Tue 12th Aug 2008
Heard on a TV ad just now:
Because the Olympics are filmed using Panasonic video technology, then it makes sense that you watch them on a Panasonic Plasma or LCD TV.
Clearly, someone at Panasonic can’t figure out that tricky logic stuff.
“Because you shit food out of your arse, it only makes sense that to eat it you should shove it up there too!”
Or how to make a single-display Mac Mini Media Center even better.
I have a Mac Mini that records all of my favourite programs (almost) automatically. It runs EyeTV (by default), and can play movies stored on either a local FireWire hard drive, or a LAN server (running OpenSolaris, and using ZFS, incidentally).
One annoying thing is that to set up a new smart playlist, or edit a movie, or do anything on the machine, whilst I can remote in and do stuff, this all displays on the TV.
However, using ScreenRecycler, it seems like I can trick the Mac Mini into thinking he (his name is jens!) has two monitors. Thus, with some swizzling, I can have the EyeTV full-screen display on the “real” monitor, and the desktop on the other one.
Doing this means that I can happily edit a movie (say, to remove advertisements), whilst the TV still displays the live TV (or being viewed video).
Run ScreenRecycler on the Media machine. You may need to restart if this is the first time you have run it, as it installs some driver. I’m hoping it’s pretty safe…
After running ScreenRecycler when the system has the driver installed, I needed to run JollysFastVNC to get ScreenRecycler to give me a second display. I was using ARD (and still do), which when I then reconnected showed me the whole desktop, with a menu enabling me to choose which display (or both) to view. I chose to view both displays for now.
I then loaded up the Displays preference pane, and moved the menu bar to the ScreenRecycler display.
I made the ScreenRecycler display run in a higher resolution (1280×960, so that it fits nicely onto my external monitor on my laptop at full-size). I then went to the EyeTV preferences, and made sure the full-screen display went onto the “real” monitor. This apparently has the side effect that quicktime movies will also play on this monitor, so that’s quite good.
Finally, I made new Live TV and Recording open in a new window. This enables me to edit a movie while Jaq is watching another. It does, however, mean that it is a little cumbersome to switch between tuners (need to view both monitors, and do some more swizzling), but it’s workable. It was always hard to switch tuners anyway, at least with the Apple Remote.
This makes for a fairly cool setup. I’m fiddling a little more before I buy ScreenRecycler (like, does it work better upon startup?), but it looks pretty promising.
One good thing about doing benchmarking of algorithms for homework is that I have time to watch TV while I wait for code to run.
And then I see things like the World’s Fattest Man, and World’s Heaviest Teenager.
How the fuck does someone get to 1000 pounds. And you can’t tell me that the teenager’s Mother isn’t to blame for him being so large.
I just couldn’t see the point of living if I could not move around.
Channel 10 is pretty crap about how it plays House. They’ll advertise a new episode, and then play two old ones instead. It really pisses me off.
Last night, however, they played the season finale of House. It was truly excellent.
With Amber about to die, they decide to ‘wake her up’ so that Wilson can say goodbye to her. So, she is brought back to consciousness so that she can find out she is about to die.
I wouldn’t want this, or do this to my partner. Even if it means not being able to say goodbye. I think I’d rather never wake up. Jaq knows I love her, regardless of me having to say it.
If we had had a fight, then I was in a bus crash, that might make it different…
One command:
defaults write com.elgato.eyetv “apple remote menu button behavior” -int 1
This made my day.
Don’t do what I did first, which was:
defaults write com.elgato.eyetv “apple remote menu button behaviour” -int 1
It still frustrates me that the world has chosen to LCD in spelling: colour and behaviour shouldn’t be spelled the USA way…
Update: this seems to cause a crash when starting Front Row. I’ve had to revert to the old behaviour. Poo.
Thu 14th Feb 2008
I hate statements that are unqualified, and therefore meaningless, with regard to statistics.
On Sunrise this morning, in the local news, they trotted out the chestnut:
“12% of people charged with drink-driving in the last two years were P-platers.”
This is totally meaningless without an indication of what percentage of the driving population are P-platers. What if it is higher than 12%? Then P-platers are actually more responsible than the rest of us…
Bah.
Apparently, EyeTV 3 will be released today (Tuesday). I did read somewhere that this version will be a fully-fledged media centre, but maybe that’s just rumour and innuendo.
I hope not. I’d love it to access and display data from iTunes, since I’ve painstakingly put most of my pre-EyeTV (and saved-from-EyeTV) media into iTunes.
I love my Mac Mini. It does almost everything I want. With the purchase of a second tuner, EyeTV actually becomes useful. Previously, when I tried to record two programs that adjoined one another, but were on different channels, then you were likely to miss the start of the second program, and/or the end of the first program. Even if you set some padding (I use -5/+15), because there was a single time where the transfer needs to take place, chances are you miss some TV.
So, with two tuners, the system flawlessly records two programs at once. Which means the pre/post padding is respected, as long as there is no clash with other scheduled recordings. It means you then need to edit (or just skip, if you plan on watching only, not keeping), but at least you get all of the material. Oh, and it takes up a bit more disk space.
But the hassle I discovered is that the USB subsystem seems to choke under the load, if you record a program and try to watch another. The picture and sound of the program you are watching becomes jumpy and broken.
I made the program smoother by putting the record buffer into RAM. (And making it much, much smaller).
Note that this is using a USB disk as the recording location, I’m hoping to get much better performance when I move the drive to a Firewire enclosure. However, I can record two programs without jumpiness, so it may be something to do with the Live TV Buffer and how it is handled.
I don’t use live buffering much anyway, so I may just live without.
Sun 23rd Dec 2007
Short Answer: Very.
Yesterday was the first time I really got to use Vista properly. And the whole OS is crap. Stuff is not consistent across contexts, which means it is really hard to figure out what to do when. Trying to find data is troublesome, trying to find applications is even worse. It is like the whole operating system is conspiring to just leave your data all over the place so you can’t find it when you need it.
So, I had a few jobs to do for my Father-In-Law, after he had bought his new Acer laptop. I should have just refused to provide support since he didn’t buy a Mac, but I’ll let that slide. The things he needed to do were set up his HP printer/fax/scanner, which can be connected to a network wirelessly or via ethernet in addition to being USB connectable; and get his TV tuner card working properly.
The printer turned out to be a bit of an issue - the driver that it came with didn’t work with Vista, so we had to download a 160MB file, which shouldn’t be too much of a concern, but 3’s “7Mb/s” connection is closer to around dialup speeds. And I’m not talking 56k, either. We had to wait over 3 hours for this file to download. After that, it looked to be pretty easy. Except that because the 3 USB thingy was the default network route, I had to disconnect it to then get the PC to even look on the Wireless network (802.11g) to find the printer. After it was connected once it seems to work fine, although just in case I gave the printer a static IP address (or more correctly, a reserved dynamic IP address).
Getting Windows Media Centre to display TV guide data was a bit more hard work. For starters, they have totally fucked up the interface - it is really trying to do too much, and the interface just isn’t logical at all. It is “designed” so it can be used with a remote, apparently, but can still be controlled with a mouse. Except the buttons sometimes act strangely. There is a “back” button, and just next to it is one with the windows logo. But the operation of this button varies according to context. So sometimes that loads the menu up, other times it appears to work similar to the back button. And sometimes the menu that appears takes up the full screen, other times it doesn’t. Fucking crazy. Sometimes you need to double-click on a menu item to activate it, other times a single click does the trick. There are so many options on each of the menu items that you can’t see them all until you scroll through them, but when you hover over one, clicking it doesn’t activate it, it moves it to the active position, where you must click it again to activate it. Which means, using the mouse, you then need to move back and click. And sometimes there is a “more” arrow that appears over the item, and you accidentally click that instead…
If you are using a scroll mouse, things are even worse. If you use the scroller, then it scrolls, but if you then move the mouse even just a little bit, it selects the stuff under the pointer. Meaning it jumps around and makes it very hard to scroll through a large list. Scrolling also sometimes selects items outside of the active widget. For instance, I had the channel list being scanned, and if you scroll with the pointer over this, you can scroll outside of the list, and choose the buttons above and below the list box. But once you are out of it, you can’t just scroll back into the list box. Another trick I use is to scroll hard to the “end” of a list box if I know I need to choose the last item. You can’t do this, as it jumps out of the box. And then can’t get back it. And it resets the list box to display the top items anyway!
So the interface is fairly fucked. The logic of the layout also doesn’t make sense. Why should you go into “Guide” to change the channels. And I’m not talking about which guide is attached to which channel, I’m talking about which channels are active. And attempting to do anything often required going into a menu three layers deep, then going back, then going down through three other menus, and so on. Very frustrating.
The most annoying thing is that it will not use the program guide data that is broadcast with the DVB signal. You have to use an external EPG system in order to see what is on. Every station in Australia broadcasts some guide data, or will in the very near future. I use IceTV with my eyeTV, but I’m hoping at some stage not to have to any longer. $13/month is just crazy. I can buy the newspaper for $2/week with the TV guide in a less useful form. I should be able to access this data for free - it adds value to the TV signal. But Windows Media Centre will not access the broadcast signal at all. Which means if you are away from the internet for any period of time, you might not be able to see what is on TV. I love the internet and all, but having the internet shouldn’t be a requirement to be able to watch TV effectively.
I’m not saying eyeTV is perfect, but it certainly shits all over WMC. Even if it only plays TV programs.
