Schinckel.net

I’ve ranted about this type of thing before, but one thing that really pisses me off is when people attempt to compress already compressed files. I love the BBC program Spooks, but because they are still showing a series that is about 3 years old in my country, I’ve been forced to download the series via slightly shady means.

So, I’ve just grabbed the first few episodes of series 6. And the joker who made the first episode decided to rar th avi file. And split it into 15MB chunks. Why would you do this? At best, it is just slightly annoying (you have to unrar the file before you can use it), at worst it means you can’t access the file. If I were unable to snarf the entire torrent, then I would not be able to unrar the file, meaning I could not view any of the video. To put that in perspective, when I grabbed a Grand Designs episode I had missed on local TV, I only got 99.3% of the file. But I can still watch it in a viewer, and I can’t even see where the data is missing. I would not be able to do this with the Spooks episode.

Luckily, the whole thing downloaded, so it isn’t a big issue. Not this time.

Still hacking away with EyeTV.

$ defaults read com.elgato.eyetv

Has some interesting values:

• “use TenFoot UI” = 0;
• volume = 1;
• picture = { brightness = 128; contrast = 142; hue = 128; saturation = 128; };
• “pip offset horizontal” = 0.08333333333333333;
• “pip offset vertical” = 0.08333333333333333;
• “pip rel height” = 0.25;

I’m guessing that the volume one might be useful, if you can make it louder than 1. As for the PIP settings, as I’ve found the window to be somewhat too large.

And I thought me (almost) reaching my quota every month was making me a heavy user of the internet. I came across this on a torrent site:

Yes, that’s what it says. He’s downloaded 730 Terabytes, and uploaded 18,000 Terabytes. In about 18 months. That’s uploading about 1,000 TB/month.

Or another way, about 33TB uploaded every day. Which cannot possibly be right. 3TB per hour. 1TB every 20 minutes. 50GB per minute. Just under 1GB every second.

I put it that this is false.

Snarfy mode on.

Finally, a bible smaller than the brains of the pinheads who believe it is the word of god.

Happy Festivus.

I have some tasks that I repeat lots on my Media Centre, and sometimes it is a bit trying. I’ll discuss a couple of them here, and perhaps discuss how I overcame them, or in later posts as I do.

Firstly, I’m currently using EyeTV to watch and record TV, and Front Row to watch stuff I already have.

Editing out the advertisements and fixing the start and end of a program is a little challenging at times. Because my Mac Mini is keyboardless, then I have to either use Synergy (or -alike) and use my laptop mouse/keyboard/trackpad, or go the whole hog and use VNC, or Screen Sharing as Leopard calls it.

It would be nice to be able to do the editing on a remote machine, but I can see how this would be challenging, since there is an awful amount of data that needs to be transferred. But perhaps not as much as is being transferred via VNC, anyway.

I’d also love to be able to run the application on my laptop for editing schedules. Basically, you have all of the functionality of the software, but the recording (and encoding, etc) is done on the remote machine. It would also allow me to schedule and so on without interrupting the display on the TV.

The biggest issue I am having is with transfer of data from torrents and EyeTV into iTunes. I’ve put in most of the pre-existing stuff I have, but there are a couple of issues. If I export to iTunes (AppleTV, I think it is called in EyeTV), then the data gets put into the iTunes library location. Which is bad, since that is on a small disk, whereas the library files are all on external, and much larger, disks. If I import a torrent file into iTunes, I need to do the following:

• If the file is not a .mov or .mp4, then open the file in Quicktime and Save a Reference Movie. Which cannot be automated under the new quicktime, for some reason. Add this file that is created to iTunes.

• Edit the file, and make sure the Video Type flag is set to the right type (Movie or TV Show). This could be automated, as could the TV Series, Season Number and so on. With a heap of files I had I did automate this, since I had meticulously renamed and located the files into a tree structure. Of course, I created throwaway scripts for this, since they were all slightly different for each programme.

I think I could automate the process a bit more if I export the files to mp4 files, rather than trying to make reference movies. Since I now have one of those Elgato Turbo 264 thingies, I might do that.

I think a few of the problems would be solved if I could make the Mac Mini think it had two monitors, and I could just ‘connect’ to one of those. That would then enable me to do stuff while the TV was still being watched. However, I have noticed some jumpiness when things are happening and you are trying to watch TV sometimes. I also need to get up on my roof and adjust my aerial to try to improve my reception of some channels.

Oh, and to allow me to record two programs at once, I’ve ordered another EyeTV for DTT stick. Handily, my amplifying splitter has three outputs, so that’s cool.

Finally, I’ve tried out a couple of alternative systems, MediaCentral, XHub and CenterStage. None of them really do what I want them to do. XHub gets close with it’s integration with EyeTV, but you can’t access EyeTV’s menus. What would be great was if EyeTV had the ability to access other media files (which it can, from the menubar, you can open movies!), or if it were better integrated with Front Row. MediaCentral got close there, with their other program, which was a fair bit crapper than EyeTV. Never mind that you can’t play HD tv through their software, at least in Australia, since we use AC3 audio, which it can’t handle.

Well, I’ve finished my job as a Teacher. I might write more about it later, but I’ve been flat out doing a heap of other things. I will just say, it’s great to not be doing that any longer. Sure I’ll miss some aspects of it (casual day, for instance), but I am much happier knowing that it’s all over.

By default, Safari in Leopard doesn’t show tabs.

defaults write com.apple.Safari AlwaysShowTabBar 1

Now, it does.

I’ve been setting up my various VirtualHosts under Leopard, which uses Apache2.

I’d blogged before about ensuring that you set up the hosts line before you restart the apache daemon, but this time around I came across something even odder.

If you use the regular line in /etc/hosts, ie:

127.0.0.1    hostname

Then it fails under the VirtualHost setup. Instead, you need to use:

::1    hostname

Which is the IPv6 address. Which works under Virtual Hosts.

Loving DTT with my new Mac Mini and EyeTV. Loving being able to look at an online guide anywhere, and schedule a program, or even better, a whole series whenever any episodes of it play.

One problem with the EyeTV/IceTV integration.

Schedule a program on IceTV, and it gets propogated down to your EyeTV - naturally, since that is where it is recorded. But if you schedule a program on your EyeTV, it isn’t passed back up to the IceTV system. So you can’t see everything you have programmed while at home. Meaning that it is easy to accidentally schedule a clashing recording with something else. Meaning you might accidentally tape an episode of the Simpsons that finishes after Grand Designs has started. Meaning you miss the first 20 minutes of your partner’s favourite show.

Not the best way to be able to justify why you spend $1500 on equipment so she wouldn’t ever miss that show again…

Well, I’ve bitten the bullet and installed Leopard onto my main machine. I did have it already on a Mac Mini, but that’s not a machine I use other than via eyeTV or Front Row.

So, how is it so far? Well, I’ve really only just gotten partway through reinstalling the apps I really need - I’m taking the approach that I’ll just install the stuff I use as I use it, and try not to do what I usually do which is install just about everything I think I might ever use.

I’m not keen on the shape of the new menus, I really don’t like the rounded bottoms. I’ve moved the dock to the left, but skill don’t really like the look of that, either. And I’ve killed off the annoying default desktop background image. That is really too busy for my taste.

Everything seems to be flying along nicely. iCal almost didn’t import my data, but closing it, removing the entire Calendars directory from Library and restarting it fixed it up nicely. It starts much faster than under Tiger.

Took me a while to get networking going with the spastic system we have here at work. But eventually did. I’m hoping that it won’t keep asking me to trust a certificate that is untrustworthy like Tiger did. That got old quickly.