Morph3ous’s Weblog

I’m not going to spend too much time on this post. Maybe in the near future. I just spent a lot of time trying to analyze the National Surveillance Act of 2006.

I am impressed so far. After switching MythTV over to using OpenGL I am greeted with a nice fade-in and fade-out on the menus.

The integrated upnp server has been working perfectly (except for fast-forward, but I’ve had that problem with another upnp server too). It is nicer than my previous solution of using uShare and a renaming script to produce prettily-named symlinks to the video files. The integrated upnp server allows you to search by date recorded, title of the show, channel it was recorded from, … My old solution could only sort by title of show.

Good job Myth Team!

From BroadbandReports.com: 25 Cents to Stream a DVD Quality Film - 80 Cents for HD, a nickel for iPod TV…:

Dave Burstein crunches the numbers behind offering video via broadband and concludes that it costs a quarter to stream a DVD quality movie, 80 cents for an HD film, or a nickel for iPod or AOL TV shows. A much more reasonable analysis than the recent UK report that claimed it cost ISPs $39 to stream a two hour HD film. This compared to broadcast over the air video, which costs a few pennies per hour to distribute.

“For providing managed servers and internet bandwidth, several content delivery networks are bidding $10,000 to $12,000 per continuous gigabit per month. That’s enough for 700 1.5 megabit streams, almost DVD quality if pre-encoded in the latest MPEG-4, Flash, or Windows Media. Amazon’s choice of 2.5 megabit encoding may be raising the bar. It’s also enough for over 3,000 300 Kbps streams, appropriate for iPods or the quarter screen video AOL and ABC are distributing supported by ads.”

Burstein also comments on how players like Apple and Amazon will threaten TelcoTV’s already fragile projected profit margins.

This release has one feature that I have been longing for, an internal UPnP server. I have been using uShare, the MythRename.pl script, and a a few cron jobs to pipe the PVR content to my D-Link DSM-320.

Thread on the progress of the MythTV 0.20 Ebuild
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Treehugger has an upate to the technology that the University of Florida is working on to provide refrigeration, water, and power from one device. I previously spoke about this in the post New system provides power, water and refrigeration from one source. This new post at Treehugger has a picture of the device.

Treehugger: The ‘Frig-Enerator-Water Supply’: A Working US Army Sponsored Prototype

New system provides power, water and refrigeration from one source

Engineers at the University of Florida have been working on a system that produces power, water, and refrigeration. The system is still in testing.

The engineering researchers’ solution: a small system that ties a novel gas turbine power plant to a heat-operated refrigeration system. The refrigeration makes the gas turbine more efficient, while also producing cool air and potable water. The turbine can run on conventional fossil fuels as well as biomass-produced fuels or hydrogen.

I have not spoken much about the Long Tail on this blog, but I am about to start to. The phrase was coined by Chris Anderson, the editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine. He has published a book titled The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More (Hardcover). I am currently reading the book and have found it to be very enlightning.

While visiting his blog about the book, I encountered this video on YouTube:

I definitely recommend that you visit longtail.com and consider purchasing the book.

I have long wanted to build myself a PVR. I thought that it would be nice to be able to control what I watch, and when I watch it. Commercial alternatives are restricting their features too much for my tastes. I wanted a system that would give me full control over everything, even if it cost more to build.

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I purchased a D-Link DSM-320 Digital Media Receiver some time back. This product interested me as it was a video thin client of sorts.

The DSM-320 utilizes Intel’s UPnP AV protocol which attempts to create a standard method for consumers to distribute media throughout their homes.

Devices like these will likely play a large part in our future much to the dismay of many a large media conglomerate. The Internet has reduced the cost of distributing data significantly. The role of the traditional media company will lessen if they do not adopt the new technologies.

The DSM-320 upon first examination was absolutely horrible. The video refused to stay synchronized with the audio. I almost gave up on the product after playing around with it for hours trying to figure out what the cause of the problem was.

I learned that the product did not work properly with videos where the audio was in MP3 format but not CBR (constant bitrate). The problem was with the firmware. D-Link had rushed the product out too early. My best guess as to what was causing the problem was the demuxer. This is run in software and is the part that separates the audio from the video. The video is decoded in hardware, and it is my hypothesis that the audio may be decoded in software.

D-Link is not the OEM for this product. The firmware and reference design are actually by a company called Redsonic. This means that the product is by no means unique. An Australian company, Zensonic, also produces a digital media receiver based upon the Redsonic design that they call the Z400. Early firmware releases for the Z400 had the same problems with audio synchronization.

Zensonic was likely more active in their dialogue with Redsonic as they were able to release a viable firmware for their device before D-Link was able to do the same. I was able to flash my player with Zensonic’s firmware and the synchronization problems went away.

I was not very content with this solution. It angered me that D-Link was not able to release a workable firmware as quickly as Zensonic was. It took D-Link a while, but they finally released firmware version 1.05 and the device became usable. I put D-Link’s firmware back on my DSM-320 at that point.

The other main issue with all of the digital media receivers on the market is the server software. You need to run a server on your computer in order to allow the device to access your media. These servers differ in quality and ability. The D-Link server in its current incarnation works well. My main gripe is that you can not set it to run as a service. Thus, my machine which is set up for multiple users needs to have one user logged in at all times running the server program. If that user logs off, then another user needs to make sure to start up the server.

If the server could run as a process, then it would be available even if there were not any users logged in. This would make the device much easier to use, and less of a techie toy.

The media server also needs to figure out when new files have been added to a directory so that it can reindex them. If you add a new video and the server has not reindexed, then the video will not show up on the menu of your digital media receiver. The D-Link server has two options. You can either tell it to manually reindex your videos, or to reindex them automatically every x minutes. It would be better to tell the server to check if the directory has changed and then reindex if need be.

Right now I consider the DSM-320 to be more of a proof-of-concept. It is possible to create a working digital media distribution system in one’s home; however, much work needs to be done to make it practical for the non-techie.

There is also a more comprehensive review of this hardware over at Mirror World.