Planet TLLTS

So what if you’d like to watch a recording from you MythTV system on your Android phone? Android phones have an onboard video decoder that will let them play h264 encoded videos (youtube) easily in whatever resolution the phone’s screen will allow. Basically you’ll need to re-encode the MythTV recordings into a suitable format The most direct option is to use ffmpeg to convert the videos for use on your phone. ffmpeg literally is the swiss army knife of multimedia in the F/OSS world. You can basically convert any video/audio file into any other format using a multitude of codecs. ffmpeg is a commandline tool that has a lot of flags that a noobie might be a little intimidated by. Here’s my ffmpeg command to re-encode videos for my Nexus One:


ffmpeg -i inputfile.mpg -aspect 16:9 -s 800x480 -vcodec libx264 -b 480k -r 13 -acodec libfaac -ab 128k -sameq -pass 1 -f rawvideo -an -y /dev/null && ffmpeg -i inputfile.mpg -aspect 16:9 -s 800x480 -vcodec libx264 -b 480k -r 13 -acodec libfaac -ab 128k -ac 2 -sameq -pass 2 outputfile.mp4

The above command will do a 2 pass encoding of the video file using the x264 encoder for video and faac for the audio. While more time consuming 2 pass encoding improves the quality of the video greatly. The videos tend to come out much smoother with little or no artifacts. I tested the above command with both hi-definition and standard definition recordings that were captured with my PVR-1212 and my HDHomerun capture devices. A one hour HD recording that was roughly 4.1 gig in size was re-encoded to a 332mb file that plays perfectly on my Nexus One in 800×480 resolution. I tried bumping up the video bitrate and frames per second rates. As a result the files were slightly larger and improvement in video quality was negligible. I also tested playing back my videos on a co-worker’s Verizon Droid phone and they all played back without issue. It should be easy to bump down the resolution to 320×480 and have the videos work on lower powered Android phones (G1, Mytouch3G, Hero, Eris, Backflip). I forwarded my settings to John Baab, the developer of MythExport. Hopefully we’ll soon have a default Android preset that will let you re-encode your MythTV recordings right from the menus in Mythbuntu. Good times.

Every Android user would like to be be able to use their cell phone as a broadband modem. It’s a nice option to have if you can’t jump on a public access point. Most cell carriers say you shouldn’t be doing this and it will break the TOS agreement. You should be ok doing this as long as you don’t go too crazy that often. In order words don’t be downloading Linux distros or other large files. There are wireless tethering apps that let rooted Android phones connect to the phone via bluetooth or wifi. I’ve used these apps on my G1 running cyanogenmod with no ill affects. Reading the warranty of my new NexusOne it explicitly says that rooting the phone will void it. Considering I paid the full unlocked price for my Nexus One I think I don’t want to void the warranty at this point. So my tethering options are slightly diminished. The easiest way of doing this is using a program called proxoid on your Android phone. The main requirement is that you have the Android SDK installed and working on the machine you want to tether your phone to. You’ll also need to connect the usb data/charging cable to your computer. Make sure you have usb debugging checked off in your system settings on your phone. This article explains all tethering options (included rooted phones) and this How-To explains how to tether without rooting and using a proxy. This post was made on my laptop tethered to my Nexus One.

In my last posting I talked about my decision to purchase an HTC Nexus One phone from Google and what I was looking for in a 3rd generation Android phone. My phone arrived on Friday afternoon and I was very excited to be upgrading to a new device. The first thing I noticed about the phone is how sleek, thin and light the thing is compared to my old G1. Another thing that jumped out at me was the beautiful large display and finally having a standard 3.5mm audio jack. Powering up the phone you see a lovely 3d accelerated bootup animation. Android 2.1 is a nice step forward compared to the latest Cyanogenmod ROM (based on Android 1.6). The phone has a 1ghz snapdragon processor and the result is every application is extremely quick and responsive. The 800×480 display is absolutely gorgeous (clear,crisp and sharp). The area where the NexusOne really shines is on the web. Viewing web pages on the high resolution display is leaps and bounds ahead of where it was with the G1. This phone on the same T-mobile network as my G1 seems exponentially quicker. Video streaming works very well on both a 3g connection and wifi. I re-encoded several HD and SD video recordings using ffmpeg (libx264 encoder) from my MythTV box and watched them on the NexusOne. Everything I played looked great. A decent pair of headphones comes with the phone. The headphones have a small controller with three buttons (play/pause, skip forward/backward) and a built-in microphone. If you’re listening to music or watching a video and a phone call comes in the media player will pause your playback and start your ringer at a moderate audio level. Terminate the phone call and the media player starts up automatically. Nice touch. My biggest concern of moving to the NexusOne was losing a hardware keyboard. The virtual keyboard in landscape mode works very well for me. As you’re typing words you’ll see a list of possible words appearing in the toolbar above the keyboard area. At any time you can select one of the suggested words and it will auto-complete it for you. The voice recognition features of the NexusOne are pretty damn impressive. When typing in any application you can switch to voice mode by hitting the microphone key and the phone will prompt you for a voice entry. For me the accuracy rate is about 85% which is decent considering I have a pretty strong New York accent. Speaking a little slower than normal improves the accuracy quite a bit. Using voice input for searches & starting phone calls seemed to work much more accurately than dictation. I’m sure the voice features will improve with time. I’ve been showing off the phone for a couple of days now and everyone is pretty impressed with it. Flash is supposedly coming to Android 2.0+ devices in the next couple of months. While everyone generally dislikes flash having it will improve wider adoption of Android phones. Being able to play videos on Hulu will be something to hold over iPhone/maxi-Pad owners. For better or worse flash is very pervasive on the internet. I now understand why Apple wants to sue HTC out of existence. More to come later.

Here’s a good breakdown of the energy costs associated with HDTVs. Plasma eat more energy but it’s not as drastic as some make it out to be:
Cnet HDTV Energy Consumption breakdown

It’s definitely worth a read if you’re in the market for a new HDTV.

It’s been too long since I posted last. I got the approval from the boss (aka the wife) to start shopping for a new HDTV for the family room. I’ve checked out some HDTVs yesterday at one of the electronics stores near my office. Honestly I was most blown away by the Plasmas from Panasonic. I know they consume more power than LCDs but the difference in picture quality compared to 60 & 120 Hz LCDs were very noticeable. I was impressed by the latest 240 Hz LCDs but they tend to be a couple hundred dollars more in price than their 60 & 120 Hz brethren. Speaking to several people I hear that if you go with an LCD Samsung and Sony are currently the way to go. Plasma TVs seem to be only pushed by Panasonic and have some sort of stigma attached to them by the tree huggers because they’re “less green”. Honestly I’m not opposed to Plasmas. I want the best bang for the buck and I’m open to all options. Right now I’m leaning towards getting a plasma tv. I was very impressed with the OLED TVs they had. Ultra thin and with an excellent picture. Unfortunately they’re still relatively expensive as any newer technology tends to be in it’s infancy. I can see OLEDs becoming the norm in the near future. They didn’t have any 3D tvs on display yet. Honestly I can’t see myself sitting in my living room watching the big game sporting 3D glasses. It just seems too gimicky. But hell, I’m all for it if it drives down the prices of 2D televisions. More to come.

During the last MythTVCast one of our listeners asked about getting updated MythTV packages post installation on his Mythbuntu system. I commented that “if it works for you don’t fix it”. Robert McNamara (one of the Myth devs) immediately commented that I should enable the nightly autobuilds as described here. You download a package that enables the repos. It will ask you if you want stable and/or testing. Select stable (0.22) and then select your local mirror. I then did an ’sudo apt-get update’ which immediately triggered the update manager. I then upgraded 33 packages (majority of them MythTV related). I rebooted and everything seems to functioning fine. I then did the same for my Ion based frontend and haven’t had any problems. So Rob, thanks for the information. I’ll mention this during the next MythTVCast recording. Robert pointed out that Mythbutnu 9.10 shipped with a pre-release version of MythTV 0.22 and these autobuilds contain many important fixes that are now considered ’stable’. If that’s the case shouldn’t these packages be included in the Ubuntu repositories of 9.10 by default? Maybe I’m missing something here. Regardless I can recommend this method to getting the fixes in your Mythbuntu 9.10 system.

So sound issues STILL plague Linux in general. I think we can all agree that the decision to make Pulse Audio the default sound daemon in Linux has resulted in mixed results at best. While the creator of Pulse Audio has repeatably claimed the issue was entirely the fault of Linux distribution maintainers for not implementing it properly it still continues to be an eyesore more than 3 years since it was first introduced. Anybody remember Linspire? They were a commercial Linux distribution that was squarely targeted at new Linux users coming over from the Windows world. Linspire took a lot of heat from the F/OSS community for including a bunch of proprietary codecs and software to help ease the transition for new users. I reviewed the release of Linspire 1.0 back in 2005 after running it on an 800 mhz workstation and a 1 ghz celeron laptop. I remember that the audio just worked with a variety of different applications with absolutely no issues whatsoever. Guess what sound server was being used? JACK. That’s right the same sound sound server that’s currently used by Linux audiophiles was successfully implemented by an uber noobie-centric Linux distribution in 2005!! My plan is simple. Scrap pulse audio entirely and make JACK the default sound server in Linux. Mark Shuttleworth should hire Paul Davis, the programmer who wrote JACK and Ardour. I guarantee the current audio issues in Linux would be resolved in under a year and for good. The only major challenge would be implementing a simplified configuration out of the box that 98% of users would be happy with. The remaining 2% could go to the “advanced” settings and do their multi-track recording.

A few weeks back I became aware that FLOSS Weekly started advertising for the Ford Sync product which is co-developed by Microsoft. I know Leo Laporte only cares about money. That’s fine, he’s a businessman and wants to make as much money as possible. Fair enough. I do think it’s atrociously bad taste to advertise for one of the most closed and predatory companies in the world on a show geared towards Free & Open Source users/supporters. It’s shows a total lack of respect to the community you’re trying to cater to. Honestly I haven’t listened to a TWIT network show in some time now and will definitely not listen to any going forward. Sorry that’s my choice.

Just a follow up to my last post. First this report of Nokia scaling back their smart phone lineup and “commitment to Symbian”. Then I see the N900 is now selling for $799 at Amazon where it was previously selling for $500. What gives?! Finally the news that Nokia is closing it’s flagship stores. Things do not bode well for the N900 and Nokia in general.

So let me start this post by saying I have a Nokia N800 internet tablet and I absolutely love the device. Maemo is based off of Debian and is the closest full blown Linux running on consumer level devices. It’s a great little device. Think of it as a full blown mini Linux computer that fits in your pocket. It’s very easy for developers to port over the best desktop Linux applications to Maemo. The build quality of N* series internet tablets is excellent. I’ve dropped my N800 on a hard floor on more than one occasion and it’s never been damaged. The thing is just built solidly. Many times I’ve thought to myself the Nokia N8100/810 devices would be perfect if it included a cell phone. Fast forward to a several months ago and rumors surfaced of the N900 and that it would include a cell phone! The dream of a mass market Linux based phone has been something I’ve been looking forward to since the early rumblings of the OpenMoko project. Cell phone service in N.America is very closed and tightly controlled. Anything forcing carriers to open things up and make phones more portable is a good thing. Google announced that they would be pushing their own Linux based phone operating system called Android back in late 2007. The first phone released with Android was the G1 on the T-mobile network back in October, 2008. Initially the adoption was slow with newer phones starting to trickle through by the second half of 2009. T-mobile in the U.S. is one of the smaller cell carriers unlike their German parent which is massive. Fast forward to November 6 and Verizon (one of the biggest mobile carriers in the U.S.) released two Android based phones. The Droid (known as the Milestone in Europe) and the Eris. Verizon also started a massive marketing campaign targeting AT&T (their primary rival) and the iPhone. The marketing campaign caused a serious buzz leading up to November 6th roll out that the press picked up on. The Droid sells for $199 with a 2 year contract. The results have been amazing. Verizon is on target to sell 1 million Droid phones in under 2 months time! Compare this to Nokia and the release of the N900. No U.S. based carrier is offering the N900 for a subsidized price. You can buy an unlocked N900 for around $500 online. There has been zero marketing done in N.America for the N900. I’d love to check it out in person if I could actually find one. The messages from Nokia have been mixed. Talk to anyone related to the Maemo project and they claim Nokia will make Maemo a cornerstone of their future plans. All their actions point to the contrary. Anytime Nokia makes an announcement they seem to only talk about the crusty old Symbian phone OS that’s very prevalent on older and low end phones. Nokia you have failed us in North America. Who in their right mind would shell out $500 for the N900 when you pick up a very capable Android phone with thousands of applications for $0-$199? The only people I can think of are uber geeks with lots of discretionary income who adore the N8** series devices. The N900 is sadly doomed to failure.