a ShoutCast stream (I looked it up). DI and Sky, however, reply with 'HTTP/1.0 200 OK'. I can't help wondering if MPlayer gets confused by the response and tries to find the proper codec (and somehow fails). Regardless, DI and Sky are not really conforming to the ShoutCast protocol, but since MPlayer seems to be the only player that chokes on it (Xine, VCL and foobar don't blink an eye) maybe nobody knows anything is wrong. Aaanyhow... short version is it's been worked around and my web radio streams are back in business. I wanted to tie up the loose ends for future searches. Because there's nothing more aggravating than finding someone else with your problem and having the mail/forum thread just die out with no resolution. ^_^ James -- This SF.net email is sponsored by Make an app they can't live without Enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge http://p.sf.net/sfu/RIM-dev2dev ___ Freevo-users mailing list Freevo-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freevo-users
Re: [Freevo-users] Freevo shuts down immediately after coming up
Eureka! The hat goes on the head! (Sorry, couldn't resist a quote from Futurama) I fixed the sporadic immediate shutdown issue. I had the good fortune of watching it crash right in front of me after finishing a recording. I checked a few things and found the filesystem was nearing capacity (again, the clean-out daemon runs under the GUI), so I deleted a few things and tried the GUI and it came up! A-ha! Long story short, every time the remaining free space fell under the deletion minimums, the GUI stopped working. I enlisted a host of print statements to narrow down where it was crashing and on what particular program entry. It was giving up trying to find the last-accessed time for a particular MPEG file. I went to check the file and found out I had an orphaned FXD! The FXD existed and was being put into the menu but the MPEG had somehow been removed. It was trying to find the last-accessed time for a nonexistent file. Why it was silently crashing, I'm not sure (unless it has to do with that process running as a daemon). I deleted the orphan FXD and everything is back to normal. It even cleaned up the directory back above space minimums. By the way, the check on last modified time is something I added myself (and haven't submitted yet) because I had run into trouble where if the Freevo was recording and ran out of space while you were watching a previously recorded show that happened to be the best candidate for deletion... it would delete it while you were watching. Or it would delete it right after you finished watching it, so you never got a chance to mark it to keep if you wanted to keep it. I put in some code that anything accessed in the last 5 minutes would not be put on the candidate list and it seems to work. But now I may need to add some error-trapping to it. Or something to look for orphaned FXDs and/or MPEGs couldn't hurt either. Thanks for all your support my friends, even though this turned out to be esoteric and weird. I figured it had to be, just by the way it was behaving. James - Original Message From: John Molohan john.molo...@gcd.ie To: freevo-users@lists.sourceforge.net Cc: James Trietsch kero...@yahoo.com Sent: Mon, June 14, 2010 1:56:32 PM Subject: Re: [Freevo-users] Freevo shuts down immediately after coming up Hi James, Can you try the latest version of svn and see if this still exists? John -- ThinkGeek and WIRED's GeekDad team up for the Ultimate GeekDad Father's Day Giveaway. ONE MASSIVE PRIZE to the lucky parental unit. See the prize list and enter to win: http://p.sf.net/sfu/thinkgeek-promo ___ Freevo-users mailing list Freevo-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freevo-users
[Freevo-users] Freevo shuts down immediately after coming up
(Figured I'd start a new mail to detach myself from that other thread)
Back on May 31st somewhere past 00:30, the frontend GUI on my Freevo decided to
shut down. It didn't crash, it shut down in a clean and orderly manner like it
should.
(I just noticed I can't pin down the exact time of shutdown, because it looks
like the header in the log that tells the time of shutdown actually tells the
time of startup. The last stamp is 2010-05-31 00:29 but the shutdown says it
successfully shut down on May 20th. Is this still the case?)
Now when I start the GUI, it starts up until it gets to the main menu, then it
immediately shuts down. It shuts down just the GUI as if I had stopped the
process (I have the shutdown plugin configured to shut down the entire box
because it is a stand-alone install). I bumped up the debug level and it looks
like the the system loops through checking events/LIRC/keyboard/UDPnetwork
about four times before shutdown() is called and the system shuts down. See the
attached log file. I trimmed it to what I think is the relevant part, but I can
send over the whole thing if desired.
I also ran a trace on the shutdown plugin... but I don't understand the
results. I've attached that too.
John: I'm not using autoshutdown and have it disabled. On a whim, I tried
disabling the shutdown plugin as well, but it still behaves the same way.
Fabrizio: I don't have an auto-update, but I did manually run an update a few
days before (conveniently forgot to mention that, didn't I? Sorry...) I'm using
Debian Lenny and didn't think anything of it at the time because nothing
crashed immediately after the update. Are there any packages I should be
concerned about?
In the meantime I can log in and call up shows manually and watch them... but
that's just a stop-gap. ^_^
Thanks for all your help guys.
James
DEBUG: update(rect=[(0, 0, 720, 480)], blend_surface=None, blend_speed=0,
blend_steps=0, blend_time=None, stop_busyicon=True)
DEBUG: rc.get_singleton(kwargs={})
app=class menu.MenuWidget at 0x893253c context='menu'
DEBUG: rc.add_app: Setting app class menu.MenuWidget at 0x893253c (context
menu)
DEBUG: rc.get_singleton(kwargs={})
DEBUG: Main loop starting...
Freevo 1.9.2 r11675 ready
DEBUG: rc.post_event(event='FREEVO_READY')
DEBUG: rc.get_singleton(kwargs={})
DEBUG: EventHandler.post_event(event='FREEVO_READY')
DEBUG: EventHandler.poll()
DEBUG: Lirc.poll(rc=rc.EventHandler instance at 0x8695a0c)
DEBUG: Lirc.get_last_code()
DEBUG: Keyboard.poll(rc=rc.EventHandler instance at 0x8695a0c)
DEBUG: UDPNetwork.poll(rc=rc.EventHandler instance at 0x8695a0c)
DEBUG: _event_handler(event=MENU_PROCESS_END)
DEBUG: get() _player_=None
DEBUG: _event_handler(event=MENU_PROCESS_END)
DEBUG: handling event MENU_PROCESS_END
DEBUG: rc.get_singleton(kwargs={})
DEBUG: EventHandler.get_app()
DEBUG: rc.get_singleton(kwargs={})
DEBUG: EventHandler.get_app()
DEBUG: PluginInterface.eventhandler(event=MENU_PROCESS_END: class
'event.Event', menuw=class menu.MenuWidget at 0x893253c)
DEBUG: no eventhandler for event MENU_PROCESS_END
DEBUG: PluginInterface.eventhandler(event=MENU_PROCESS_END: class
'event.Event', menuw=None)
DEBUG: no eventhandler for event MENU_PROCESS_END
DEBUG: EventHandler.poll()
DEBUG: Lirc.poll(rc=rc.EventHandler instance at 0x8695a0c)
DEBUG: Lirc.get_last_code()
DEBUG: Keyboard.poll(rc=rc.EventHandler instance at 0x8695a0c)
DEBUG: UDPNetwork.poll(rc=rc.EventHandler instance at 0x8695a0c)
DEBUG: _event_handler(event=FREEVO_READY)
DEBUG: get() _player_=None
DEBUG: _event_handler(event=FREEVO_READY)
DEBUG: handling event FREEVO_READY
DEBUG: rc.get_singleton(kwargs={})
DEBUG: EventHandler.get_app()
DEBUG: rc.get_singleton(kwargs={})
DEBUG: EventHandler.get_app()
DEBUG: PluginInterface.eventhandler(event=FREEVO_READY: class 'event.Event',
menuw=class menu.MenuWidget at 0x893253c)
DEBUG: no eventhandler for event FREEVO_READY
DEBUG: PluginInterface.eventhandler(event=FREEVO_READY: class 'event.Event',
menuw=None)
DEBUG: no eventhandler for event FREEVO_READY
DEBUG: EventHandler.poll()
DEBUG: Lirc.poll(rc=rc.EventHandler instance at 0x8695a0c)
DEBUG: Lirc.get_last_code()
DEBUG: Keyboard.poll(rc=rc.EventHandler instance at 0x8695a0c)
DEBUG: UDPNetwork.poll(rc=rc.EventHandler instance at 0x8695a0c)
DEBUG: EventHandler.poll()
DEBUG: Lirc.poll(rc=rc.EventHandler instance at 0x8695a0c)
DEBUG: Lirc.get_last_code()
DEBUG: Keyboard.poll(rc=rc.EventHandler instance at 0x8695a0c)
DEBUG: UDPNetwork.poll(rc=rc.EventHandler instance at 0x8695a0c)
DEBUG: EventHandler.poll()
DEBUG: Lirc.poll(rc=rc.EventHandler instance at 0x8695a0c)
DEBUG: Lirc.get_last_code()
DEBUG: Keyboard.poll(rc=rc.EventHandler instance at 0x8695a0c)
DEBUG: UDPNetwork.poll(rc=rc.EventHandler instance at 0x8695a0c)
DEBUG: EventHandler.poll()
DEBUG: Lirc.poll(rc=rc.EventHandler instance at 0x8695a0c)
DEBUG: Lirc.get_last_code()
DEBUG: Keyboard.poll(rc=rc.EventHandler instance at 0x8695a0c)
DEBUG: UDPNetwork.poll(rc=rc.EventHandler
Re: [Freevo-users] Spontainious crash and collateral damage during attempted repair...
Izio, it worked perfectly. I had disabled ipv6 ages ago when trying to troubleshoot a different problem and since all I ever run is v4, never needed to re-enable it. Once I put it back in and recompiled Python (just in case), it worked fine. Now... if I can just figure out why the frontend GUI quits all by itself. Could it be something it ingested on Monday that is giving it a tummyache? ^_^ Any help with that problem would be greatly appriciated. I'll see what I can do after making the logs more verbose. Oh, and sorry about stealing threads... I didn't realize it still kept a record of where the message belonged even if I changed the subject line to something new. I'll create new messages from now on. Thanks for pointing that out! James - Original Message From: Fabrizio Ferraro izio...@fastwebnet.it To: freevo-users@lists.sourceforge.net Sent: Mon, May 31, 2010 11:56:33 PM Subject: Re: [Freevo-users] Spontainious crash and collateral damage during attempted repair... James Trietsch wrote: In an attempt to fix, I updated kaa and freevo from SVN and now I really broke it. Now the webserver and recordserver won't start, but at least they're throwing an exception. Something about network sockets and type needing to be an integer, related to trying to talk to the recordserver I think. Seems like kaa svn needs ipv6 and your installed version of python does not have ipv6 support compiled in. I'm running Gentoo and I had the same problem as I disabled ipv6 support with a global USE flag when I built the system a long time ago. If this is your case too, you just have to enable ipv6 and rebuild the system with emerge --newuse --deep world . You may have to recompile your kernel, too. Hope this helps. -- ___ Freevo-users mailing list Freevo-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freevo-users
[Freevo-users] Spontainious crash and collateral damage during attempted repair...
*sigh* Just when I was praising about how good the Freevo was behaving for an open-source free project... I came home today after being away for the holiday weekend to find the frontend GUI stopped. I tried to restart it, but it's acting very strangely. It starts up normally, then shows the main menu for just a fraction of a second and then it quits. It doesn't crash, it exits normally, with the 'shutting down' message and no errors or tracebacks in the log. That's what's making this particularly frustrating. I'm attaching the log. In an attempt to fix, I updated kaa and freevo from SVN and now I really broke it. Now the webserver and recordserver won't start, but at least they're throwing an exception. Something about network sockets and type needing to be an integer, related to trying to talk to the recordserver I think. But this is definitely deeper in the pool than I can swim. I'm attaching those logs too. Can anyone help, or give me further avenues to explore? I could bang my head against the frontend issue all day long, but without an error to work with, I'm flying blind and just beating myself against a brick wall. Any help would be greatly appreciated, especially since now the recordserver is broken. There isn't anything major up I want to record soon... but I'll be out of town for the weekend and there are a few things then I'd like to see. Thanks again, my friends! James Springfield, OR USA webserver-0.log Description: Binary data main-0.log Description: Binary data recordserver-0.log Description: Binary data -- ___ Freevo-users mailing list Freevo-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freevo-users
[Freevo-users] Streaming Audio Oddities
I've got two for anyone who has a little spare time (yeah I know... who exactly has any spare time?) The first is the one that I'd like to see solved the most. I'm a big fan of DI.fm and Sky.fm and long ago set up the webradio.fxd to point to many of their channels. I used the 24kbps AACplus streams because they were low bandwidth but sounded perfectly fine to me. About a month ago, they upgraded the streams first to 32kbps, then 40kbps. And now Freevo won't play the streams anymore. I did my research and found out that MPlayer is hanging up trying to figure out what type of decoder to use for the stream. It will decode the ICY info and display the current song, fill the cache to about 12% and then stall, searching through all the different decoder modules for something that works (and often going for MPEG video, spewing out plenty of errors and warnings). If I force the decoder with -demuxer aac, it lights up and plays without a hitch. Of course if I put that as part of the command line permanently, it breaks trying to play anything other than AAC audio. Here's the kicker: I captured part of the stream by WGETing the url. And if I try to play back the captured file, it plays perfectly with no extra command line parameters. So I've got this terrible feeling it's something in the way the server is presenting the stream. I haven't yet reached out to the powers that be at DI/Sky... but I'm tempted to see if they have any ideas. For the record, I'm using MPlayer 1.0rc2-4.3.2. I tried going to the latest snapshot a few months ago, but seeking in recorded MPEGs seemed really broken (grey screen, blocking and long lags in response) so I went back to 1.0rc2. Anyone have any ideas on this one? The second involves the podcast from National Public Radio's Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me show. It's the weirdest thing, without fail the playback stops about 10 minutes into the program. The exact time varies, but here's the truly bizarre part: It _always_ stops right on the break between segments of the show, as if there was some kind of metadata tag inside the MPEG indicating a break. If I restart the program (playing from the now-downloaded file) it plays without any issues, start to finish. I've also noticed that the displayed data is different from the first play and subsequent plays (I think the genre changes, among other things). If anyone wants to check that one out, the podcast URL is http://www.npr.org/rss/podcast.php?id=35. And while we're discussing the podcast plugin, is there any reason it needs to download the podcast and play back the file while it continues to download, rather than just plugging the URL directly into MPlayer to play? The apodcast plugin doesn't clean up after itself so it leaves the downloaded MP3s sitting in its directories (this is something I've been planning to address). It does allow an immediate playback of a podcast that has been downloaded, but once it disappears off the list, it pretty much becomes an orphaned file sitting in the file system. A cursory check seems to show the URL to the MP3 plays okay directly in MPlayer. That's all I got. Sorry to bring troubles to the table... the rest of Freevo is running fine! In fact, it's gotten so reliable at recording and playing back TV sometimes I have to remind myself it's not a commercial box. The GAF (girlfriend, not wife) is quite high although she does put up it hijacking the TV when I forget to reschedule recordings and we're watching something live. But that's the woes of digital cable and only one cable box. Cheers! James Springfield, OR USA -- ___ Freevo-users mailing list Freevo-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freevo-users
Re: [Freevo-users] *server start/stop
Yes, I live! And am still using Freevo. Working like a champ, as always. I'm sitting here in a motel in SoCal with the box up in Oregon, and going in through the web interface to add stuff to record that I'll miss while I'm gone. So convenient! As for how to start up Freevo, my box is a stand-alone unit hooked up to my TV via VGA. I use a set of init scripts derived from the one in ../freevo/contrib/debian. Originally it was one init script that reads /etc/freevo/boot_config for boot-up information. I put it in init.d and set up the proper rcX.d links (this is on Debian) and it's been perfect. You can press the power button and it will boot up and fire up the GUI, then you can press power again (or use Shutdown from the menu) and it will shut down and power off. I can also use the Debian 'invoke-rc.d' to change the states of the servers. If your Freevo isn't stand-alone, it might still work. There is a line in the boot_config to control how it starts up, and it can start Freevo as a daemon process if it's not a stand-alone setup. I haven't tested this exactly (no need to) but the option is there. I took the main init script and broke it down into component parts, so now I also have init scripts that control just the front-end gui, just the recordserver and just the webserver. This way while troubleshooting, I can just restart one of the components without having to bounce them all. Individual twiddling has caused some issues... but hopefully the can be resolved in the future. Anyhow, if anyone is interested, I'd be happy to zip up the scripts and boot_config and post them up here, or you can check out the script in the ../freevo/contrib/debian directory of the distribution. Cheers! James -- Download Intel#174; Parallel Studio Eval Try the new software tools for yourself. Speed compiling, find bugs proactively, and fine-tune applications for parallel performance. See why Intel Parallel Studio got high marks during beta. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-sw-dev ___ Freevo-users mailing list Freevo-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freevo-users
[Freevo-users] Freevo and recording via firewire?
When last we left our hero, he was worried that moving into the all-digital realm of Comcast cable up in the northwest regions of the United States and how that would affect his Freevo, and what he was going to do with his PVR-250 card... (I'll try not to be too long-winded about this, but maybe it's already too late.) I elected to go with HD programming this time around, since I've got a decent (albeit old) HDTV. They set me up with a Pace RNG110 set top box. I'm using the component out to the TV, then cursed the death of S-Video connections and wired the composite video to the PVR-250 in the Freevo (better than nothing, right?). I split the audio and it seems to be working just fine for the time being. The RNG110 has an ethernet jack (for future use), a USB port and a firewire port. Research on the web suggested that it responded to standard DCT6200 commands over firewire, so I bit the bullet and got a cheap used firewire card and cable. With only a little tinkering in the 6200ch code, I got it talking to the STB and Freevo can change the channel now when it starts up recording. I'm already thinking about improvements, like Freevo turning the STB on and off... but I can't think of a way to tell if it's on or off (the command seems to just be a toggle). Always the curious type, I wondered how much luck was in my pocket. I pulled down some DV and firewire tools to the Freevo and after a bit more tinkering, discovered that the RNG110 is also dumping the MPEG-TS out the firewire port! All the way up to glorious 1920x1080 HD! Jackpot! I've captured some things manually using dvgrab, although the Freevo struggles a bit to play back 1920x1080. Also, this is the pre-decode TS data, before the box does any on-screen overlays. That makes it perfect for recording, because it's only the video, with no distracting graphics from the box itself. So it's time for the QUESTIONS! Any support in Freevo for recording video via Firewire? I've experimented with a few things so far: * Using dvgrab manually. It works, and mplayer has no qualms playing back the captured MPEG2-TS data. I do get interlacing artifacts if I don't use a deinterlace filter though. This may only be on lower-res or SD sources. I'll check again with some true 1920x1080. It may also be settings in the DFBMGA output driver related to interlacing. I've had to futz with those before, so I'll futz with them again. * DV2V4L (and similar things) that claim to take DV input and then make the video available at the standard V4L points (/dev/video0). I haven't had any luck with those so far. This would probably mesh best with Freevo right now, but probably needs extra overhead to translate the video from DV to V4L. So anyone working on something like this? I'm tempted to just try writing a wrapper around dvgrab... but even that might be beyond my current knowledge. Although there's nothing like a project you believe in to motivate you to learn new things. ^_^ I have seen a few references to MythTV doing firewire capture... surely it's the wave of the future and should be available in Freevo, even if you get unlucky and have a locked-down cable box. While I'm asking questions... anyone suggest a new video card for me that would handle HD formats better? Preferably AGP, passively cooled and with S-Video outputs at a minimum. My TV does take VGA, but only in 640x480... so I _could_ use that, but it's not the ideal situation. I think someone had suggested an nVidia card a while back. Ideas? Thoughts? Rants? Cheers, and I'll have another related e-mail in just a few minutes. James -- This SF.Net email is sponsored by the Verizon Developer Community Take advantage of Verizon's best-in-class app development support A streamlined, 14 day to market process makes app distribution fast and easy Join now and get one step closer to millions of Verizon customers http://p.sf.net/sfu/verizon-dev2dev ___ Freevo-users mailing list Freevo-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freevo-users
[Freevo-users] Freevo and playing back via firewire?
Now THIS I suspect is the pipe dream... My previously-mentioned older HDTV has three firewire ports so you could plug your DVcam right into the TV. It would even put up transport controls and let you control the camera from the TV. Pretty sharp, eh? Curiosity getting the best of me again, I tried plugging the STB right into the TV via firewire. And the TV popped up a box saying, 'Hey, you just plugged in a Pace RNG110. Want to set up an input for it?' I did, and selected the new input and Ta-Da! Video over firewire! It was all roses until, as mentioned previously, I found out it was just the video stream and there was no graphic overlay. So much for browsing programs using the on-screen guide! Now, I have the cable box and the TV both plugged into the Freevo. I've been trying to do video playback over the firewire port but so far it's no good. Romtest does show both the RNG110 and the Mitsu TV connected, so we know there is communication there, plus the TV confirms a device is plugged in. The weird part is that the connection at the firewire card is almost acting like a pass-through. With the STB plugged into the firewire card and the TV plugged into the firewire card, I get video on the TV from the STB over firewire. Furthermore when I switch away from the firewire input on the TV, the command that the TV sends to shut off the STB travels back up the chain and the STB powers down. Is there something I need to reconfigure to prevent this 'pass-thru' effect? This pass-through doesn't stop me from putting commands out there... 6200ch will still send channel change commands to the STB. It's just... weird. I wonder if when I send video over firewire, if it's getting overridden by this pass-thru video. QUESTION time... How can I send MPEG2-TS back down the firewire to the TV? I'm starting to play with things like mpeg2-test... I haven't really gotten in-depth with them yet. I tried simply doing 'cat test.m2t /dev/video1394/0' but that didn't do anything noticable. Since my TV has this firewire connection on it already... (this is the pipe-dream) is there any way to send the Freevo GUI down the firewire? I suspect this would be more trouble than it's worth, because it means taking the DirectFB/SDL output and basically making it into a video stream to send down the firewire port. So even when the interface isn't changing, the CPU is busy creating video to stream. Probably more trouble than it is worth, but I thought I'd ask... Linux is full of oddities. ^_^ I think that's all I've got for now... thanks everybody for all your hard work on Freevo. James -- This SF.Net email is sponsored by the Verizon Developer Community Take advantage of Verizon's best-in-class app development support A streamlined, 14 day to market process makes app distribution fast and easy Join now and get one step closer to millions of Verizon customers http://p.sf.net/sfu/verizon-dev2dev ___ Freevo-users mailing list Freevo-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freevo-users
[Freevo-users] Stymied by digital cable...
Well the day is soon coming when I'll be moved into my new home and the Freevo will come out of storage (of course) and life will continue on fairly normally (hopefully)... However, in this new place, we have Comcast's all-digital cable service. I have some questions about Freevo's ability to get along with this service. I'm sorry if some of these have been covered before... obviously I wasn't paying close attention since they didn't quite apply to me. I ask for forgiveness up front. So now with all-digital cable my PVR-250's tuner is... useless. The better things get, the less options we have. Joy. I briefly looked into QAM tuner cards, but it appears Comcast down here only broadcasts the federally mandated channels in the clear (about 20 channels, half of which you can pick up OTA, the other half are shopping and government), everything else is encrypted. And yet 250 miles north, my friend reports that Comcast offers over 160 channels in Clear QAM (including ones not on his tier and some in HD), available to any decent digital tuner. Double Joy. My first question: Is there a way to get digital encrypted cable via a PC card? Is the mythical CableCard PC card available to the end-user? Even if it was, are there drivers available for Linux? Will this dream ever be a reality? I suppose I should also ask if Comcast would supply me with a CableCard if I did have a PC card to put it in... Question-the-second: How well does Freevo work with IR-blasting channel change commands to the cable box? I saw the message recently from Pascal, which was good timing: I had forgotten if Freevo could even do it (and how to set it up). I'm coming to terms with the fact I'll be running Freevo to record video input from the cable box and while that is better than nothing, it's a shame I won't be able to watch one thing (live) while recording another. And as always, I would accept possible solutions that I haven't yet thought of from anyone here: The collected knowledge of this list is what makes it such a powerful tool. Cheers, and can't wait to get my Freevo back. I miss my internet radio stations (and NPR podcasts) most of all! James -- Return on Information: Google Enterprise Search pays you back Get the facts. http://p.sf.net/sfu/google-dev2dev ___ Freevo-users mailing list Freevo-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freevo-users
Re: [Freevo-users] Upgrading to 1.9
Morten, I think I had tried using the convert_config helper a while ago and it worked okay, but I tried it this last time (using the SVN build) and I'm not sure it did much. I'm afraid what I ended up doing was taking the local_config.py.example in the source and cranking it through a merge utility with my existing local_config.py, basically using the new format but making sure all changes were carried over. I'm not sure that helps, but it could be another thing to try. James - Original Message From: Morten Lied Johansen morte...@ifi.uio.no To: freevo-users@lists.sourceforge.net Sent: Sunday, September 20, 2009 6:14:15 AM Subject: [Freevo-users] Upgrading to 1.9 I've just installed Freevo 1.9 on Gentoo (after rolling my own ebuild), and I wanted to upgrade the config at the same time (I noticed there were some changes). I've tried running freevo convert_config /etc/freevo/local_config.py -w, but I get an error: -- Come build with us! The BlackBerryreg; Developer Conference in SF, CA is the only developer event you need to attend this year. Jumpstart your developing skills, take BlackBerry mobile applications to market and stay ahead of the curve. Join us from November 9#45;12, 2009. Register now#33; http://p.sf.net/sfu/devconf ___ Freevo-users mailing list Freevo-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freevo-users
Re: [Freevo-users] Recordserver won't stay running on RC and 1.9.0
Just like my car that wouldn't start until the tow truck arrived, then it would start right up... my Freevo seems to have gotten over it's upgrade nausea and is running back at 95%, all important parts going strong. The only thing I did between then and now was upgrade my Linux distro... I figured as long as the Freevo was broken, I wouldn't be doing any harm if it got further broken by a distro upgrade. After the upgrade, I poked around and the recordserver seemed to work. Then it was time to get to bed. So cancel emergency... recordserver is working, playback is good... just have minor issues to sort like TV viewing, but we don't use the Freevo to watch TV normally, so that's not a real priority. See you guys around, I'm sure. ^_^ James - Original Message From: James Trietsch kero...@yahoo.com To: freevo-users@lists.sourceforge.net Sent: Monday, September 14, 2009 7:33:03 PM Subject: [Freevo-users] Recordserver won't stay running on RC and 1.9.0 Okay, I'm officially giving up on ever getting current on the backlog of mailing list entries on the Freevo mailing lists. It just got out of control and I let it slide too long and now I'm making a fresh start of it all. So having said that, I apologize in advance if this is something that was just recently discussed and corrected. I did search through the mailing list archives but couldn't find anything. [etc etc etc] -- Come build with us! The BlackBerryreg; Developer Conference in SF, CA is the only developer event you need to attend this year. Jumpstart your developing skills, take BlackBerry mobile applications to market and stay ahead of the curve. Join us from November 9#45;12, 2009. Register now#33; http://p.sf.net/sfu/devconf ___ Freevo-users mailing list Freevo-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freevo-users
[Freevo-users] Recordserver won't stay running on RC and 1.9.0
Okay, I'm officially giving up on ever getting current on the backlog of
mailing list entries on the Freevo mailing lists. It just got out of control
and I let it slide too long and now I'm making a fresh start of it all. So
having said that, I apologize in advance if this is something that was just
recently discussed and corrected. I did search through the mailing list
archives but couldn't find anything.
I've been running the SVN version of Freevo for a long time, but I hadn't
updated it in quite a while. So today I figured I'd update and see how many
things on my personal to-fix list had been done by someone else (I've seen at
least one already). Figured it would be a piece of cake, an hour's work at the
most, right?
I got the latest SVN from the server and installed it. But then it said it
needed the latest version of Kaa (I always forget that). So I got the latest
version of Kaa, but only Kaa.base would install. Finally found out that I
needed to get and install the python setup tools. Didn't realize that at first
though, so upgraded to Python 2.6 thinking that might be the problem.
Kaa.beacon wouldn't install, needed to get glib 2.4 so kaa.db would compile...
etc etc etc.
Currently, the front-end works fine, at least through all the paces I've put
it. But the recordserver won't keep running and the webserver wedges when
trying to start (CTRL-C will shut it down).
To the best of my sniffing around, it looks like the RPC setup is failing, and
it's failing because at least in the recordserver (not sure about the
webserver) the socket variable is being passed as a tuple, but the kaa.socket
module is expecting a 'string or 4tuple'. Here, I'll paste in the exception
dump:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File /usr/local/lib/python2.6/site-packages/freevo/helpers/recordserver.py,
line 1489, in module
main()
File /usr/local/lib/python2.6/site-packages/freevo/helpers/recordserver.py,
line 1458, in main
rpc = kaa.rpc.Server(socket, secret)
File /usr/local/lib/python2.6/site-packages/kaa/base/rpc.py, line 171, in
__init__
self._socket.listen(address)
File /usr/local/lib/python2.6/site-packages/kaa/base/sockets.py, line 450,
in listen
sock, addr = self._make_socket(bind_info, overwrite=True)
File /usr/local/lib/python2.6/site-packages/kaa/base/sockets.py, line 380,
in _make_socket
addr = self._normalize_address(addr)
File /usr/local/lib/python2.6/site-packages/kaa/base/sockets.py, line 355,
in _normalize_address
raise ValueError('Invalid address specification (must be str, or 4-tuple)
[%s]' % len(addr))
ValueError: Invalid address specification (must be str, or 4-tuple) [2]
WARNING: Invalid address specification (must be str, or 4-tuple) [2]
In the main of recordserver, the socket variable is being set up with ''
(blank) for the host and whatever socket is specified in the config (I swear I
read in one of the modules that blank hostname would bind to all interfaces).
That goes merrily down the list until _normalize_address performs some sanity
checks and rejects it for only having two parts when its expecting four.
On the off-chance I caught the SVN version when something was in a known broken
state, I stepped back to the hot-out-of-the-oven 1.9.0 release but alas, it
does the exact same thing. I can't imagine everyone is having this problem or
there would be a serious public outcry (and 1.9.0 wouldn't have been released
in that state). I have completely cleared out the kaa and freevo directories in
site-packages and done fresh installs a few times now, but to no avail.
Can anyone offer any help? Especially before my next show is slated to record?
^_^ Of course it goes without saying that the time and effort all of you have
put into this is deeply appriciated. Such a full-featured product for free is
quite a rarity.
And I promise to do my best to keep up with the mail flow this time!
Quick overview:
(Hardware available on request, but I omitted it since I don't think it's a
problem)
Debian 2.6.18-6
Python 2.6
Kaa SVN build 4253
Freevo 1.9.0 and Freevo SVN build 11630 (same symptoms on either one)
Problem: Front end runs fine, recordserver fails trying to start RPC listening,
webserver wedges on startup
--
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[Freevo-users] Updated to SVN-12244, ivtv_record.py now throwing a fatal exception
First, Freevo has been performing flawlessly for month now. Okay, so there are a few flaws, but I've got them noted and am kinda working on the ones I think I can address. More on that at another time. Second, I am so far behind on this list I will never catch up. I want to see what's been going on, but... anyway, I'll keep an eye out at the top for replies to this. Now, the problem: Last weekend I updated to svn-12244. No noticeable issues on the GUI, recordings were still being set up, favorites tracked... it was flawless. Of course it couldn't be that easy. I find out today that there's trouble with the recording system. It's trying, but ivtv_record.py is throwing out an exception when it's setting up to record. From the recordserver logs: 2008-12-24 22:31:15,466 DEBUGrecordserver.py (250): using cached schedule 2008-12-24 22:31:15,466 DEBUGrecord_types.py (270): getFavorites() 2008-12-24 22:31:15,472 DEBUGrecordserver.py (1146): isProgAFavorite(Wed Dec 24 20:00-23:00 (20:00) I10590.labs.zap2it.com It's a Wonderful Life) 2008-12-24 22:31:15,958 DEBUGivtv_record.py (113): Record_Thread::run: mode=record 2008-12-24 22:31:15,958 INFO ivtv_record.py (120): Record_Thread::run: started recording 2008-12-24 22:31:15,959 DEBUGchannels.py (77): FreevoChannels.__init__() 2008-12-24 22:31:15,959 DEBUGchannels.py (279): getChannel() 2008-12-24 22:31:15,959 DEBUGivtv_record.py (123): Channel: 2 2008-12-24 22:31:15,960 DEBUGchannels.py (89): getVideoGroup(chan='4', isplayer=False, chan_index=2) 2008-12-24 22:31:15,960 CRITICAL ivtv_record.py (226): list index out of range It seems when it comes to finding the video group: vg = fc.getVideoGroup(self.prog.tunerid, False) it throws an exception. I feel like it's not finding the proper video group for the channel (all channels should be the same device/group). I feel like it's something in the VideoGroups configuration, and I feel like I've read the solution before on this list... but I did some mailing list searches and couldn't dig up anything useful. Vitals: AMD Athlon XP1900+ 512MB RAM Matrox G400 MAX Debian Sarge (I believe?) Kernel 2.6.18-6 (optimized for k7) Python 2.5 VideoGroups config segment: TV_VIDEO_GROUPS = [ # Use this group for watching tv VideoGroup(vdev='/dev/video0', adev=None, input_type='tuner 1', input_num=0, tuner_norm=CONF.tv, tuner_type='', tuner_chanlist=CONF.chanlist, desc='Watching Video Group', group_type='ivtv', record_group=1), # Use this group for recording tv VideoGroup(vdev='/dev/video0', adev=None, input_type='tuner1', tuner_norm=CONF.tv, tuner_type='', tuner_chanlist=CONF.chanlist, desc='Recording Video Group', group_type='ivtv', record_group=None) ] Can anyone offer any help? If I've left out any other vital information, write back and let me know and I'll get it for you and post it up. Thanks in advance, and here's hoping it's something really easy. James -- ___ Freevo-users mailing list Freevo-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freevo-users
[Freevo-users] Making your G400 MAX run silent
Just to show I'm not a complete troublemaker, I offer the following report from the field. The short version of the lead-up: My Freevo started in a standard beige-box. But it was loud. So I bought an Antec NSK2400 HTPC case. Nice case, comes with a PSU that has a variable speed fan (hardly ever winds up enough to be heard), twin 120mm exhaust fans (move a lot of air very quietly) and rubber grommets for mounting the hard drive(s) to isolate noise. Once I got that case, suddenly I could hear the CPU fan. I bought a Zalman AlCu 'flower' with a 92mm fan and variable speed control. Wound it up to about 1700 RPM, moves air and can't be heard. Great! But now I could hear the GPU fan on the G400 card! I thought about disconnecting the fan, especially since it was starting to squeal and sound like it was on its last legs. But I was afraid there wasn't enough airflow to keep the GPU cool. So I hatched a plan. I got a no-longer-needed nVidia 8852 at work that had a passive heatsink on it. It turns out the G400's heatsink mounting holes are a fairly standard configuration, and the 8852 had the same mounting pin configuration. I took the passive sink off the 8852, took the fan-heatsink off the G400. Laid down a thin layer of thermal grease on the G400 chip and attached the passive heatsink. It has now been running for 4 months or more without any issues. It stays cool, although I don't have anything in the slot next to it so it has extra room for airflow and the blank slot on the back has a cover with vent holes in it (came with the Antec case) so air can be drawn into that space by the exhaust fan. And best of all, it's absolutely silent! Now I can no longer hear anything from the box from across the room. It's wonderful! So don't be afraid to experiment with your G400 card and passive cooling. I doubt the Freevo system taxes it too much, but my system is a stand-alone running DirectFB, so I don't have X to deal with. Happy tinkering and happy Freevoing! James -- ___ Freevo-users mailing list Freevo-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freevo-users
[Freevo-users] Last Call for Strange Escapments
Hi guys... been a while. I've had to catch up with the list! I'm running SVN build 10312 (at least that's what the freevo_conf says, is there a way to be totally sure?) and it's been running like a total champ. Recording my shows, playing streamed audio and local audio over the LAN. Great stuff. I've just run into a problem with special characters since I moved from 1.7.3 to SVN. To recap the main points: Streamed song titles with an apostrophe/single-quote in them are truncated. Don't Fear the Reaper becomes Don. I looked at the code in the mplayer.py audio plugin that handles decoding the ICY information. It looks for a single-quote to find the end of the field, so that would explain why it's finding the apostrophe and thinking that's the end. However, I checked the plugin back in 1.7.3 and it's the exact same code! But I never had this problem before. I can only assume the apostrophe should be escaped, but that isn't happening. At least one of my data DVDs full of AVIs is not accessable because of spaces in the folder name. Again, this was not an issue in 1.7.3. I started watching the series, and now I can't finish it (oh the suspense!). More recently I noticed that manually making thumbnails seemed to be failing for the same reason (spaces in the path), although the auto-generated thumbnails from the recordserver always work. I can investigate these problems further. Most recently, the file-info box that pops up on the web interface has been hanging because of TV shows with apostrophes in the episode name. It took me a while to figure that one out, but now I'm sure of it. This is a bit annoying, because without that box, you can't get the option to record the show or make it a favorite. Note that apostrophes in the plot summary don't cause the same problem. So I'd mentioned this before (I forget on which list, though), but I can't believe that other people would be having this problem without bringing it to the list, and I've noticed no complaints. So... is this me? Can anyone think of something in my Linux setup that might be causing characters to not be escaped? I may try going back to 1.7.3 temporarily just to see if it still works, or if it exhibits similar behavior. Thanks for any help you can offer. It's an annoyance and aggravation, but don't keep Freevo from doing it's daily work. James Be a better friend, newshound, and know-it-all with Yahoo! Mobile. Try it now. http://mobile.yahoo.com/;_ylt=Ahu06i62sR8HDtDypao8Wcj9tAcJ - This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2008. http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse012070mrt/direct/01/___ Freevo-users mailing list Freevo-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freevo-users
[Freevo-users] Mplayer playback slips fields on interlaced shows
I'm looking for the select group of crazy people out there. You know who you are, the ones running interlaced recordings (recorded from SDTV) interlaced to an interlaced output (TV). I can't imagine there are many of us... but I beg your help. My recordings from TV on Freevo are beautiful (given the bitrate I'm devoting to it). They play back smooth... except every once in a while, they get jittery. Having a background in TV production, I recognize this is reversed fields in interlaced playback, as opposed to some kind of encoding artifact. If I pause Freevo/Mplayer and then resume, everything is back to normal. Or sometimes if I let it go long enough, it will correct itself. It's a minor annoyance... either I have to quickly pause/unpause, or if I'm watching with someone else I'll just grit my teeth and bear it until it corrects itself. What I think is happening is for some reason, mplayer decides it needs to drop a frame, but instead it drops a field, so now the field-order is reversed. And once it's paused, it starts off in the correct order again. This could make sense if mplayer treats interlaced playback as 60fps where each 'frame' is one of the fields. I tried adjusting the -autosync value and it seemed to help, but it still doesn't make it bulletproof. If it is a matter of mplayer dropping fields/frames, I'd like to know what's causing it. I have an XP1900+ with 512M of ram and a G400Max video card... unless my hard drive is the bottleneck I can't see any reason it should choke. But perhaps I'm missing something. Again, thanks for any help anyone can offer, or any directions to pursue research. Not a deal-breaker, but fixing this would make playback perfect. James Looking for last minute shopping deals? Find them fast with Yahoo! Search. http://tools.search.yahoo.com/newsearch/category.php?category=shopping- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2008. http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse012070mrt/direct/01/___ Freevo-users mailing list Freevo-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freevo-users
[Freevo-users] XMLTV time offset applies to grabbed range (was: tv_grab_de_tvtoday)
I had a brilliant flash of insight last night! I had mentioned that my schedules seem to run out at 16:00 on the last day grabbed, instead of at midnight? 16:00 in Pacific Standard is 00:00 the next day in Universal Coordinated. In the XMLTV configuration I had told it to run zero offset (UTC) instead of an offset for Pacific Standard (it claimed it was better to let the application sort out timezone conversions) but it looks like it adheres to this offset when grabbing the schedules too. Which means it's probably also grabbing the last 8 hours of yesterday's schedule that you never see (or are not interested in?). Alas, it appears to be an XMLTV 'problem'... if it's even considered a problem at all. It looks like the options so far are: * Deal with it and not have the last evening's programs available * Set the time offset in the XMLTV config and face possible issues going in and out of DST Of course, what I'd really like to do is have XMLTV make adjustments for the current timezone when grabbing. Sound possible? Or overly complex? Or is that what the offset is designed to do (I thought it changed the times in the TV.xml file as well)? In the mean time, I'm beating the web guide into shape. I think I've solved the problem with shows on a channel not appearing after a previous show ends at a strange time (Jay Leno ends at 00:37!)... but of course it created more havok in the process. I'll continue to tinker. James Looking for last minute shopping deals? Find them fast with Yahoo! Search. http://tools.search.yahoo.com/newsearch/category.php?category=shopping - This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2008. http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse012070mrt/direct/01/ ___ Freevo-users mailing list Freevo-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freevo-users
[Freevo-users] Escaping string problem?
I moved up to the SVN version for my box and after some initial
confusion (didn't realize it used both /var/lib and /var/cache now, thought it
was just supposed to be /var/lib) I've got things back and running
nicely. Can't wait to try out some of the new fun, like the audio podcast
plug-in.
However, I went to play some video from a data CD-ROM yesterday and it
complained. It wasn't a full-out crash, but the pop-up error with
'Shutdown' and 'Continue', although it was completely unresponsive at that
point. I could see in the background that the files on the disc were
listed. From what I see, it's wrecking trying to find/create the wrong
directory in the VFS:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File /usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/freevo/main.py, line 290, in
eventhandler
app.eventhandler(event)
File /usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/freevo/menu.py, line 707, in
eventhandler
action(arg=arg, menuw=self)
File /usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/freevo/directory.py, line
480, in cwd
self.check_password_and_build(arg=None, menuw=menuw)
File /usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/freevo/directory.py, line
535, in check_password_and_build
self.build(arg=arg, menuw=menuw)
File /usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/freevo/directory.py, line
773, in build
items[0].actions()[0][0](menuw=menuw)
File /usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/freevo/directory.py, line
480, in cwd
self.check_password_and_build(arg=None, menuw=menuw)
File /usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/freevo/directory.py, line
535, in check_password_and_build
self.build(arg=arg, menuw=menuw)
File /usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/freevo/directory.py, line
791, in build
dirwatcher.cwd(menuw, self, item_menu, self.dir)
File /usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/freevo/directory.py, line
1010, in cwd
self.last_time = vfs.mtime(self.dir)
File /usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/freevo/util/vfs.py, line 131,
in mtime
t = os.stat(name)[ST_MTIME]
OSError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '/media/cdrom0/Last
Exile'
Looks like it chokes when trying to find the modified time of the files inside.
Now that I look at it, could it be the space is giving it trouble? I can
navigate to that directory just fine from the command line, but I have to
escape the space ('Last\ Exile') for it to work properly. This worked just fine
back in 1.7.3 and I enjoyed several episodes from this disc.
Actually after some quick testing, I'm sure it's the space. A DVD of AVIs from
a friend who used no spaces in filenames plays without any kind of issues
whatsoever.
While we're on the subject of escape sequences, I've noticed that while
streaming radio from the web, the title strings get chopped off when they run
into an apostrophe/single-quote. For exmple, Simple Minds - Don instead of
Simple Minds - Don't Forget About Me. It looks like the current SVN has some
problems escaping funky characters in strings.
Don't think I can fix this one on my own (not without a lot of searching) so
someone else can hopefully get right to the heart of the problem and correct
it. Unless I'm the only one experiencing this problem? ^_^
James
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Re: [Freevo-users] Web interface not highlighting conflicts
John, I wrote some quick-and-dirty code to highlight conflicts on the 'Scheduled Recordings' webpage, but I didn't develop it too far because I figured conflict resolution would take care of any conflicts. Basically anything that conflicted with the show above it would be highlighted in yellow. I didn't realize conflicts were highlighted in the Freevo-based guide screen. I do a lot of work on the web pages because sometimes I work from my office when I have spare time or at lunch, so the web pages are easy to check from somewhere other than my living room. So I tend to forget there are similar listings on the TV screens themselves. James - Original Message From: John Molohan [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: freevo-users@lists.sourceforge.net Sent: Tuesday, January 8, 2008 6:00:09 AM Subject: [Freevo-users] Web interface not highlighting conflicts Hi, Was it my imagination or did the web interface used to highlight conflicts in recording schedules similar to freevo's interface? If it did it appears to be broken. Never miss a thing. Make Yahoo your home page. http://www.yahoo.com/r/hs - Check out the new SourceForge.net Marketplace. It's the best place to buy or sell services for just about anything Open Source. http://ad.doubleclick.net/clk;164216239;13503038;w?http://sf.net/marketplace ___ Freevo-users mailing list Freevo-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freevo-users
Re: [Freevo-users] tv_grab_de_tvtoday
John, Tanja, Bjoern: I noticed ever since I first loaded up 1.7.3 that the web guide would stop showing shows on a channel if a program ended on a non-five-minute interval. For example, tonight the channel 4 news goes 29 minutes (?) from 23:00 to 23:29. And after that block, the schedule is empty space. For me, this usually only happens late at night, with weird shows like Jay Leno and David Letterman so it's not a huge issue. What I'm starting to research now is that the web guide stops displaying show information before the actual TV.xml runs out of data. For example, yesterday the drop down only displayed 'Fri Jan 11' and 'Sat Jan 12', but checking TV.xml showed there was plenty of data for Sunday the 13th. Additionally, all the show information was available for all of Sunday's shows with the on-screen guide. Another problem (most likely related) is that on the last day loaded in the TV.xml, the web guide data starts to 'run out' around 16:00. I haven't checked the on-screen guide for this problem, but I have a suspicion it's related to the missing day problem above. All three of these are on my list to dig into, but if anyone else wants to look into it and can fix it quick, by all means go for it! James P.S. I'm not running tv_sort. I was under the impression it's primary function was to put in valid end-times for shows. Schedules Direct data all seems to have valid end times for all their shows, so I blew off tv_sort. - Original Message From: Bjoern Franke [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: freevo-users@lists.sourceforge.net Sent: Tuesday, January 8, 2008 9:15:10 AM Subject: Re: [Freevo-users] tv_grab_de_tvtoday John Molohan schrieb: Bjoern Franke wrote: Hi Tanka, Tanja schrieb: I have just checked and see the same problem in the webinterface. In the normal freevo interface everything works fine. The data is there in the xml file. It seems to be a problem of the webinterface... Perhaps I should add this to the bugtracker? Please do. I've just checked again and see the same problem. Done. Be a better friend, newshound, and know-it-all with Yahoo! Mobile. Try it now. http://mobile.yahoo.com/;_ylt=Ahu06i62sR8HDtDypao8Wcj9tAcJ - Check out the new SourceForge.net Marketplace. It's the best place to buy or sell services for just about anything Open Source. http://ad.doubleclick.net/clk;164216239;13503038;w?http://sf.net/marketplace ___ Freevo-users mailing list Freevo-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freevo-users
Re: [Freevo-users] Automatically (un)mount smb/cifs directories
One thing that might be of interest (if you don't use it already) is the
ability for Freevo to ping the server in question before it attempts to open up
the remote directory. This way if the server is down or disconnected, Freevo
doesn't even make autofs try. There is still a little hesitation, but it's
definitely shorter than waiting for autofs to time out. I'm not sure if this
would help things if the server disappeared while browsing the directory, but
the entry definitely wouldn't show up the next time the main listing was
refreshed.
You just add the server name and a colon before the path in your
local_config.py entry:
VIDEO_ITEMS = [ ('Frisch aufgenommen', 'hera:/mm/Recorded'),
('Noch nicht gesehen', 'hera:/mm/Videos/Nochnicht gesehen'),
('Videos', 'hera:/mm/Videos'),
('USB', '/var/run/usbmount')]
So Freevo will ping 'hera' before trying to access any of those paths. If it
doesn't get a positive response, it skips it and moves on.
The one problem I see is it seems to trip up the cache helper... it doesn't
know what to make of the extra name and colon and says the path is bad.
Something for me (or someone else) to look into, I suppose.
Hope that helps some.
James
- Original Message
From: Duncan Webb [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: freevo-users@lists.sourceforge.net
Sent: Saturday, December 29, 2007 10:14:55 AM
Subject: Re: [Freevo-users] Automatically (un)mount smb/cifs directories
Thorsten Pferdekämper wrote:
Hi folks,
In my setup, two freevo boxes are connected via smb shares.
This
works very
well as long as both boxes are up and running, but problems
occur
when the
server is switched off.
Here are the details:
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Re: [Freevo-users] Better controls in freevo web page for VLC video streaming
Pirlouwi: I made a tweak to one of the videolan Java files, but what I did didn't work, so I put it back. All I'm running is your changes from the tar.gz file you posted to the mailing list: * Modified fileinfo.rpy to point to vlcwin.rpy * vlcwin.rpy * videolan directory to hold Java support files I had an issue with the plugin not installing correctly (Firefox on Windows XP) so I took out the hand-installed VLC and used the version with the Windows installer instead. That properly installed the plugin and I could get playback. I got a chance to try things out at home last night on the LAN. I found I can definitely scroll around inside the buffered area of an MP3 (both forward and backward and forward again) but video does not behave the same way. There seems to be a very small area around the current playback time where you can change, but if you go outside of that (forward or backward) then the error pops up. Perhaps it has to do with the video being a much higher bitrate than the MP3. I have also noticed some of my MP3s stream 'live' and some stream with an ending time. The Java code looks for a total length of the object and if it doesn't find one, assumes it's a live stream. So now I question where it's getting the total length from. Is it just being lazy and trying to look it up in the media tag? And if it's not available, it assumes the media is a live stream? Just a minor thing to look into, I suppose. Anyway, those are my results. Hope they help. James Never miss a thing. Make Yahoo your home page. http://www.yahoo.com/r/hs - This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2005. http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse012070mrt/direct/01/ ___ Freevo-users mailing list Freevo-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freevo-users
Re: [Freevo-users] itv and vpodcast
John, you're not mad. At least, no more crazy than any of the rest of us here (I hope I can speak for everyone?) I definitely see where everyone is coming from on this front and how this got sticky in a hurry. True, this would be a plugin for online video content (we already have a method for web radio) and as such it all doesn't necessarily fit neatly into one category. My gut instinct was this: Live streams (things handled by itv) would go under Television, while downloaded shows (vpodcast items) would be put Movies (or Video, if you prefer). If I wanted to watch a certain internet show that comes on Sunday at 20:00 and is live, I'd got to Television. If I wanted to catch up with a 'cast that was done a few days ago and I had downloaded... Movies. Basically, that TV is live and Movies is pre-recorded. Granted, if somebody wrote a system to record live webcasts (like recording live TV) and store them for later... would that go under TV in the recorded section? Uh oh... I sense this is getting complicated again... And I trust there's already a podcast plugin that downloads podcasts and stores them for you, so you can put that under your Music menu, right? If we put live video web streams under TV, doesn't that mean we should move live audio web streams to Radio? :P I'm going to stop now before I give myself a headache, but I still stand by my original idea: Live streams in TV, recorded streams in Movies/Video. And perhaps discussion on re-evaluating the categories. For a start, perhaps distinguishing between locally stored items (Movies/Music) and remotely received items (TV/Radio), regardless of the media (hard drive, DVD, CD, local network, internet, over-the-air, cable, etc). James - Original Message From: John Molohan [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; freevo-users@lists.sourceforge.net Sent: Tuesday, November 20, 2007 10:43:06 AM Subject: Re: [Freevo-users] itv and vpodcast point of view (and specifically from a new users point of view). Any thoughts? Am I mad :) Never miss a thing. Make Yahoo your home page. http://www.yahoo.com/r/hs - This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2005. http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse012070mrt/direct/01/ ___ Freevo-users mailing list Freevo-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freevo-users
Re: [Freevo-users] Thumbnail followup
Okay, I'm following up on my followup... ^_^ When last we left me, I was trying to get thumbnails to work. I had sorted a problem with distutils.py in /utils causing videothumb.py to wreck. Once that was solved, it looked like thumbnails were being created (even automatically for newly recorded shows) but they were not appearing when the show was highlighted. This was in the TV program menu, using recordings_manager.py in place of view_recordings.py. Just to rule out another variable, I switched from the 'rain' skin to the default 'blurr' skin, but same thing: Only the default picture was displayed in place of any thumbnail that should have appeared. On a whim today, I went to my Movie section and tried making a thumbnail of a video I have there. Not only did it work, the thumbnail showed up too! Made a few thumbnails for some shows stored on a CD-ROM and they displayed fine (hooray for storing data about removable discs in the VFS). This leads me to a suspicion I've had for the last few days: That recordings_manager isn't built to handle/display thumbnail images. I haven't had a chance to switch back to view_recordings to confirm this, but now I know the thumbnail creation and display process works like it should. I'm going to poke at recordings_manager (because I believe it's superior to the basic view_recordings when it comes to categorization and organization) but all the Python I know I've learned sifting through and experimenting with Freevo. If anyone else knows exactly what to do and/or how to do it, I'm sure you could get the job done much faster than I. A focused laser as opposed to a focused flashlight. ^_^ In the meantime, I'll poke at it because it's fun, and I'm learning Python and about Freevo too. Cheers! James Never miss a thing. Make Yahoo your home page. http://www.yahoo.com/r/hs - This SF.net email is sponsored by: Splunk Inc. Still grepping through log files to find problems? Stop. Now Search log events and configuration files using AJAX and a browser. Download your FREE copy of Splunk now http://get.splunk.com/ ___ Freevo-users mailing list Freevo-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freevo-users
[Freevo-users] Thumbnail followup
Hello Freevoers: I was looking over old mailing list messages about getting thumbnails to work because it's the next part of Freevo I've decided to attack. When I picked the menu item, it would pop up the window saying creating thumbnail, but it wouldn't create it. Not even an .mpeg.raw file in the vfs. I went through the steps outlined in the archived mails (they were recent, maybe August of this year) and even ran into the same error with Python complaining there was no core module in distutils. Apparently the original troubleshooter solved the problem by reinstalling kaa and/or Python. I didn't want to do that (I'm lazy!) so I spent a frustrated hour poking around. To keep things short (I tend to ramble): I discovered I could import distutils.core without issue in any directory _except_ the /site-packages/freevo/utils directory. This led me to find there is a module in utils called distutils.py! When trying to import anything that wants distutils.core (in this case, videothumb asks for kaa.metadata, which asks for kaa.base which in turn tries to import distutils.core) while in the utils directory, it would go after the distutils.py package and not find a core module inside of it. I have since renamed the distutils.* files to distutils.*.back and have not run into any problems yet (that I've noticed) and the videothumb module works without complaint. I'm not seeing the thumbnails on the TV interface, but the .mpeg.raw files are being created and the option to make a thumbnail disappears off the menu, so Freevo is aware the files are there. I suppose there's a chance the skin/module isn't set up to show them properly (rain skin with the recordings_manager plugin) so I'll investigate this further in the next few days. I have noticed that newly recorded shows since I made the distutils 'fix' are getting thumbnails automatically created for them. ^_^ Hope this helps... oh, this is Freevo 1.7.3 from source, by the way. Downloaded about two months ago. James Burbank, CA USA __ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com - This SF.net email is sponsored by: Splunk Inc. Still grepping through log files to find problems? Stop. Now Search log events and configuration files using AJAX and a browser. Download your FREE copy of Splunk now http://get.splunk.com/ ___ Freevo-users mailing list Freevo-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freevo-users
Re: [Freevo-users] multi part files and audio language and subtitle selection
- Original Message From what I remember if you had files split across multiple files freevo automagically played them as one. E.G [EMAIL PROTECTED] freevo-rel-1]# ls -lh /home/media/recorded_tv/|grep vob -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 17M Aug 2 22:42 ALL_THE_KINGS_MEN3-1.vob.partial -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2.0G May 26 19:08 APOCALYPTO1-1.vob -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2.0G May 26 19:12 APOCALYPTO1-2.vob -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2.0G May 26 19:15 APOCALYPTO1-3.vob -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 439M May 26 19:16 APOCALYPTO1-4.vob -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2.0G Aug 2 20:53 MILLION_DOLLAR_BABY2-1.vob -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2.0G Aug 2 20:56 MILLION_DOLLAR_BABY2-2.vob -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1012M Aug 2 20:58 MILLION_DOLLAR_BABY2-3.vob Either of these would have appeard as a single menu item in freevo and played as such but now I don't get this behaviour - has this changed? Hi John. I actually ran into the opposite problem, where I have three files of three days of WRC coverage, named ending in Day_1, Day_2 and Day_3. Freevo was combining them into one, which isn't _bad_, but I don't necessarily want to watch them all at once. I remembered a variable to control this from my first install (over a year ago) and finally stumbled over it again. It's VIDEO_AUTOJOIN and unfortunately it only appears in the freevo_config.py and not in local_config.py, so if you only change things in local_config, you might never realize it's there. It does default to 1 (on) though, so if it hasn't changed for you I'm not sure why your files wouldn't be joining again. However, it might be a place you can start looking. As a general question, would it be worth adding VIDEO_AUTOJOIN to the local_config, just so users are aware of its existence? Keep up the good work and the good support, all. ^_^ James __ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com - This SF.net email is sponsored by: Splunk Inc. Still grepping through log files to find problems? Stop. Now Search log events and configuration files using AJAX and a browser. Download your FREE copy of Splunk now http://get.splunk.com/ ___ Freevo-users mailing list Freevo-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freevo-users
Re: [Freevo-users] TV_IVTV options
- Original Message From: John Molohan [EMAIL PROTECTED] Bert Kneepkens wrote: I tried googling, but i can't really understand what option is best. The most important one is the option 'input', the config file gives some descriptions of mpeg2_ps, mpeg2_ts, mpeg1 mpeg2_pes_av mpeg2_pes_v... but i don't understand the difference. Hello Bert and John. I was curious about the different stream types too (I have a PVR-250) and decided to take a quick jaunt out on the 'net. Wikipedia turned out to be a goldmine of information. PES: Packetized Elementary Stream (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packetized_Elementary_Stream) A stream (audio, video, data) that has a packet header every so many bytes. In the case of the IVTV card, I would guess these are pes_v (video only), pes_a (audio only) and pes_av (both). PS: Program Stream (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Program_stream) A combination of one or more PESes. I'm once again guessing the ability exists for a PS to carry multiple PESes, maybe like multiple angles or multiple audio tracks on DVD. It's all one PS, but the decoder can chose among different (synched) audio and video streams. I think this is the option you'd most likely want for recording on Freevo. TS: Transport Stream (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPEG_transport_stream) A PS with extra data for synchronizing and error correction over unreliable media, such as digital broadcast. If you piped your IVTV card output right onto the network, this would probably be a good choice. Otherwise it looks like PS is better for more reliable media (such as DVD or hard drives). Additionally, There is the mysterious DVD-Compatible setting(s)... I'm using DVD-compatible for now, but I don't know if PS would offer better/worse quality for the same bitrate. For what it's worth, I'm running the latest IVTV drivers where they've merged in with V4L2 (i.e., you use v4l2-ctl to change most settings on your card instead of ivtv-ctl) and there are only five stream types available: * MPEG-2 Program Stream * MPEG-1 System Stream * MPEG-2 DVD-compatible Stream * MPEG-1 VCD-compatible Stream * MPEG-2 SVCD-compatible Stream Unfortunately, I have no idea what the differences may be in the 'compatible' stream types, aside from VCD being MPEG1 and the others being MPEG2. Maybe someone could encode the same piece of a program at the same bitrate but different stream types and see if there are any noticable differences. Also the stream_type numbers have changed (10 is no longer DVD compatible, now it's 3). Just a heads-up if you're using the newer versions. That's all I got on stream types. I seem to remember finding a website that had some good explanation of the dnr settings, but I don't remember where it was now. Hope some of this helps! James __ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com - This SF.net email is sponsored by: Splunk Inc. Still grepping through log files to find problems? Stop. Now Search log events and configuration files using AJAX and a browser. Download your FREE copy of Splunk now http://get.splunk.com/ ___ Freevo-users mailing list Freevo-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freevo-users
[Freevo-users] Channel list doesn't survive reboot (and other minor schedule issues)
Hi guys, just a quick question... I'm hooked up to Schedules Direct for North America channel listings. I'm using Freevo's tv_grab helper. It grabs smoothly and life is good. However, my machine isn't at the level of 'full time' yet: until I get a list of things I want to record, it gets turned off overnight. My concern is when I reboot it (either because it was turned off, or because I'm testing) the TV schedules are gone until I do another tv_grab. I see that the TV.xml is put into /tmp, but I was under the impression that once the schedules are grabbed and cached, the TV.xml file is no longer needed. In fact, at one point I deleted the TV.xml file and the full schedule list was still available. Is this done by design? Is it a known problem? I know that once the box goes full-time, this probably won't matter (and the schedules will be updated nightly). Should the TV.xml file be kept around? Having the 3.8M TV.xml plus the 1.8M pickled file seems redundant to me, but I might not understand exactly how the process works. Just wanted to know if there was anything that could be done in the meantime. I got the box to record a few shows last night and played them back this morning! Progress is definitely good... ^_^ Oh! I looked at the TV.xml and see that SD sends end times... does this mean there's no need to run tv_sort to put in end times manually? Also, I tried to grab the NA channel icons, but when I went to run the makelogos helper, it thought a moment, then barfed up a screen full of: Failed to get file:///usr/local/share/xmltv/icons/ANIMALP.gif for channel I50001.labs.zap2it.com error Could not open /tmp/kaa-0/kaa-imlib2-img-138017250: 0 I think there's one there for almost every channel on the listing. I've confirmed the .gifs exist in that directory... seems to be this imlib2-img- file that's causing the trouble. The icons and tv_sort questions are minor, though... heck, this whole thing is minor really... but I would like a few answers or nudges in the right direction. Thanks for the help! James Burbank, CA USA __ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com - This SF.net email is sponsored by: Splunk Inc. Still grepping through log files to find problems? Stop. Now Search log events and configuration files using AJAX and a browser. Download your FREE copy of Splunk now http://get.splunk.com/___ Freevo-users mailing list Freevo-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freevo-users
Re: [Freevo-users] init.d script on Debian fails to start freevo/webserver/recordserver reliably
I seem to have fixed the problem... I got to talking with another Linux-inclined friend of mine and he said it sounded like a race-condition between the recordserver, webserver and Freevo. And the more I thought about it, the more I started to agree with him. Because as of late it seemed consistant that the recordserver would start, the webserver would fail and Freevo would start. So like the recordserver was able to add the /tmp/kaa-0 directory after the webserver had looked for it, but before it would make the directory. This would also explain why things never exploded after boot-up: Once the directories are made, they aren't wiped out, so re-running Freevo would run normally, because the directories are already there. So on a whim, I added 'sleep 2' commands between each step of the init script (the RTC frequency reset, recordserver start, webserver start and freevo start) and I've rebooted without issue twice now. I'm going to say this issue is solved. Duncan, I checked the __init__.py and tmpfile.py modules in SVN against the ones in the latest kaa.base download (0.5?) and they were the same, so I didn't try the SVN version of kaa. Not to say there aren't changes in kaa.base that might help, but I didn't immediately see anything tmp-file related that might make a difference. Francisco, I checked who was running Freevo and it runs as root (which is what I intended) when it is started from the init script. In fact, since it runs during bootup outside of a terminal, it runs as root regardless of the ROOTUSERINFO setting in boot_config. Thanks for your help, support and above all your patience, guys. You know I'll be back when I have another problem I can't solve on my own. Nice thing about Freevo: It's free, but there's even good tech support. James __ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com - This SF.net email is sponsored by: Splunk Inc. Still grepping through log files to find problems? Stop. Now Search log events and configuration files using AJAX and a browser. Download your FREE copy of Splunk now http://get.splunk.com/ ___ Freevo-users mailing list Freevo-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freevo-users
Re: [Freevo-users] init.d script on Debian fails to start freevo/webserver/recordserver reliably
Duncan, Francisco, thanks for the suggestions. Of course I blew out of the apartment this morning and didn't turn on the box so I could tinker from work. I'll have to wait until I get home to try out your suggestions. I also ran into an error last night when trying to grab a CD cover image... it threw an exception (but didn't crash completely) regarding /tmp/kaa/something so I figure it must be related. I'll definitely poke my head back in and let you know if this solves the problems. By the way, is anyone aware that in the latest source (1.7.3?) the freevo_conf is v5.20 but the example local_conf is v5.17, so every time I start up, it spews the list of new additions? I think some of them have even been added to the local_conf (I'm pretty sure I saw a few). I can investigate further. Maybe all the new items were added but the version number wasn't updated. Thank you again for the help. James - Original Message From: Duncan Webb [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: freevo-users@lists.sourceforge.net Sent: Tuesday, October 23, 2007 3:24:57 AM Subject: Re: [Freevo-users] init.d script on Debian fails to start freevo/webserver/recordserver reliably Francisco Eduardo Álvarez Solano wrote: Hi, James I have similar problems in Ubuntu and I fix them changing the owner of freevo dirs in /tmp. You can try to delete /tmp/freevo and /tmp/kaa-* and start freevo from init scripts and then run ps xau to see the owner of the process. May be freevo's owner is root, but webserver and recordserver is spawned by another user. IIRC this was a bug in kaa.base, you could try a svn version of kaa. Duncan - This SF.net email is sponsored by: Splunk Inc. Still grepping through log files to find problems? Stop. Now Search log events and configuration files using AJAX and a browser. Download your FREE copy of Splunk now http://get.splunk.com/ ___ Freevo-users mailing list Freevo-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freevo-users __ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com - This SF.net email is sponsored by: Splunk Inc. Still grepping through log files to find problems? Stop. Now Search log events and configuration files using AJAX and a browser. Download your FREE copy of Splunk now http://get.splunk.com/ ___ Freevo-users mailing list Freevo-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freevo-users
Re: [Freevo-users] Oh deary me!
--- Karl Lattimer [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2006/04/19/philips_enforced_ads_patent/ Can this be avoided if it comes into force in future freevo releases, we could use a slogan like take back your channel hopping I wouldn't sweat it. After all, every stand-alone 'offical' DVD player I've met won't let you jump out of the FBI/INTERPOL warnings. Yet all you have to do is push MENU in Freevo and off it goes... I'm betting Freevo can be made to adhere to or ignore whatever standards the user would like. As for Porn driving the technology industry? Can you deny it? The decision between BlueRay and HD DVD as a standard rests squarely on which one is embraced by the pornography industry. ^_~ (At least I hope so... I can't take another multi-standard like DVD+/-R/RW/Super/Turbo/GTR) James __ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com --- Using Tomcat but need to do more? Need to support web services, security? Get stuff done quickly with pre-integrated technology to make your job easier Download IBM WebSphere Application Server v.1.0.1 based on Apache Geronimo http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnkkid=120709bid=263057dat=121642 ___ Freevo-users mailing list Freevo-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freevo-users
Re: [Freevo-users] getting the freevo display to fit on screen (was: Re: [Freevo-users] spdif output with xine)
Sorry it took me so long to get back to you, Stephen. --- Stephen Rowles [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I've tried again with values ranging from 20 to 1000 and it seems to have not effect whatsoever :) I am using the freevo rpm, got from the FC4 yum repository: Name: freevo Relocations: /usr Version : 1.5.4 Vendor: (none) Release : 1_fc4 Build Date: Tue 18 Oct 2005 09:09:28 AM BST Maybe it has a bug in this version, which version are you using? Heh, I think you'd _definitely_ see some noticable effects if you put 1000 into the field. It could very well have something to do with your setup. I recall reading (or I am assuming from what I've read) that you're using X of some sort? So you have your GUI on the first head, and then TV out on the second? My setup is a dedicated X-less box, using DirectFB (more specifically the DFBMGA driver made especially for Matrox cards). No monitor attached to the first head, TV-out on the second. I ended up compiling from source for my latest run. I compiled almost everything from source to get the flexibility and make it all play nice with my G400. IIRC, the Debian package just used the standard, unaccelerated framebuffer. But I'm using Freevo 1.5.4 (compiled from source back before November) on a 2.4.27 kernel. Sorry I can't be more help at the moment. ^_^ James __ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com --- Using Tomcat but need to do more? Need to support web services, security? Get stuff done quickly with pre-integrated technology to make your job easier Download IBM WebSphere Application Server v.1.0.1 based on Apache Geronimo http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnkkid=120709bid=263057dat=121642 ___ Freevo-users mailing list Freevo-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freevo-users
Re: [Freevo-users] Why 720x480 for DirectFB and NTSC?
D'oh... of course once I got to thinking after sending that, I thought of a few things that might answer my question. Like that NTSC TV has 525 scan lines, but at least 20 (probably 25) of those at the top don't display any picture information. If you figure 20 of the bottom ones don't display picture information either, bingo: 480 height. And while the horizontal resolution of TV was always a little fuzzy (no pun intended), it was generally accepted to be around 700 or 720 vertical 'lines'. 720x480... the displayable area of NTSC video. . What I also neglected to mention is that mplayer cuts off the right side of my test AVI only when using fullscreen (-fs) mode. If I omit the -fs switch, the video plays centered (more or less) with black bars around it, being originally 512x384. If I use the -xy 640 switch, it expands out to fill the screen, although probably it falls short of the edges just a little bit (but takes up the full 480 height). If I use both -xy and -fs, it goes back to the cut-off fullscreen shennanigans. Does that help any toward a solution? Or is using -xy and -geometry to shift the picture an accepted way of doing things? James __ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com --- This SF.Net email is sponsored by xPML, a groundbreaking scripting language that extends applications into web and mobile media. Attend the live webcast and join the prime developer group breaking into this new coding territory! http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnkkid=110944bid=241720dat=121642 ___ Freevo-users mailing list Freevo-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freevo-users
[Freevo-users] Why 720x480 for DirectFB and NTSC?
Perhaps this question is better answered by the DirectFB krew. If so, say so and I'll take it there. I'm a little dismayed to find that freevo setup forces the geometry to 720x480 if you pick DirectFB (or DFBMGA) and NTSC. I forget what the PAL equivelent is, but it forces a geometry for that as well. (This is why I figure I might get an answer on this list... somebody must know _something_ if Freevo is smart enough to force the settings). If I may be allowed to descend into my TV/Video roots... 720x480 is the resolution for DV format video, but the aspect ratio isn't correct for NTSC TV. 720x480 is an aspect of 3:2, not the 4:3 of standard NTSC TV. I probably wouldn't have noticed except I was playing back some AVIs in testing and found the right edge of the picture was being cut off, extending past the edge of the visible picture. Like, very noticably past (the last letter or two of words being cut off). The AVI was originally 512x384, which is 4:3. Mplayer properly detects it as 1.:1. But then I assume it tries to play it 720 wide (and 540 high? Or maybe it just stretches it horizontally). I did some poking around with mplayer outside of Freevo and found if I set -xy 640 (force 640 width and scale height to match aspect), it would scale the AVI to 640 wide and 480 high and everything would fit on the screen. I added that and -geometry 50%:50% into the options in local_conf.py, but this feels like a work-around to me. Tonight I tried to manually set the geometry in freevo.conf to that oddball 756x? size that freevo setup mentions. Freevo started and the startup screen displayed (looking a little better, in my opinion) and up came the menu, but then the keyboard was totally freakin' out! The keypresses would repeat (even when only pressed once) and it was totally uncontrollable. I managed to bumble my way into playing back a video and the keypresses behaved correctly there. It's only an issue in the Freevo menu screens. I tried 640x480 and the same thing happened. With two strikes, I didn't try 800x600 (but I may, later). I guess now I know one reason why the geometry is forced when using DFB! Does anyone know why DFB/Freevo/SDL(?) freaks out if you use something besides 720x480 for NTSC? Can this be easily changed? Really, it should be something besides 720x480, that's a strange limbo aspect somewhere between 4:3 and 16:9... Thanks for reading, I do tend to get long-winded. Any suggestions or answers? Oh! System info: AMD Athlon XP1900+ 512MB SDRAM Matrox G400 MAX, TV out on second head Debian Sarge, 2.4.28 kernel Freevo 1.5.4 Thanks guys! James __ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com --- This SF.Net email is sponsored by xPML, a groundbreaking scripting language that extends applications into web and mobile media. Attend the live webcast and join the prime developer group breaking into this new coding territory! http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnkkid=110944bid=241720dat=121642 ___ Freevo-users mailing list Freevo-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freevo-users
Re: [Freevo-users] getting the freevo display to fit on screen (was: Re: [Freevo-users] spdif output with xine)
--- Stephen Rowles [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Justin Wetherell wrote: Have you tried playing around with the overscan values? OSD_OVERSCAN_X = OSD_OVERSCAN_Y = Thanks for the tip, just looked at those and setting them to any values doesn't seem to make any difference to the amount of the display that is off the edge of the screen. Any other suggestions? Hi Stephen. I had the same problem and ended up solving it with the OSD_OVERSCAN values. What threw me off at first is that changing those values doesn't affect the skin background, only the graphics on top of it. That's nice because then you don't have to worry about getting black bars: The blue (or whatever the skin backgruond happens to be) always fills the screen. I would suggest (if you haven't already) giving it another go, but putting some rather high values (100+) into the overscan settings just to get a baseline and see if it is changing the display at all. My current settings are 50 and 10, but I went higher at first and watched the interface get squashed away from the sides of the screen. Hope that gives you a little more of a lead. ^_^ James __ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com --- This SF.Net email is sponsored by xPML, a groundbreaking scripting language that extends applications into web and mobile media. Attend the live webcast and join the prime developer group breaking into this new coding territory! http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnkkid=110944bid=241720dat=121642 ___ Freevo-users mailing list Freevo-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freevo-users
Re: [Freevo-users] Problem solved!
--- John Molohan [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Woops, bit of a misunderstanding there, I was hoping the original poster might stick it in the wiki - not you. I'd like to have you locked away hacking on 2 never looking at the users list :) John, I'd be happy to. That and maybe taking a whack at the self-booting section for Debian. I tried the directions in there over and over and had no luck. Then I found the '/boot' subdirectory in the source tree and there's an init.d script sitting there waiting for me. Works like a dream now! ^_^ James __ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com --- This SF.Net email is sponsored by xPML, a groundbreaking scripting language that extends applications into web and mobile media. Attend the live webcast and join the prime developer group breaking into this new coding territory! http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnkkid=110944bid=241720dat=121642 ___ Freevo-users mailing list Freevo-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freevo-users
[Freevo-users] Problem solved!
I just wanted to drop everyone a line and say thanks. It seems like this list is mostly full of questions (as it should be), but I thought maybe a post of success would be a nice intermission. I recently re-joined the list after doing some deep hacking/debugging in pursuit of finding why Freevo would not control the child video applications once they were launched. Long story short: It was because the OSD was being shut down when the video players were launched. I noticed that even though local_setup has the line OSD_SHUTDOWN=0 (or whatever the line is... I'm at work and don't have direct access to my box), in the freevo_conf there's actually an if/then depending on what video system is being used. Perhaps in the future, a note in the local_setup to indicate this would be good: I was under the impression it always defaulted to zero. But anyhow, chalk up one more X-less Freevo on Debian, with a G400 MAX video card. I'm enjoying it a lot. Next step, probably a used PVR-250 card. Or maybe build an IR remote receiver. Then it will really start to rock. Thanks for all the suggestions and help when I was trying to solve the problem before. The support is always appriciated. Can't wait to see the majikal Freevo 2.0. ^_^ James Panorama City, CA __ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com --- This SF.Net email is sponsored by xPML, a groundbreaking scripting language that extends applications into web and mobile media. Attend the live webcast and join the prime developer group breaking into this new coding territory! http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnkkid=110944bid=241720dat=121642 ___ Freevo-users mailing list Freevo-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freevo-users
Re: [Freevo-users] DirectFB blocking stdin to child apps?
--- Justin Wetherell [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: You can also compile DirectFB with the *--with-inputdrivers=none --without-tools* option. Justin, thank you for all your suggestions. I gave them all a try, except recompliling DirectFB. I'll do it as a last resort, but I'm not sure it would do anything different than putting 'disable-module' in the directfbrc. Am I wrong? Putting the disable in the directfbrc does exactly what it should. Unfortunately, Freevo is counting on DirectFB for keyboard input, so now _nothing_ responds to the keyboard, not even the Freevo menus. I'm sure this would be different if I had a remote and LIRC, but I haven't moved that far along just yet. Adding ':noinput' to Mplayer's VO_DEV_OPTS also does what it should. Mplayer doesn't respond to keyboard input... but it's still not getting stdin commands from Freevo, so it's as deaf as df_xine is: Plays fine, doesn't respond to anything. Siccing killall on it takes it down and Freevo pops back up, ready to go another round. Also, before I wrote the original e-mail, I tried '--dfb:disable-module=keyboard' in df_xine's command line and got about the same result as ':noinput' with Mplayer. Freevo wedged when I quit df_xine, but I'm not sure the disable and the wedge are related. So I must theorize that DirectFB is still handing keyboard control (when it's enabled) over to the child app. The command-line switches to df_xine and Mplayer are just making them ignore the keyboard (if they weren't already). I've been putting _debug_ statements in xine.py to try to understand what's going on... can anyone think of a place I can set a _debug_ statement that will print when xine.py processes a command and tries to send it to df_xine? Or a way to intercept the stdin from Freevo and log it? If I get nothing back from that, it's pretty much a sure thing Freevo isn't getting key commands. One last thing, and I hope this isn't the kind of thing I should have mentioned up front... but I've been running Freevo as root while testing it. I tried it as a normal user, but it turned into a security nightmare. Each time I granted access to something, there was just something else that was access denied. But I'm not sure if running root would make a difference. Thanks again for your replies, Justin. Sorry I've got a stubborn one here! ^_^ James Panorama City, CA USA __ Yahoo! DSL Something to write home about. Just $16.99/mo. or less. dsl.yahoo.com --- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Splunk Inc. Do you grep through log files for problems? Stop! Download the new AJAX search engine that makes searching your log files as easy as surfing the web. DOWNLOAD SPLUNK! http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=7637alloc_id=16865op=click ___ Freevo-users mailing list Freevo-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freevo-users
[Freevo-users] DirectFB blocking stdin to child apps?
Okay, I went back and did some research on my problem and I bring it to the group again. Freevo 1.5.4 (compiled from source) DirectFB 0.9.24 (from source) mmpython 0.4.9 pygame 1.7.1 fbxine 0.99.4 df_xine from DirectFB Extras 0.9.23 Patches to Freevo python files to add detection of df_xine in setup.py and circumvent version checking in xine.py (df_xine does not report a version number, -v is used to set verbosity of output). Debian 3.0, dist-upgraded to Sarge Kernel 2.4.27 (from source, with AMD K7 optimizations) This is an 'X-less' box. It all runs from the command line Matrox G400 Max DH card, running TV-Out from the second head Did I miss anything? Okay. The main problem is Freevo cannot control df_xine or fbxine when playing back DVDs. After a bit of fiddling, I've narrowed this down to an issue with DirectFB, because: * DVD playback with df_xine or fbxine is unresponsive * Video playback with mplayer (used for everything but DVDs) responds to mplayer's key commands, but not necessarily Freevo's key commands. * Audio playback (mplayer) always responds to Freevo's key commands For example, right now Freevo's volume bindings are 'n' for decrease and 'm' for increase. If I play back audio in mplayer (which uses OSS/ALSA, not DirectFB) then n/m control volume. However, if I play back video in mplayer (DVD Title or video file), n/m no longer control volume, but '/' and '*' (mplayer's default volume keys) on the keypad do. I believe this works because mplayer will still respond to it's keyboard commands when run with the -slave switch. df_xine and fbxine ignore the keyboard and only listen to stdin when run with --stdctl. I can only conclude that video playback through DirectFB is somehow blocking the stdin commands from Freevo. I'm very suspicious of the 'virtual terminal' stuff that DFB is supposed to do. If a child app runs in a virtual terminal, will Freevo be able to communicate with it? However, no combination of 'no-vt-switch' and 'no-vt-switching' in the directfbrc file seems to make any difference. Interesting to me, if I run df_xine with --stdctl over telnet, when DirectFB fires up it reports the line: (*) Direct/Thread: Running 'VT Switcher' (CRITICAL, 1093)... Freevo also reports this line whenever the DirectFB system initalizes. But if I run fbxine with --stdctl (the only way it will run from telnet), that line does NOT appear. In both cases, all lines in directfbrc that deal with the VT are commented out. For what it's worth: If Freevo starts fbxine, the terminal that appears behind the video output is active: I can type things into the command line and get responses, even as the DVD plays back. This leads me to think Freevo has lost the keyboard. The above may also be the case with df_xine, but df_xine does not show any of the terminal behind the video when played back on the monitor, and blanks the terminal monitor completely when played back on the TV-Out. Both df_xine and fbxine work fine outside of Freevo when run normally (without the --stdctl command). They respond to all keyboard commands. Both fbxine and df_xine do not show a terminal behind the video in this case. If df_xine is run with --layer=0 for TV-Out, the terminal monitor remains black. If I run fbxine with --stdctl from the terminal, I can control it via stdin. I can also see my input and fbxine's output because the terminal appears 'behind' the DVD playback. However, when I quit fbxine, the output remains until I press a key. Then all output is instantly restored exactly as it was before running fbxine (fbxine is running in a DFB virtual terminal?). If I run df_xine with --stdctl from the terminal, I can _not_ see any part of the terminal 'behind' the video playback on the monitor. It also does _not_ respond to stdin commands. If I run df_xine with --stdctl and --layer=0 (to force it to TV-Out), the terminal monitor is blanked and the video is output to the TV. However as above, it does not respond to stdin commands. If I run df_xine or fbxine with --stdctl from a telnet session, they will respond to stdin commands sent over the telnet session. In all cases where df_xine or fbxine become unresponsive from inside Freevo, if I terminate the process manually (via Telnet), Freevo pops back up once the child process ends. So I can assume Freevo is working correctly, waiting for the child process to end. There's just some kind of disconnect between the keyboard and/or Freevo and/or the child process when DirectFB is running. Anyone have any clues they can offer? Even just a nudge in the right direction? I'd love to whip this, because otherwise my Freevo box is ready for prime-time in the living room. I don't have a TV-Tuner card yet, but I do have the webserver, recordserver and tv_grab working near perfectly (so I can browse the guide and set up recordings, just not view or record anything). I'd be happy to provide any debug logs (Freevo and child-app) that may be needed. Surely there are other G400
Re: [Freevo-users] DirectFB blocking stdin to child apps?
I had a thought early this morning after I'd given up troubleshooting and turned to playing music on my Freevo box. And I have a breakthrough! I went into xine.py and removed the '--stdctl' from the command line. fbxine flat-out refused to run (couldn't make the console graphical, apparently) but df_xine runs. And it works... ...with it's _own_ keyboard commands, not Freevo's. For example, pressing 'b' will trigger the brightness adjustment. So now I must assume that DirectFB is ripping keyboard control away from Freevo and giving it to df_xine (or whatever new child app is spawned that uses DirectFB). I realize now that I'll probably get better milage looking into DirectFB mailing lists and asking questions there, but on the off-chance anyone knows: How can I prevent this? Is it because both Freevo and df_xine run under DirectFB, and DirectFB automatically moves keyboard control to the most recently started application? More research... and I can report my findings back here if anyone wishes, but judging from the lack of response to my mails, probably nobody else has this problem or anything similar. Cheers! James Panorama City, CA __ Yahoo! DSL Something to write home about. Just $16.99/mo. or less. dsl.yahoo.com --- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Splunk Inc. Do you grep through log files for problems? Stop! Download the new AJAX search engine that makes searching your log files as easy as surfing the web. DOWNLOAD SPLUNK! http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=7637alloc_id=16865op=click ___ Freevo-users mailing list Freevo-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freevo-users
Re: [Freevo-users] matroxfb vs DirectFB (again sorry)
Hi Scott. For what it's worth, I have my G400 DH behaving pretty well in Freevo 1.5.4 with DirectFB. I hand-compiled everything from the ground up (not for the faint of heart!). The box is X-less, running from the command line. The TV output on the second head is beautiful... I dare say it looks better (colorwise and brightness-wise) than the VGA monitor's output. I have it configured that mplayer handles all tasks except DVD playback. Mplayer uses the 'dfbmga' video driver and appears to use hardware acceleration; video playback doesn't eat too much of the CPU's power. Audio playback is good too: MP3s, RealPlayer files and CDDA (through CD-Paranoia) all work well. Sometimes the CDDA playback gets screwed and it starts treating the rest of the disc as one track, but it's just a minor inconvenience. Xine does DVD playback because of the menu handling. I'm actually using df_xine and some patchwork to the Freevo .py files to make it work. And it almost works. I have a problem where df_xine will not catch commands sent from Freevo over stdin, so once the DVD starts it's effectively dead (can't even quit out of it). If I kill df_xine manually, Freevo pops back up just like it should. I'm currently researching more into how it behaves and will probably post for help here on the list. df_xine _does_ work perfectly on its own, and it will catch stdin commands when run on its own from a telnet session... just not when its run by Freevo. I haven't tried MAME yet (future plans for it) but all the Freevo displays and video/audio playback works well with the G400 and DirectFB. --- Scott Serr [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I used matroxfb for a long time, then I decided I wanted to try to get mame working. So I went from matroxfb: mplayer (hardware scaling etc) xine no mame And I went to DirectFB: mplayer (sucking CPU, seems like lots of stuff like scaling done in software?) no xine (to DirectFB support... that I can compile atleast) mame almost working Can people share their experiences with these two methods on a G400DH? For instance: Anyone ever have mame working on a raw matroxfb? Anyone have mame working on DirectFB (on G400) in a stable way? Anyone have xine support under DirectFB working? Will mplayer-DirectFB-G400 ever work as well as mplayer-mga_vid.o-G400 as far as using hardware? Thanks for any light... -Scott __ Yahoo! DSL Something to write home about. Just $16.99/mo. or less. dsl.yahoo.com --- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Splunk Inc. Do you grep through log files for problems? Stop! Download the new AJAX search engine that makes searching your log files as easy as surfing the web. DOWNLOAD SPLUNK! http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=7637alloc_id=16865op=click ___ Freevo-users mailing list Freevo-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freevo-users
[Freevo-users] df_xine, freevo 1.5.4 and me
Freevo is great stuff. Applause, Dischi et. all for all the work you've put into it. I'm really looking forward to seeing version 2.0. Sounds like a winner! I've got an almost completely working system, but for one little detail that I hope somebody can shed some light into. System: AMD Athlon XP1900+ 512 MB RAM 2 GB hard drive Matrox G400 Max Software: Debian (Sarge) kernel 2.4.27 Freevo 1.5.4 DirectFB 0.9.24 Python 2.3.5 (everything complied from source, including kernel) Like I said, it's almost completely working. Got TV-out on the second head. Plays MP3s, CDDA. Plays all sorts of videos over the network. Image viewing is a peach. DVDs via Mplayer, check. No TV yet, but I haven't started that part of the project. That's for later. I just want DVDs through xine so I can get the DVD menu. And therein lies my troubles. This box is X-less, so xine-ui is right out. Since I'm using DirectFB, I compiled df_xine to go along with it. It was even the sweet version with the --stdctl switch in it. I dutifully followed the patching instructions for freevo.conf.py, setup_freevo.py and xine.py and added the proper --layer switch to get it on the TV-out. From inside Freevo, df_xine is detected, the plugin is loaded and the Freevo 'Watch Movie' menu shows the DVD. Select it and it fires df_xine and it starts the DVD. But... df_xine is ignorant of Freevo's commands! It sits there happily at the menu, no matter what keys I press on the keyboard. I'm getting very good at typing killall -s TERM df_xine (via telnet shell). Once I TERM df_xine, Freevo pops back to the menu as it should and operates normally. df_xine plays dandy outside of Freevo and recognizes the keyboard input. If I run it without the --layer switch, it plays back on the VGA monitor just fine. If I fire it with the --stdctl command, I can use it by typing in the commands by hand (eventleft, eventleft, eventdown, eventselect, etc...) so that confirms it will take commands from stdctl. But if I run it from inside Freevo, it plays dumb. This may be a clue, I just noticed tonight: If I run df_xine from inside Freevo with no --layer switch, df_xine plays back to the VGA monitor, but not full-screen; you can still see leftovers of the terminal in bands at the top and bottom of the screen. And, when you press keys, they come out in the terminal (at the log-in prompt in this case) 'behind' the DVD playback. Does this mean Freevo has lost control of the keyboard for some reason? I did some other nefarious, ugly hacks to xine.py in the course of my troubleshooting, but just in case the previous paragraph is the key that solves this, I'll save those for later. And I put back the freshly-patched version of xine.py for now. Of course, if this was already mentioned in the mailing list, I apologize. I have in good faith spent the last week searching and browsing the list archives and didn't find anything that looked relevant to the situation. Thanks for reading, and hope somebody has an insight. James Panorama City, CA __ Yahoo! DSL Something to write home about. Just $16.99/mo. or less. dsl.yahoo.com --- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Splunk Inc. Do you grep through log files for problems? Stop! Download the new AJAX search engine that makes searching your log files as easy as surfing the web. DOWNLOAD SPLUNK! http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=7637alloc_id=16865op=click ___ Freevo-users mailing list Freevo-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freevo-users
