90 Days of MythTV

What can I say; it works. My wife is used enough to it that she whines when I have to do kernel updates and restart. My only complaint has more to do with the ivtv kernel module then it does with MythTV. There is no closed caption support under the pvr 500 as of late. We are still using the IR keyboard as a remote because I never did go out and get a learning remote. It took me about a week of tweaking the key codes to get more consistency across modules. Right now half a terrabyte is not enough so I will have to add more drives to the raid on the backend. And does anyone know how I could set it up to encode ripped dvd’s as mpeg4 w/ h.264 by default? I’ll google it sometime. She used to complain about a bug that would surface if you left mythtv up for a while with no activity, but that seems to be fine now.

didx.org api

didx.org offers wholesale only did numbers and peering service solutions for ITSPs. The per DID rate is set by the DID owner and thus varies. US DID’s average at about $4.50 per month with 5000 included incoming minutes. The best part about this service is the fact that they have a working api. Here is my code for using their api, based on their examples.

1) getdids.pl

This small perl program basically takes two arguments, country code + area code, and returns available DID’s that match that pattern. To view all DID’s availabe for a certain country code simply pass -1 as the area code. Make sure you replace the user and password variables with your username and password.

2) getdidcost.pl

This program takes one argument, the did that you want to order, and returns all associated costs. Again make sure you replace the authentication variables.

Asterisk 1.2.1 Tiger installer

I finally got a minute to finish the Asterisk 1.2.1 installer for Tiger. I am uploading it now and you can get it here.
md5 = ae04a2dc289735dd068936200434b6da

NOTE: Bruno pointed out that the path in the readme is wrong it should be /opt/local/asterisk/usr/sbin/asterisk not /opt local/asterisk/sbin/asterisk. This version doesn’t include the asterisk-addons, or asterisk-sounds packages. I hope to have these included later this week. For now please test, and enjoy.

UPDATE:
I just finished packaging a version that includes asterisk-sounds. You can get that version here.
md5 =5d5006af4b5b960525398e638f9a4a9b

I need help from the community to make it better, please post suggestions. Enjoy.

One must never stop learning.

I’ve decided that I must become a better web developer. I set of over the Christmas weekend to start learning php. After about two hours down that road I discovered Ruby On Rails, and the next twelve hours of development time were scheduled. A few hours later I discovered AJAX, after glancing through months of slashdot articles and not really knowing what it was. I made my first page using both techlologies today. I am hooked.

More fun with mythtv

Taking back my last. It was a stupid configuration error I made. It took a while but now I have lirc doing my bidding both on the xbox mythtv frontend, as well as the backed machine running with a pvr-500. For the xbox frontend using the xbox dvd kit the working lircrc found here had to be copied to .lircrc and a softlink made like so ln -s ~/.lircrc ~/.mythtv/lircrc. For the backend I found working instructions here . And an lircd.conf to use with my SA3250 here .

Down with the bastard child…

Ok I got fed up with using Xebian, and installed Fedora Core 4 on my xbox. I then installed mythtv, mythplugins, etc.. al from rpm’s. The install was fairly quick I copied the contents of my FC4 install dvd to /var/www/html/install of another machine on my local network. Then I used the bootdisk found here to do an http install.
Anyway fuck that I am going to buy a real HTPC case, and actually make a plan for the mythtv frontend. The xbox is nice but its not as quiet as I would like, the menu’s are sluggish, ripping a dvd takes an eon (I rip and mpeg4 encode). I think I was spoiled by the pundit frontend.

MythTV Xbox Frontend

I got my xbox working as a mythtv frontend while on vacation. I tried gentooX, grew annoyed and settled on Xebian as my distribution of choice. I am partially blogging this so that I can remember what I had to do to get everything working.
1) Installed modchip, a spider
2) Flashed modchip with 100% legal cromwell bios (I had to use a Memorex branded cdrw for the xbox drive to recognize it)
3) Installed Xebian (also had to use Memorex branded cdrw)
4) apt-get update && apt-get upgrade, you know the deal
5) Installed lame from source
6) Installed qt4-dev-tools w/ apt
7) Installed libtiff-dev w/ apt
8) Installed cdparanoia from source
9) Installed flac from source
10) Installed libid3tag from source
12) Installed mpeg2dec from source
11) Installed ffmpeg from source with ./configure –enable-shared –enable-pthreads
12) Installed libdvdread from source
14) Installed transcode frm source
15) Installed mythtv from source
16) Installed mythplugins from source