Brian Hartsock's Blog

Well, I tried to upgrade some packages on Myth, and the machine crashed.  Not too bad, just wireless and X.  Guess I will spend this beautiful Friday evening installing Fiesty.

I have decided to create a MythTV page on my site, not only to help everyone out there with their own setups, but to help me remember when everything crashes.

Since I converted to Ubuntu a few months ago, I have wrestled with the decision of KDE vs. Gnome.  KDE has infinite configurability, while Gnome tries to be much more simplistic.  I like many of the KDE applications, like Amarok, Krdc, and Kaffiene, so I thought I would try to switch from Gnome to KDE.

This lasted about 3 hours.  I spent all 3 hours trying to configure KDE to my liking, to basically mimic Gnome.  After frustation set in, I quickly uninstalled and still use Gnome with a few of the KDE apps as well.

Today I started reading Joel Spolsky’s User Interface Design for Programmers and the first 3 chapters explained exactly why switching was so hard.

1. Choices – KDE has so many it becomes daunting to try and configure
2. Expectations – I expect KDE to behave like Gnome, because that is what I am used to.  This isn’t the case though.

I’m sorry Linus, but I don’t foresee converting to KDE anytime soon.  Not because I dislike it, but because its not what I know.

After a Googling for a few hours, I finally got Sound Juicer, an audio extraction application for linux, setup correctly. Although I am very happy with Ubuntu, problems like this are why I think the rest of the world still isn’t ready for linux. There are still just too many simple problems that require experts knowledge (I am not an expert, Google is my expert).

Problem #1: Lame

Ubuntu doesn’t include any Lame or MP3 plugins. This was a fairly easy fix that I found a few months ago here. All that needs to be done is install all the GStreamer plugins.

Problem #2: VBR

When I had Windows, I used Exact Audio Copy (EAC), to rip my CD’s. EAC provides variable bit rate encoding which helps increase quality without changing filesize. I really wanted this feature in Sound Juicer, but after a lot of wasted time, I found this bug report. To make a long story short, VBR in GStreamer 0.10 doesn’t work very well, so it was back to the drawing board.

Problem #3: Help Documents

Finally, I gave up trying to create the perfect audio files and settled with a constant bitrate of 192kbs. To get the correct GStreamer pipeline, I looked in the Sound Juicer help documents and found this:

audio/x-raw-int,rate=44100,channels=2 ! lame name=enc vbr=0 bitrate=196 ! id3v2mux

After changing my preferences, I tried to rip a CD and it froze. At first I didn’t realize the problem, but then it quickly dawned on me. 196 isn’t a valid mp3 bitrate, 192 is. Good job help docs.

Summary

Linux is awesome, if you have days to waste on configuration. And finally, the GStreamer plugins for mp3′s are awful.

Since MythTV is one of my favorite hobby projects, I figured I should start blogging about it. I started building my Myth box over the summer of 2006 with MythTV 0.19 and Ubuntu Dapper Drake. Since Dapper had no built in package support for MythTV, everything had to be compiled, including MythTV, IVTV, and LIRC. Edgy Eft has a MythTV package and it makes installing a lot easier.

The newest release of MythTV, 0.20, has many new features over 0.19, but only one stands out to me. MythTV’s internal DVD player is awesome compared to Xine. It is definitely the biggest improvement to Myth. MythArchive is also new and promising, but I haven’t used it so I can’t really comment. Once I get an HD card, I see myself using archiving much more. Its hard to waste a DVD on low quality shows.

Now that I have filled you in on my history with Myth and its newest features, I figure I should tell you what some of my favorite things about Myth are.

• MythTV recordings are near perfect, I haven’t missed any of my favorite shows in months.
• Transcoding compresses recordings to about 70% their original size, with very little quality loss
• MythDVD
• MythMusic + SSHFS to my desktop is amazing

Even though I love my MythTV box, Myth has many shortcomings. Here are a few of my least favorite things about MythTV:

• MythDVD doesn’t allow ripping of entire DVD’s, just the main movie. I use K9Copy to backup my DVDs.
• MythDVD digital audio pass through doesn’t work (I have an awesome home theater so this is really annoying)
• MythDVD autoplay doesn’t work
• Setting HELL
  • Transcoding/Post recording processing is a pain
  • Audio configuration is horrific
  • XV vs. XVMC
  • And 1000 other things that I barely understand
• Transcoding: Can’t make it happen by default
• MythBrowser never works good
• MythWeb is buggy

I will continue to keep everyone posted on my MythBreakthroughs and eventually I hope to post a script that will basically install MythTV on any Ubuntu system.

(Oh yea, Ubuntu Fiesty Fawn supposidly includes an IVTV package, awesome)

I have had an iPod for a little over a year, and never updated the software. Since I run Ubuntu on all my computers, without Wine, I rarely log onto my Windows partition. So, a couple days ago, I decided to update my iPod software from 1.0 to 1.2.1.

All did not go as planned.

When I loaded up Amarok after updating my iPod, I received this message:

Media Device: failed to create lockfile on iPod mounted at /media/ipod: Read-only file system

After a lot of Googling, I found nothing related to my error.  Most of the problems I found were related to HFS filesystems (Mac iPod default) but mine was FAT32.

Then, I found the option to manually manage my iPod on iTunes.  Since then, I have had no problems syncing my iPod via Amarok.