Messages

106

Users / Re: Bug with ignore command OFF in GSD interface

« on: January 06, 2008, 10:16:51 pm »

Hi Dan

I may be wrong, but I think that nite_man is referring to something  that I've also spotted before.

With Pluto I had a simple ruby code that I put into a GSD to drive a weeder I/O. It used to work fine sending 192 (ON) and 193 (off) to several channels. Suddenly it stopped working, and this happened upon a Pluto upgrade (from .43 to .44, if I remember well).

By looking at the DCE log it was clear that command 193 was totally ignored, and the reply from Pluto staff was more or less what 1audio is saying.

After that I stopped using GSD and Weeder (so pity, but it's true) because I had no time to find out a possible workaround.

I'm following your progress with Insteon drivers (although I'm living in Europe so I unfortunately  won't benefit of your work) basically to see whether  this strange situation with 193 - OFF command was solved or not.

To be honest I do not understand clearly what you mean.

I used to see that when I pushed the proper scenario button to switch a light on, a 192 command was sent to GSD (no 184 to level 100%), and when pushing button to switch off a simple 192 was issued to GSD.
Ruby code in GSD was in charge to figure out which child the command was coming from and build the proper string to be sent via RS232 to Weeder board.

Simple, stupid, but working.

Moreover Weeder I/O has only digital I/O, so there's no point to set level, it's just a matter of switch channels ON/OFF

All of a sudden the command 193 was discarded. I tried several ways to do it (I think also invoking it from a shell command) but no avail.

Again, I did not investigate that much as Pluto guys seemed not interested in giving me an answer.

Did you find the same behaviour?

Thanks and regards
Marco

107

Users / Re: Asterisk and VoipStunt HowTo

« on: January 02, 2008, 01:47:17 am »

Hi Blair

you're obviously right.

I corrected the mentioned line on wiki.

Thanks and regards
Marco

108

Users / Re: Nokia E65 as VoIP client with Asterisk HowTo

« on: December 31, 2007, 01:03:20 pm »

Hi hari and thanks for your note

I've added it to wiki.

Regards
Marco

109

Users / Asterisk and VoipStunt HowTo

« on: December 31, 2007, 12:54:47 pm »

Hi all

I made a small HowTo in order to configure Asterisk to use voipstunt.com as VoIP carrier for outbound calls

I've added it to wiki. You can find it here -> http://wiki.linuxmce.com/index.php/VoIP_with_voipstunt.com

HTH

Again, happy new year

Regards
Marco

110

Users / Nokia E65 as VoIP client with Asterisk HowTo

« on: December 31, 2007, 10:43:09 am »

Hi all

I made a small howto in order to use a Nokia E65 (and I think in general also other similar phones) as a VoIP phone with Asterisk under LMCE.

I added it to wiki, you can find it here -> http://wiki.linuxmce.com/index.php/Nokia_E65

HTH

By the way, happy new year to all

Regards
Marco

111

Installation issues / Re: Will this setup work?

« on: December 27, 2007, 10:10:44 am »

Hi Beowulfe

Your core seems to be more than adeguate, as long as all of your capturing hardware is well supported in Kubuntu.

I think you may get into some troubles with wireless.

All MDs boot off network, and so far I never heard any success story about a MD PXE booting over a wireless connection.

If your concern is about re-running cables all over the house, a good alternative could be using power lines.
There are many nice and not so expensive adaptors that you plug into ac mains and on the other side offers a RJ45 socket. I remember well there are some devices that can offer 200 MBps.

I've seen those devices on internet some times ago and I think I mentioned them in another post of this forum.

I think that googling around you may find a lot of useful pointers.

HTH
Marco

112

Users / Re: bad audio quality on MD

« on: December 14, 2007, 08:13:07 pm »

1. I took a usb pen, copied some mp3 over it and plugged into MD. then managed to play mp3 from usb pen, with same bad quality.

This proves that network transfers are not implied in this issue, as I get the same result playing network files and local files.

If you plug any drive into a MD the file goes to the core thru the network and then back to the MD thru the network to be played.  What you have done is confirm it is not a MD hardware issue but your network and or core could be the problem.

Wait a moment: are you saying that when I put a DVD into the local drive all audio/video data are routed to core and then back to MD for playback, and all this back-and-forth is running over the network?

Is there anyone of the devs that can confirm or correct this?

In the mean time let me say that this does not make much sense to me.

I have decent performances for video playback, that requires way more data than mp3 audio.

If really all data have to go to core and go back to MD I would have orrific video also, which I don't have actually.

Anyone can shed some light upon this?

TIA
Marco

113

Users / Re: bad audio quality on MD

« on: December 11, 2007, 08:41:32 am »

LMCE probably did override the 'good' drivers in 0704, therefore I have high expectations for the 0710 as all drivers should be updated.

In my experience, having high expectations only leads to big disappointments. 

That's exactly why I'm trying to find (if possible) a "7.10 independent" solution, or at least a viable workaround that may also be applied to next release if needed.

As I'm not clear about what LMCE modifies when installed on top of Kubuntu, is there anyone that may give me some hints or directions do dig to?

TIA and regards
Marco

114

Users / Re: bad audio quality on MD

« on: December 09, 2007, 11:33:44 pm »

Hi all

some update after a long time.

I've made sote attempt in order to verify whether the bad audio coming out from my VIA MD depends from hw or sw.

The tests I've made are:

1. I took a usb pen, copied some mp3 over it and plugged into MD. then managed to play mp3 from usb pen, with same bad quality.

This proves that network transfers are not implied in this issue, as I get the same result playing network files and local files.
May it be hw problem ? I made the following test to check it out

2. I took a knoppix 5.1.1 live dvd, put into MD and rebooted. Then I plugged the very same usb pen and played the very same mp3, with cristal clear result.

So my hardware is not faulty and this is a great news. At this point audio quality is a matter of drivers. Probably knoppix 5.1.1 has better drivers, even if it sounds really strange to me.

And here comes the last test I've made.

3. I took the kubuntu 7.0.4 cd used to make initial LMCE install, put into MD and rebooted. so my MD booted fine with the very same vanilla "feisty fawn" upon wich LMCE is based. I played the very same mp3 from the very same usb pen with cristal clear sound.

I should also say that kubuntu 7.0.4 recognized immediately the proper modeline of my 42 " plasma and allowed me to use 1024x768 out of the box (with LMCE and AVwizard I cannot get past 800x600).

So a very rough analisys tells me that network, hw and audio drivers look OK, and bad audio is due to something strange related specifically to LMCE.

Is this assumption somehow correct or am I missing something?

Any suggestion?

TIA and regards
Marco

115

Developers / Re: Xine_Player: what is it really doing?

« on: December 08, 2007, 06:14:42 pm »

Ok, Xine_Player is a DCE device that wraps libxine.

My point is slightly different indeed.

It was already clear that Xine_Player was a wrapper for libxine (a sort of Xine ui designed for LMCE), but as such I'm trying to understand what other special functions this device is offering to justify the consistent CPU overhead compared to other Xine-Ui.

I can understand that interfacing DVD menu and piping them to orbiters can be a nasty task and may be resource consuming, but normal playback should not introduce any extra CPU load.

As this is consistently happening and having relevant impact to small sized MD, my question is:

is this overhead due to some special feature that LMCE can't do without, or is it due to some bug/bad design?

Another point is that Xine_Player is using its own version of Xine. In fact we can find 2 series of libxine sitting on our systems: one comes from "vanilla" Xine installed with Kubuntu, and the other one is installed by LMCE.
It was like this since early Pluto days, and the reason for this was that "custom" version of Xine contained some patch to use VDR.

What are actual plans related to this?
Is this "xine duplication " going to continue, or are there plans to merge into a single libxine installation?

TIA and regards
Marco

116

Developers / Re: Appliance vs Package vs Distro

« on: December 04, 2007, 05:07:04 pm »

Hi all

here I put my 0,2 c.

I've nothing against Xine or Mplayer (and nothing special in favour of one of them)
My concern as a user and as a semi-tech is pretty performance oriented.

To me it is not that important if my videos are played by Xine or Mplayer, but it is very important to get decent performance even without having to buy a core duo box for each MD.

From what I've seen many of us are oriented to use small factor MD (the majority of which are VIA based, like Fiire Station), and this sounds as a very reasonable choice to keep cost not too high and to keep the whole system appealing to general audience.

So the choice between Xine or Mplayer (and in general all choices, regardless of "appliance" vs "package" vs "distro" perspective) should be driven by this consideration first, i.e. performances against "normal" hw.

In the specific case of video playback, Xine_Player already gave proof to be a bit unefficient (if I launch Xine itself outside LMCE it consumes way less CPU compared as when launched from LMCE ).

My fear is that a lot of efforts have been made to write a MPlayer_Player wrapper and (I'd happy to be wrong..) no effort has made to improve Xine_Player, so in the end we have a more complicated system that can play HD content but still has some glitches playing simple stuff.

Can anyone shed some light on this?

TIA
Marco

117

Users / Re: Network Help, Round 2

« on: November 28, 2007, 12:21:41 am »

rrambo

I'm sorry if I gave you the impression to teach any lesson on routing. As you said your everyday work is related to routers it would be kinda ridicolous, isn't it ? 
I was just describing the simple steps I took to have it working. One more thing I would warmly suggest (as also Zaerc did in his post) is to never change the 192.168.80.* IP range for "LMCE network".

Since the early days of Pluto (the ancestor of LMCE) this has always been source of big headaches. Even if choosing a different IP range is allowed, it sounds like LMCE is designed to work only wiht that specific one.
So stick with 192.168.80.* for LMCE, and feel free to use any other IP range for other subnets.
The core/hybrid will do the rest.

HTH
Marco

118

Users / Re: Network Help, Round 2

« on: November 27, 2007, 10:26:17 pm »

Hi rrambo

I have a situation very similar to yours.
My hybrid has a single nic, and during installation I gave it 2 IP addresses: I left the proposed 192.168.80.1 for "LMCE network" and put 192.168.1.3 for "normal network". I enabled DHCP on hybrid and disabled it on router.

My ADSL router IP is 192.168.1.254,  all devices hooked to "LMCE network" have obviously 192.168.80.* addresses and are able to access internet through my hybrid that acts as a gateway (and firewall also).

HTH
Marco

119

Developers / Xine_Player: what is it really doing?

« on: November 26, 2007, 11:08:16 pm »

Hi all

I'm facing the following issue with Xine_player on my EPIA M10000 MD:

when I start playback of any kind of video (DVD or DivX) things go smooth for a while, then playback tends to stutter and progressively gets worst.

If I play the very same DVD or DivX on the very same MD but ith Xine (i.e NOT from within LMCE) playback is fine from the beginning till the end.

So it is definitely something that has NOT to do with MD, but has surely to do with Xine_player.

By looking at what top says during playback, i've noticed that Xine_player is eating some 50% CPU in the beginning, and progressively tends to eat more and more CPU hitting also 80%.

When Xine plays the very same movie on the very same box outside LMCE it sticks around some 50 - 55% CPU load and never moves higher.

Of course when I play movies on my hybrid things are always good (definitely more horse-power) but on a 1Ghz box this kind of increasing CPU load negatively impacts on video performances.

My EPIA MD has a CLE266 Integrated Graphics with Viaarena Unichrome Pro drivers (compiled as per totallymaxed advice found on this forum), so it is not a matter of bad drivers or missing video acceleration.

To be honest this issue has been present also in some releases of Pluto, so it is something that LMCE inherited from its ancestor.

In the past I've always managed to play my media avoiding Xine_player and launching Xine with custom scripts that I manually fired in Computing section, but this turns to be quite annoying.

My question is: what is supposed to do Xine_player?
To my knowledge (but I can be easily wrong) it should be a kind of a xine gui controlled by LMCE, that manages to call xine libraries in order to perform media playback.

But what else is it doing to eat that much of extra CPU?

Is this issue something that developers are already aware of?

On a recent post from Fiire GM I've read the following:

Further, Fiire sponsors 2 full time developers who work on LinuxMCE.  We have offered the LinuxMCE team a bunch of new code, which will likely be in the 0710 release, to now support HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, which will be part of our new 1080p FiireStation due out next month. This was *not* a trivial task by any means. It required re-writing a bunch of code in LinuxMCE to use MPlayer instead of Xine.  And our developers are now working on adding support for HD-DVD menus, sub titles and audio tracks in mplayer under the GPL, which will benefit not only LinuxMCE, but all MPlayer users.

Should I assume that actually Xine is beeing totally replaced by MPlayer starting from 0710, so my question about Xine_player has come a bit late?

TIA
Reagards
Marco

120

Installation issues / Re: Adding the Via Unichrome Pro drivers

« on: October 19, 2007, 12:37:32 am »

Say that you compiled everything on the core/hybrid, so your /CLE266CN400CN-CX700CN800XORG400y directory stands on root of that box.

To install new drivers on your MD first you should copy the mentioned dir under /home/public/data, or any other location that you can access after you ssh to your VIA MD.

Then you can ssh into MD, enter that dir and issue the following:

./vinstall

Choose your CPU and afterwards choose option "2".

Then you're finished.

Bye
Marco