Dave’s Happy Place

After upgrading to Feisty Fawn (7.04) of Kubuntu I thought I had made all the necessary changes for my XBMC (XBox Media Center) MythTV frontend to talk to the Kubuntu server running the MythTV backend. Part of the Kubuntu upgrade altered the /etc/mysql/my.cnf configuration file for MySQL. This alteration required me to change the bind-address from localhost to the static IP addess of the server.

I thought that this change would be sufficient but it turns out that it wasn’t. The MythTV frontend on my XBox failed to connect to the MySQL database on the MythTV backend for completely non-obvious reasons. If the error output in the MythTV frontend was better I probably would of identified the problem much more quickly. After some hours of looking closely at the MySQL configuration changes and various other network related settings in Kubuntu it looked like it might have something to do with the MySQL password handling.

The old /etc/mysql/my.cnf had a old_passwords = 1 setting in it. The new configuration file did not. In addition, within the newly added configuration import directory /etc/mysql/conf.d there was an old_passwords.cnf file that explicitely set old_passwords = false. This gave me enough clues to see if the MythTV front end for the XBMC was in fact using the old password authentication mechanism (no longer supported by the server with this configuration). I found plenty of references to versions of PHP needing to use the old password authentication mechanism for MySQL and wondered if there was a similar issue with Python (the language used for the MythTV frontend on the XBMC). That information was enough to convince me to try and find out how to configure the server to continue to use the old password mechanism to see if that changed anything.

Based on instructions in the MySQL reference documentation at Client does not support authentication protocol I first tried to get the MySQL daemon mysqld to start with the --old-passwords parameter so it worked like it would have prior to the upgrade. I couldn’t get this to work (the MySQL documentation is a bit sparse on how to set some of the configuration options) so I tried to set the password for the mythtv user using the OLD_PASSWORD() function instead of the PASSWORD() function. By a stroke of luck that actually worked. That’s where I’m leaving it too.

If it aint broke, don’t fix it.

So, at the moment the MySQL configuration is exactly the same way as it was after upgrading to Kubuntu Feisty Fawn (7.04) apart from the bind-address being set to the static IP address of the server. In addition, the MySQL password for the mythtv user has been reset using the OLD_PASSWORD() function.

1. Login to MySQL as the root user
2. mysql -u root -p
3. SET PASSWORD for mythtv = OLD_PASSWORD('mythtv'); - where ‘mythtv’ is the password that is configured in the MythTV settings on the XBox.
4. Test the settings in MythTV on the XBox
5. Pat yourself on the back when it works and then go to bed…

This was pretty frustrating to have to deal with. If the error getting spat out of the MythTV frontend on XBMC was better this problem would have been much easier to find with a bit of searching on Google.

One of the main reasons for moving to Linux from than Windoze was to be able to use the Linux based MythTV PVR (Personal Video Recorder). Since the Linux machine will hold lots of recorded TV it might as well hold a bunch of ripped DVDs as well. Finding a good Linux DVD ripper that gives you just enough control to get a great rip was harder than I thought it should be.

I’ve been playing around with AcidRip for a while now - playing with lots of the settings after reading about all the ins and outs of video encoding. AcidRip does some really useful stuff for you like automagically doing crop detection so you don’t end up wasting oodles of disk and time encoding the black bars at the top and bottom. It also lets you do a preview as well, which is mighty useful for checking that you’ve got the right crop settings and that you’ve actually chosen the correct sound track. Another bonus is that it encodes directly from the DVD. Under the hood it uses mencoder which is the other half of the popular video player mplayer. This means you can play with your hearts content with the huge array of settings that mencoder supports.

If you are happy using the LAVC or XVID encoding algorithms then AcidRip should work great for you. There are several articles floating on the internet about how to use it which were useful for the high level bits.

There are some down sides though. It doesn’t look like it’s been updated for a while and support on the AcidRip forum at Source Forge was almost non-existent. Also, it doesn’t really support any of the others encoders very well at all. I tried to use the newer X264 encoding but AcidRip doesn’t understand how to do anything more than a single pass encoding, which is by all means useless if you want a good quality encoding. Fortunately my XBox Media Center doesn’t fully support X264 encoding yet so I’m ripping using XVID, which AcidRip supports pretty well.

Windows released the Wireless Client Update for Windows XP with Service Pack 2 in January of 2007. By all accounts it seems to have resolved some of the reasons why I switched to using the Intel PROSet Wireless application.

The Wireless Client Update lets you configure wireless networks as broadcast networks or as nonbroadcast networks. Additionally, Wireless Auto Configuration sends probe requests only for nonbroadcast networks.

Since the latest release of the Intel software caused 100% CPU usage on my machine I ditched and went back to Windows management of wireless.

With this Client Update installed I haven’t had any problems so far with my wireless network that isn’t broadcasting the SSID. Excellent. Thanks to the Non-broadcast Wireless Networks with Microsoft Windows article for providing the link to this breakthrough.

Setting up the nonbroadcast network isn’t as simple as it was for the Intel wireless management, but at least it’s possible without the machine going into a tailspin:

1. View the wireless networks that are available. More than likely the nonbroadcast network won’t be displayed.
2. Click on the Change advanced settings link underneath the Related tasks heading in the left hand pane.
3. Choose the Wireless networks tab.
4. In the Preferred networks section click on the Add button.
5. Fill in the SSID that is being broadcast and select the Connect even if this network is not broadcasting checkbox.
6. Save the changes and then see if Windows tries to connect to the network. This should fail since you haven’t specified the wireless network key. I found that I had to do this before Windows would even let me set the Wireless network key though.
7. Hopefully now the network shows up in the list of networks that are available. If it does, go into the configuration settings for it again (this time the SSID should be disabled) and specify the correct wireless network secuirty settings for your network.

Last night I had the misfortune of updating to the latest version of the Intel PROSet Wireless application and device drivers (11.1.0.86). After updating the machine spins into a 100% CPU gobbling cycle by the ZCfgsvg.exe process. This is related to the Intel PROSet application. Killing the process moves the problem to the iFrmwork.exe process. After faffing around for 30 minutes trying to figure out what was poked I just uninstalled the whole damn thing.

The reason I upgraded was to try and resolve a very bizarre problem I’ve had for some time on my Windows laptop. Every so often the machine will throw a complete hissy fit with fonts not rendering making the machine unusable (even the Windows Start button text goes away). For some time I’ve had my suspicions that it was related to the Intel PROSet Wireless application somehow mangling something in the OS. It’s a pretty far fetched suspicion because no application should be able to prevent the OS from being able to render fonts onto the display. However, more often than not it all went pear shaped after an error box (with nothing in it) was popped up by the Intel PROSet Wireless application.

So, now I may not have the problem with fonts going away but I’m faced with using Windows wireless networking which I never got to really work satisfactorily in the past - why I moved to the native Intel application in the first place. Luckily I found another Windows download that helps resolve some of the problems I was initially having with the Windows wireless management - I’ll cover this in a later post.

Last night I finally got around to upgrading from the Edgy Eft version of Kubuntu to the recently released Feisty Fawn version. The process was amazingly simple. I updated all of the existing packages that needed upgrading and then the system very nicely told me that there was a completely new version of Kubuntu that I could upgrade to. So off I went and started the upgrade process.

The only place that I had any problems was with the MySQL configuration. A number of modified configuration files needed to be replaced as part of the installation. I had knowingly modified the /etc/mysql/my.cnf file so it had a properly networked bind-address. I needed to do this so my Xbox Media Center (XBMC) Myth TV client can connect to the MythTV backed database.

The entire process took just over an hour and overall I think it downloaded around 700Mb of data. This put a pretty big dent in the monthly download quota but it came down at approximately 350kbps so didn’t actually take that long. Who knows how much I’ve downloaded via Windows updates over the course of a year. So far everythings working as expected and fingers crossed it stays that way.

Overall I’m really impressed at how easy and relatively painless the upgrade was. Well done to the guys at Kubuntu who put the 7.04 release together.

For a while I haven’t been able to play video’s using Mplayer from the KDE GUI in Kubuntu. Playing files through the command line worked fine though. It only fails when using the "Open With" command from the Konqueror GUI and choosing "MPlayer Movie Player" I’d always get a Fatal Error box popping up saying:

Error opening/initializing the selected video_output (-vo) device.

I’ve been using MPlayer quite a lot from the command line since I’ve been doing a bit of DVD encoding of late using AcidRip so it hasn’t been too problematic.

Anyway, the problem is now resolved and what follows are some simple instructions that worked for me.

1. When the problem occurs the MPlayer window should still open (it just doesn’t play what you asked it to).
2. In the MPlayer window, right-click and choose Preferences
3. Choose the Video tab.
4. Change the highlighted Video Driver to something else. Mine was set to xmga, Matrox G200/… I don’t have a Matrox video card so that is probably why MPlayer was barfing. I changed it to xv, X11/xv and now it is working fine.
5. Click the OK button