Xbmc

I recently bought an Acer Aspire Revo and had one of my trainees put XMBC on a SDHC card today. So after a bit of toying earlier, I started looking at the thing (from the command line that is). One thing, if you enable the PPA (ppa.launchpad.net) sources, apt/aptitude is gonna babble something about an unverified key. 1 2 3 4 5 Fetched 119kB in 2s (41.4kB/s) Reading package lists... Done W: GPG error: http://ppa.launchpad.net jaunty Release: The following signatures couldn't be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY 6D975C4791E7EE5E W: GPG error: http://ppa.launchpad.net jaunty Release: The following signatures couldn't be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY 2BBD133164234534 W: GPG error: http://ppa.launchpad.net jaunty Release: The following signatures couldn't be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY A956EB81318C7509 I ended up looking the error up (since I only have an Ubuntu desktop). There’s a simple solution for this: ...

As I wrote a month ago, one of my trainees put up with my stubbornness to put XBMC on said Acer Aspire Revo. Now, initially he put the Live Edition onto it, which didn’t really fly with me. I’m usually the CLI guy, so I needed to install it myself (again). Since I wanted to use the VDPAU features the later GeForce cards offer (and the Revo has such a graphics cad), I had to install the current development builds (you know – I love bleeding edge!) ...

Well, I have a few movies and series that ain’t represented in TMDB/TVDB. So here’s a little script, that will parse over any video files, check if a thumb file is already present, and if not generate one using ffmpegthumbnailer… 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 #!/bin/bash find /srv/smb/tv/ -name "*.wmv" -o -name "*.avi" -o -name "*.mp4" \ -o -name "*.mkv" | while read file; do if [ ! -f "${file%.*}-thumb.jpg" ] ; then fmpegthumbnailer -i $file -o "${file%.*}-thumb.jpg" -s 0 &>/dev/null fi done

Well, I finally switched back to the official builds of XBMC (well, semi-official). Now, since my previous and my current media center doesn’t come with a remote like, say a Boxee box, I built myself a custom one using a Hama MCE Remote Control and a Logitech Harmony 300. After trying a bunch of things (it actually works like a standard mouse), I stumbled upon this Trac ticket. ...

I recently bought a replacement for my aging Acer Revo R1600. I decided to go with the HD-ID34, since I didn’t wanna fiddle with buying a bunch of components. Installed a copy of Windows 7 on it (just to try it out …. 😛), and downloaded the Ubuntu 11.10 mini.iso. However the mini.iso apparently has issues (no clue which), basically it boots but gets stuck when bringing up the network connectivity (which is fucked up, since the mini.iso needs network connectivity to contiune the installation). ...

Some of you out there may know, I am using Ember MM to scrape my movies and TV episodes. One thing about that is, that Ember MM is kinda stupid doing so. After the 9.10-release of XMBC, they apparently changed the XML format, introducting durationinseconds, which is basically like duration, just … yeah you guessed right, in seconds. Now Ember MM doesn’t know that, and still writes the old duration-tag. Now, everytime when something goes kaboom! with my library, I do have to rescrape all my episodes and movies, which isn’t a big deal since the NFO’s are still on disk. However, since I didn’t watch them (as Ember doesn’t know about the lastplayed-tag) XBMC is not showing any runtime in the GUI. Now this isn’t annoying per se, but it was just bugging me (and since I got lots of spare time, due to being chained to the sofa). ...

Yesterday out of a sudden, the sound on my Acer Revo stopped working. Don’t ask me why, I didn’t update anything in between New Years eve and today. Just no sound. Tried removing my .asoundrc, tried rebooting, tried powering off; but nothing worked. Since the Revo was running Jaunty Jackalope, I decided to reinstall the box (yeah, yet again) – but this time with Karmic Koala. Took this forums post and this blog entry as pointer (ie what needed to be installed), and started from there. And guess what … after finishing all that, changing the settings in XBMC – tada sound works. After finishing, I turned the box off and then back on, booted to the “old” installation – guess what .. Sound is working again. I really don’t have a single clue as to why the heck the sound stopped working and the started working without any doing, but I’m glad :-P

If you intend to use a custom Keymap.xml with XBMC you might need to be aware of a change that recently happened. Up till now the Keymap.xml was placed in ~/.xbmc/keymaps. Recently (not exactly sure, which svn revision it changed) although it changed. Since r21442 (that’s after the current 9.04.1 release), the default keymapping files are stored in the system/keymaps/ subfolder of your installation. To alter the default keymapping simply add one or more xml-files in the Userdata/keymaps/ folder with the changes you wish to make. If the keymaps folder doesn’t exist, create it. For backwards compatibily, Userdata/Keymap.xml is still read. ...

After I had the initial stuff done, I spent some time yesterday (roughly one hour) figuring out, why Play/Pause/Stop aren’t working any longer (they worked at some point). After looking at the XBMC debug log for some time, I went back and looked at my Lircmap.xml. As it turns out, you can’t map one Lirckey to two functions (in my case, I mapped KEY_7 to as well as ). XBMC doesn’t like that, and in return quits functioning for those keys. ...