Adventures with Ruby

I’ve bought some new hardware for my MythFrontend HTPC. I wanted some more juice for playing high definition movies and using the gigabit LAN. Due to some problems with a webshop I ended up with an extra Core 2 Duo E6600 processor, so all I had to do was buy a motherboard and some memory. I bought a Asus P5E-VM HDMI with 2GB Corsair RAM.

After doing the usual cable origami, trying to fit everything in the Antec Fusion case, without totally disrupting the airflow, it all booted fine. I just love how Linux (Mythbuntu 7.10 in my case) doesn’t really seem to care what kind of hardware I have, it’ll adapt. I just needed to adjust xorg.conf a bit though to use the new chipset. It took my some time to install all the new packages needed, but it worked as a charm eventually.

Now to address my problems with the remote. I had given up hope for fixing this with my old hardware, and although the hardware I used for using the remote hadn’t changed, it was a good opportunity to try it again. The problem is with the Philips USB Infrared Receiver (which has a really good reception) and the Antec Fusion case. The Antec has a big volume knob which will be recognized as lirc device, as well as, of course, the Philips one. They get assigned randomly to /dev/lirc0 and /dev/lirc1, so it will only work half of the time. Using the MythTV wiki, I found a solution suitable for me. I don’t use the knob, but let my tv control the volume. So all I had to do was make sure the proper dev-file got loaded on reboot.

First of all, add these lines to /etc/udev/rules.d/**-lirc.rules:

KERNEL=="lirc[0-9]*", SYSFS{idVendor}=="0471", SYMLINK+="lirc_mce"
KERNEL=="lirc[0-9]*", SYSFS{idVendor}=="15c2", SYMLINK+="lirc_imon"

You need to check if the SYSFS uses the right idVendor. I didn’t know how to do that, but the example worked fine for me.

Restart udev with /etc/init.d/udev restart and configure your Mythbuntu to use mce_usb2 (at least, that is what I used for the Philips IR Receiver). After that, change you /etc/lirc/hardware.conf and change DEVICE="" to DEVICE="/dev/lirc_mce" That did the trick.

Making your LCD display work is really easy. Be sure to install lcdproc (apt-get install lcdproc), edit the conf file and turn it on in mythfrontend (the last page of the Appearance configuration). Don’t turn on the large clock, because the display is too small for that.

I’ll save two problems for a next weekend: using suspend to RAM as screensaver or as mythfrontend closes and being able to seek forward or backward in large files with mplayer. Somehow it doesn’t work with large (around 4GB) h264 encoded movies. I only could find the solution for windows based versions of mplayer, so if you know the solution, please leave me a comment.

PS. Get the Microsoft Ergonomic Keyboard 4000, if you haven’t allready! It rocks!

Update 3 feb: Got seeking in big files to work. Problem was the inability of smbfs to handle files larger than 2GB properly. Using cifs instead of smbfs solved the problem within a minute.