Tag: video

Starting your first instance on Shaken Fist (a video tutorial)

As a bit of an experiment, I’ve made this quick and dirty “vlog” style tutorial video to show you how to install Shaken Fist on a single machine and boot your first instance. I demonstrate how to install, setup your first virtual network, start the instance, inspect events that the instance has experienced, and then log in.

Let me know if you think its useful.

Couldn’t determine the video directory?

A couple of people have contacted me in the last couple of days with an error where MythNetTV can’t determine the directory to put videos in. The error would look something like this:

    
Importing data/tekzilla--0050--tehbunniez--hd.h264.mp4
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "./mythnettv", line 453, in 
    main(sys.argv)
  File "./mythnettv", line 212, in main
    mythnettvcore.DownloadAndImport(db, guid, out=out)
  File "/home/mythbox/Scripts/mythnettv/mythnettvcore.py", line 92, in
  DownloadAndImport
    prog.Import(out=out)
  File "/home/mythbox/Scripts/mythnettv/program.py", line 472, in Import
    raise FilenameException(self.db, 'Could not determine the video '
program.FilenameException: Could not determine the video directory for this
machine. Please report this to mythnettv@stillhq.com

The stack trace is mostly irrelevant. The problem here is that MythNetTV couldn’t decide what directory to put the video in once downloaded. Please execute the following SQL statements against your MythTV database:

    select * from storagegroup where groupname="MythNetTV";
select * from storagegroup where groupname="Default";
select * from settings where value="RecordFilePrefix";

This will dump all of the possible places MythNetTV will look for a video directory.

Once you’ve dumped this information, perform some simple checks:

  • Is there anything listed at all? If not, you need to configure storage groups with the MythTV user interface
  • Is there anything listed with the hostname that MythNetTV is running on? If not, you need to add configuration entries for your current hostname.

If you’re still having problems, please send email to mythnettv@stillhq.com, with the output of those select commands, and the output of the hostname command.

Open Source video creation

For the upcoming MythNetTV release I am toying with the idea of asking the user if its ok to include a default subscription to an announcement video blog. This blog could be used to inform MythNetTV users of things like new releases, and important bug fixes if such things happen.

This raises the question — if I wanted to mix creative commons licensed music with some still images (the announcements), what tool is the best to do that? Specifically open source tools please.

MythNetTV release 1

I figured it was time for another release of MythNetTV, especially since I’ve fixed some bugs recently and rolled in code generously provided by George Nassas. New things in this release:

  • Initial work on transcoding smaller files to something else
  • Better error checking for MySQL configuration and accessibility
  • Fixed bug where MythNetTV was unhappy if there were no channels configured in the MySQL database
  • Found, and hopefully fixed, a bug where program dates were not always being tracked correctly. Also added a check to make sure this doesn’t happen again
  • Added –markread, which lets you mark old shows as already downloaded

The code has seen a fair bit of use now, so it should be fairly stable. Let me know if you find any problems…

    $ ./mythnettv --statistics
Programs tracked: 735
  Google EngEdu: 350
  Scoble Show: 85
  linux.conf.au 2007: 74
  Mobuzz TV: 82
  dl.tv: 32
  Net Cafe: 2
  Foo: 1
  ABC News: 2
  Australia: 1
  Play School: 1
  Diggnation: 72

Programs still to download: 50
  Google EngEdu: 49
  Diggnation: 1

Data transferred: 103 gb (111017264341 bytes)

Get it here if you care: http://www.stillhq.com/mythtv/mythnettv/

MythNetTV beta 4

As it says in the email:

To: Discussion about mythtv <mythtv-users@mythtv.org>
Subject: MythNetTV beta 4

Hi again.

MythNetTv is my video downloader / aggregator / importer thingie for MythTV.

I've spent a little longer testing this beta, and I think it's getting
kinda ready for a real release number or something. New things in this
version (from the change log):

  - Made --update more terse
  - Made --update more liberal about what it considers to be a video,
    specifically added video/quick time and text/html (to work around the
    rather broken http://www.mobuzztv.com/uk/rss/quicktime
  - Added a filter option to --download to constrain it to only
    downloading shows with a specific title
  - Added transcoding for mov and wmv2 files
  - If there is a straggling import, and it causes as error, just skip
    it and mark it as imported
  - Don't reset transferred data statistic when we start downloading a
    show again
  - Started implementing moniker support for downloads
  - Unsupported monikers will result in an attempt to download the URL
    using mplayer (which works for RTSP and MMS at the least)

Yes, that's right. You can now download only shows with a specific
title, and you can also download any protocol which mplayer supports --
specifically, RTSP and MMS are now supported.

Now, if only there was a non-sucky way to work out what streams
abc.net.au were offering at any given time...

Get it here if you care: http://www.stillhq.com/mythtv/mythnettv/

Mikal

Mirror traffic during the last day of LCA 2007

It seems obvious to me that videos of LCA 2007 are good. Specifically:

 IPTraf
 # Statistics for eth0 ##########################################################
 #                                                                              #
 #               Total      Total    Incoming   Incoming    Outgoing   Outgoing #
 #             Packets      Bytes     Packets      Bytes     Packets      Bytes #
 # Total:       241091    228940K       96646   18025370      144445    210915K #
 # IP:          241091    225548K       96646   16655328      144445    208892K #
 # TCP:         241086    225547K       96643   16655034      144443    208892K #
 # UDP:              4        412           2        266           2        146 #
 # ICMP:             0          0           0          0           0          0 #
 # Other IP:         1         28           1         28           0          0 #
 # Non-IP:           0          0           0          0           0          0 #
 #                                                                              #
 #                                                                              #
 # Total rates:      49188.4 kbits/sec        Broadcast packets:            0   #
 #                    6592.2 packets/sec      Broadcast bytes:              0   #
 #                                                                              #
 # Incoming rates:    3814.2 kbits/sec                                          #
 #                    2714.4 packets/sec                                        #
 #                                            IP checksum errors:           0   #
 # Outgoing rates:   45374.2 kbits/sec                                          #
 #                    3877.8 packets/sec                                        #
 # Elapsed time:   0:00 #########################################################
  X-exit

Yay for LCA 2007 videos.