Pat's Blog

Migrating over to wordpress.com

Patrick Davila — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 10:05:25 +0000

At some point over the coming weekend I will be migrating this blog over to the wordpress.com website:
patdavila.wordpress.com

Currently it’s just a place holder but eventually all the posts on this blog will be available over there. I’ll put up a place holder entry here once the migration is complete.

Re-Encoding MythTV recordings for viewing on your Android phone

Patrick Davila — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 14:16:07 +0000

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.

Tethering on Android without rooting

Patrick Davila — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 13:35:54 +0000

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.

Nexus One arrives

Patrick Davila — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 15:41:43 +0000

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.

Upgrading to a Nexus One

Patrick Davila — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 19:34:35 +0000

It’s been far too long since the last time I posted. I’ve been very busy but excuses are lame so I’ll just get on with things. I’ve had my G1 Android for almost a year now on T-mobile. I’ve really taken to Android and absolutely love the platform. The applications are great and I generally like the developer friendly approach Google has taken to help get applications into the marketplace. While I’ve enjoyed my time with the G1 it’s shortcomings are painfully obvious. First is the attrocious battery life. I’m lucky I can make it halfway through the day without having to recharge the battery. No standard 3.5mm audio jack is an annoyance. The biggest positive for the G1 is the slideout keyboard. It’s a decent “starter” Android phone but I’m ready to move on to one of the newer more powerful phones. A very nice TLLTS listener sent me a bricked white G1 that was basically brand new but would lockup when booting up. I tried every trick in the book to get into a terminal prompt or to boot into a recovery image. This thing was truely bricked. The only way to get it to work would be to replace the motherboard.So I decided to sell my old G1 along with this bricked G1. I found a guy down the Jersey shore who wanted a bricked white G1. He had a Mytouch3G that was in excellent condition and was willing to work out some sort of trade. So I traded the bricked G1 + $100 cash for the Mytouch3G. I then sold the Mytouch3G for $220 on Ebay. I did play with the Mytouch3G for a couple days and it’s generally a nice improvement over the G1. It definitely has better battery life than the G1 and not having a physical keyboard didn’t seem to bother me that much. Still the lack of a standard 3.5mm audio jack bothers me plus I want a newer phone that has a higher resolution screen and a beefier processor. My two main choices were the Motorola Droid or a Nexus One. I’ve played around with the Droid on several occassions and overall it’s very good device. The only negative would be switching over to Verizon on a more expensive plan than my current T-Mobile account which costs me $60 a month. Honestly I’m very happy with my current alotment of talk time. So I was seriously leaning towards the Nexus1 at this point. Anyone who’s used it seems to like it a lot. This past week Apple announced a lawsuit against HTC for 20 alleged patent violations. That basically sealed the deal for me and I placed my order for the Nexus1 shortly after selling the Mytouch3G on Ebay. I also plan to sell my G1 on Ebay next week. Expect to see a bunch of posts in the coming days as I put the Nexus1 through its paces. I can’t wait to get my hands on it.

Review of Samsung LN40B550

Patrick Davila — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 14:34:23 +0000

So I’ve been wanting to upgrade the tv in the family room to an HDTV for some time now.I was ecstatic a couple weeks back when my wife gave me the green light to start seriously shopping for a new tv. The family room is right next to our kitchen and is only separated by a half wall. It’s also the room where we tend to do most of our tv viewing. Previously I had a 32″ inch SD CRT Panasonic that served us well for the last 10 years. Now the room isn’t terribly huge and the couch is about 8 feet from the tv. Based on the that a 40-42 inch tv was in the size range I was shopping for. The price range I was looking to hit was around $700-$750. After taking a look at a lot of online reviews and talking to several people I narrowed the choices down to the Samsung LN40B550 LCD and the Panasonic TC-P42S1 plasma. Both are really nice TVs. While some people are really opposed to plasma tvs because the they consume slightly more power than their LCD counterparts. Honestly the power consumption difference is pretty negligible. The plasma would of consumed about $15 more electricity in the course of the year than a similarly sized LCD. I showed my wife both tvs and she liked the LCD a little bit more. The picture on the LCDs tend to look better in bright rooms than plasmas. The color tones on the plasmas look a bit more natural to me, less washed out. The family room is a fairly bright room so the LCD was more of an appropriate choice. The thing that sealed the deal for me was the Samsung had more input connections. Definitely a nice thing to have considering I have 3 devices that use HDMI (cable box, Zotac Ion MythTV frontend, HD-DVD player). Oh I also paid $682 at 6th Avenue Electronics. So far I love this tv. It looks great with any HD content I’ve thrown at it. The blacks especially look very good for an LCD. I had zero issues with my Zotac Ion box connected via HDMI. No overscan whatsover and the default Mythbuntu theme looks absolutely killer on it. The handful of HD-DVDs I own simply look amazing (Transformers, 300, Bladerunner). The upscaled standard definition DVDs look pretty good too. I highly recommend the Samsung line of LCDs.

Plasma vs LCD HDTVs energy consumption costs

Patrick Davila — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 14:31:59 +0000

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.

In the market for a 40-42″ HDTV

Patrick Davila — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 12:52:58 +0000

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.

Upgrading Mythbuntu packages (post installation)

Patrick Davila — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 13:38:35 +0000

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.

Happy 2010 and what I’d like to see happen

Patrick Davila — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 15:39:42 +0000

Happy New Year’s everyone! I hope 2010 is better than 2009 for you and your loved ones. Now that’s out of way I’d like to post some things that I’d like to see happen in the Linux world in the coming year. First I want to see Android to continue to challenge in the cell phone market. Make more people aware and sell lots of new Android based phones. Continue to challenge the iPhone. Competition is a good thing. It drives prices down and forces innovation. Verizon has done very well marketing the Droid in a very short amount of time. It’s pretty amazing what you can do with millions of dollars to advertise your products and generate buzz. Imagine what a similar campaign from someone like Dell would do for the Linux desktop? I’d like to see Netflix release a native Linux client for their streaming movie service. I know plenty of Linux users who are Netflix subscribers and can’t watch streaming movies like their Windows and Mac counterparts. Netflix could leverage what the Mono project is doing with their Moonlight implementation of Silverlight. A little good will goes a long way. I’d also like to see more Linux adoption in schools and in government. F/OSS is such a perfect solution for public institutions. It really is a no brainer. Finally I’d like to see Pulse Audio replaced by JACK as the default sound daemon in Linux (see my previous post). Cheers!