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Messages - andymck

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1
Developers / Re: Picture Player / Plugin Workshop
« on: March 21, 2008, 11:10:30 pm »
If any of you can can see any way in which i might be able assist in any way with this i would be happy to do what i can.  I am a developer with reasonably good c++ skills but dont have any real knowledge of this environment and so not sure how much i could contribute in the short term but if you need any testing etc please let me know.  I plan to setup a development environment over the weekend and start looking at the inards in any case....

Andy


2
Developers / Re: This Community will Fail and LMCE will be forgotten.
« on: March 21, 2008, 01:22:35 pm »

> and IMHO we have this feature (at least under UI2) practically implemented - we just need to start screen saver
> from play all button with all pictures in current directory tree.....

I also think that would be a great way to go, all in under the existing lmce UI and being able to select a specific directory and or sub directory would be perfect...At home here my wife organises all our digital photos, sets them into monthly directory,then sub directories that give a description....i.e.  Dad's birthday party 07....and under there a batch of photos....being able to go in and see that structure and select a play all from a particular directory would be just perfect.

> I'm some times nearer inclusion of mythtv, but then again, it's ui looks different, it doesn't work with Gyro, etc...
> I think solution above might be better and more LMCE's native...

Agree, i will probably still look at the myth gallery plugin myself as it looks like a good start to perhaps getting involved in some little way...

Andy



3
Developers / Re: Picture Player / Plugin Workshop
« on: March 21, 2008, 01:14:19 pm »
Makes interesting reading, def a lot to take in...following with interest

4
Developers / Re: This Community will Fail and LMCE will be forgotten.
« on: March 20, 2008, 07:36:24 pm »
DanielK, thanks for the response and you make some interesting points and i do fully appreciate that this is a young project.  The idea of the MythGallery plugin sounds like a good route to go and I would be happy to look at this.  I have absolutely no real idea how the inards of myth or lmce works but i will give it a go.  At the moment i am flat out with a deadline at work but i could start over the weekend.  If you can send me some info re setting it up to be installed by default that would be appreciated.

Re the lmce tags, i am using these currently but when you have a lot of similar media for instance tv shows, it can be a very mundane process setting each one by one.  I dont know of a quicker way to do this....but even with the tags set trying to jump to a particular episode can still be fiddly, whereas with a directory structure you can jump straight to where you need to go.

A number of people have mentioned sorting by filename and i have tried this but on my machines any time i do this 90% of my media disappears and cant be located....so i have never really seen this working and as such cant comment as to if it improves the issue.

Jimmy, i take your analogy about looking midway through a rebuild but i do believe that a slideshow is a pre-requiste of any media center now-a-days....digital camears are just so popular and with all those photos filling up hard drives it the obvious step to want a convienent means to access them.


5
Developers / Re: This Community will Fail and LMCE will be forgotten.
« on: March 19, 2008, 11:15:34 pm »
I have to agree with Orionsune.  I have been using LMCE for a couple of months now and mostly lurking on the forums in the little free time i have, trying to learn as i go.  During that time I have to say i have come across more that enough negativitly, hostility and plain rudeness directed at different individuals to make me personally question how this project is being run and where its going.

I get the impression of a clique running things that doesn’t take too well to criticism and has no real vision for the product besides their own narrow interests.  I can understand that during product development we all like to add the things we think are cool but if you want to make a product a success you have to think what does the typical user want and i dont really think too much consideration is given to this.

As cool as some things might be such as the Mame wrapper, the mobile java client, has anyone given any thought to making this product compete as a media center first, its name is LinuxMediaCenter after all.  Look at any mediacenter on the market, then consider its likely positioning in the home and all are competing for space in the living room.  As LMCE stands at the moment its biggest weakness in this regard IMO are

1. Lack of a photo slideshow facility
May not interest the people running this product but you can guarantee that this is a serious omission to anyone with a family and kids.  I wonder how many of us have went through the pain of getting a working setup, demonstrating it to the wife and getting the response, “those flickr images are cool, now how do i get the photos of the kids to show up like we used to do with the xbox"....and i don’t consider the current ability to have random photos appearing as a replacement, especially since you have to resize all your photos to 1200 pix or whatever it is...

2. Weak Media Structure
I appreciate that lmce has a specific media structure and i understand how that came about, i also understand that to change this is a big deal.  However there is no getting away from the fact that it has weaknesses especially to those of us with a lot of tv shows.  I have all 6 series of 24, all 7 series of smallville and lots of other shows and i have to say its one pain in the ass to sort through all of this.  A simple directory structure would solve all the problems and its also something that non techies such as the wife can work with and understand, if thats too much of an overhaul well i am sure there are other less painful solutions.  Again its considering how people will actually use the product.


While all the extras that come with lmce such as the lighting controls, the orbiters etc are fantastic these two things are glaring omissions and present major barriers to the product entering the mainstream and competing for the media center space within any typical family environment considering their options.  Put on top of this the less than amicable nature of some individuals on these forums, the lack of any perceived steering group and weak documentation and I wouldn’t count on lmce being here in 24 months time.  I think that would be unfortunate as it has great potential, i personally now have a working setup with 3 MDs around the house and starting to look at lighting controls and security cameras.  But still as a media center i cant make it do the all of basic things that XMBC could do, or my 360 acting as extenders.

I also have to point out that the find by Orionsune in regards to MythTV hanging all the time due to what we now know was logging issues should be seen reflected upon by those  in charge of this product.  I mean the amount of posts highlighting this and similar problems that went ignored demonstrates something is wrong here.  I really dont mean to over criticise but something really doest seem right with how the product is managed.  And i do appreciate the work that has gone into making this product what it is but still some things do need to be said.  I hope they can be taken as constructive as that is my intent but i suspect some may view them in a different light.

Just my two cents. Sorry for this rant being overly long but these things have been simmering for a while now...



6
Users / Re: Heatsink advice
« on: March 13, 2008, 01:12:53 am »
I picked one up in PC World but when i last looked they didnt seem to stock them anymore, so i got my second one from microdirect.co.uk

http://www.microdirect.co.uk/(25445)Zalman-CNPS8000-CPU-Fan-Socket-478754775939940.aspx

Andy

7
Users / Re: Heatsink advice
« on: March 13, 2008, 12:40:28 am »
i find the Zalman CNPS8000 works fantastically...it is totally silent at its lower speed but keeps my cpu temp to around 35-40 degrees.  Its around 6cm high and so fits most low profile cases... see link below

http://www.frostytech.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=1991

I have it running in two mds using the Antec NSK2480 case and i couldnt be happier with it.  In the uk cost around £25 ( $50)

Andy


8
Excellent orionsune!
Let us know how it goes...
In fact if you are impatient ( i.e. i am... ) and would like someone to test now, you could always email it to me and i will give it a go :)

9
With the - v all option omitted, i have MythTV running for about 5-6 hours

Prior to that i tested a couple of times with each run lasting about 20mins before I terminated and restart myth.

With the -v all included the longest I got was about 5 mins.

10
Users / Re: Myth TV still locking up after 710 upgrade
« on: March 04, 2008, 05:30:22 pm »
orionsune, Myth behaves well when omitting the -v all option

Looks like you are definetly onto something.

11
Users / Reversed Mac Address On Gigabyte GA-M68SM-S2
« on: March 04, 2008, 10:42:02 am »
I purchased a Gigabyte GA-M68SM-S2 motherboard for use as a media director, it uses the nvidia 7050 chipset and so i thought it would be relatively good for linuxmce.

However i cant get the thing to boot beyond dhcp_config.  I do think i know what the problem is.  I noticed that the mac address for eth0 would change during the boot process and an error message generated saying "Invalid Mac Address.... switching to a random mac.  Please complain to your board manufacturer".

After digging around on the web I found this:

"The nvidia MAC has for many years now for some stupid reason had it's
MAC address stored in reverse order on almost all boards that use it
(not sure if the documentation was confusing or what).  As a result the
driver has had to reverse it before using it.  A few months ago some
board makers decided to "fix" the problem and start storing the MAC in
the correct order which of course now breaks all existing drivers that
"know" the MAC address is in reverse order."


I also found a couple of ideas for fixes including editing /etc/network/interfaces ( http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/501 ) and also making changes to etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rule ( https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/udev/+bug/145382 ) but so far no joy, linuxmce still fails to boot.


Anyway perhaps someone here has encountered a similar issue.   Is this something we are going to have to watch out for when purchasing motherboard or am i missing a simple fix / workaround for linuxmce ?

Thanks

Andy


12
Users / Re: Abit An-M2HD Motherboard
« on: February 27, 2008, 10:48:46 am »
I use the same board at 720p and it works nicely...no probs so far.

13
Users / Re: MythTV Setup in UK with Virgin Media
« on: February 17, 2008, 09:27:27 pm »
Stephen, fyi i got mythtv working with the virgin stb via infrared control...All the channels etc are in place, guide etc working....

It was straightforward enough once I got to the point where I understood how MythTV worked but to get to that point i had to make a few mishaps along the way...such as using the channel search facilty in myth setup....how i expected that to work I will never know, given that i had the stb connecting simply through composite in to my pvr card....

I used the xml feed (http://homepage.ntlworld.com/justin.hornsby2/virgin.xml) created by Justin Hornsby, modified one of his perl scripts to auotmatically create the source channel files for Myth, ran mythfilldatabase to get the guide for the source channels and then added a new script to assign the channel numbers using the same xml file.  So the xml file proved to be a good find and my thanks goto Justin for that.

I also used Venom986 process and script for setting up the channel changing via infrared control ( http://forum.linuxmce.org/index.php?topic=4302.0 )...may not be relevant to you if you are able to do it via serial.  But it works a treat and means i can actually make use of all these MCE blaster I have lying around.

I will put the steps i went through down in a Wiki, for the benefit of others who may come at this as blind as I did, hopefully have that done for tomorrow evening. 

Andy

14
Users / Re: USB-UIRT Learning
« on: February 17, 2008, 09:06:11 pm »
Venom, just to let you know your solution worked a treat for me..thanks very much...your effort is much appreciated.

MythTV is working good, well except for the crash bug that creeps in randomly freezing the frontend....

15
Users / Re: USB-UIRT Learning
« on: February 16, 2008, 01:24:32 am »
Fantastic Venom!

I will give this a try on my setup on saturday....looks like it could be the final piece in my mythtv puzzle...

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