taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

After a short period where things were looking up, Screenclick have once again reverted to type, by ditching the lovely simple Netflix-style queue they seemed to be using, and instead instituting some new kind of bizarre homebrew wierdness.

It looks like a queue, with a line-by-line listing of movies — but then beside each title, there are 3 radio buttons: “High”, “Medium”, and “Low”.

The instructions run as follows:

All titles are sorted in alphabetical order within their priority group

• - High: Please deliver these titles as soon as possible
• - Medium: Please deliver these titles as they become available
• - Low: I don’t mind when you send these titles

So what — does this mean that if I put a title in as “High”, I’m going to receive it next, or not, or what? and what’s with the alphabetical order? WTF is going on? argh.

Anyway, I just got out “Amores Perros”, presumably due to this alphabetical ordering thing. not what I wanted at all. What a mess.

Tags: dvds, ireland, netflix, screenclick, tv, usability, wtf

Yay! They now have a proper queue! Also member reviews and other improvements — it seems a lot better.

Can’t figure out how to change my password, though ;)

Tags: dvds, ireland, screenclick, tv

MythTV is a pretty great product, once you get it working — however, it can be labour-intensive, involving lots of local knowledge to deal with the ins and outs of each area’s TV provider, cable service, etc.

To that end, we’re recently set up a new mailing list: mythtv-ireland, a list for discussion of topics of interest for MythTV users in Ireland.

Particularly on-topic:

• the NTL frequencies list for areas in Ireland

• hacks to scrape the Channel 6 schedule from their website

• dealing with the NTL Digital set-top box

Sign up, if you’re interested!

Tags: ireland, irish, mythtv, ntl, pvr, tv

Here’s a useful script for users of a MythTV box equipped with a PVR-350 MPEG capture/playback card — mythsshimport:

NAME

mythsshimport - transcode and install video files onto a MythTV box

SYNOPSIS

mythsshimport file1 [file2 ...]

DESCRIPTION

Transcodes video files (AVI, MPEG, MOV, WMV etc.) into MythTV-compatible and PVR-350-optimised MPEG-2 .nuv files, suitable for viewing on a 4/3 screen, then transfers them to the MythTV backend, inserts them into the “recorded programs” listings, and builds seek tables.

All this happens on-the-fly, at faster-than-real-time rates; with a recent CPU in the transcoding box, and over an 802.11b wifi home network, you can start the process and start watching the video within 20 seconds, while it is transcoded and transferred in the background.

SSH is used as the network transport. If you have the CPU power available on the MythTV backend itself, you can run this script there (as the mythtv user) and it will skip the SSH parts entirely.

REQUIREMENTS

• ssh password-less key access from transcode box into mythtv@mythbox (this could be localhost, if you’re transcoding on the mythbox). Test using: “ssh mythtv@mythbox echo hi”. If you run this script on the mythbox as the mythtv user, this is not required.

• mencoder. Tested with 2:0.99+1.0pre7try2+cvs20060117-0ubuntu8 (I swear that’s a version string and not just me rolling my head around the keyboard)

• MythTV. Tested with MythTV 0.20.

• The “contrib/myth.rebuilddatabase.pl” script from the MythTV source tarball, installed on the mythbox in $PATH: download from svn.mythtv.org.

• screen(1) installed on the transcoding box, used to keep the mencoder output readable

Download here.

Tags: mythsshimport, mythtv, tv, video

So, Google have invented their own DRM, apparently. I’m keen to find out more details; Techdirt and Plasticbag.org are so far the only places I can find in the blogosphere to discuss it in any detail.

One tidbit worth noting from the LA Times coverage:

The Google copy-protection software also imposes a big restriction: The CBS shows, NBA games and other material protected by the software can be watched only on a computer that’s connected to the Internet.

“I think it’s going to be a problem,” said Li, the Forrester analyst, adding that Google executives told her they were trying to fix it.

That’s interesting. In my opinion, given that quote, I’ll bet Google’s DRM is something similar to the copy-protection systems used for many games since about id’s Quake 3 and Valve’s Half-Life; an online “key server” which validates codes, tracks player IDs, and who’s viewing what, “live”, as the video is cued up and played.

Some more info on the Half-Life WON authentication system can be found in this GamaSutra article; subscription required — try viewing this google-cache version with Javascript off if you don’t have a sub. That’s historical now, of course, since that WON system has been replaced by a new auth protocol as part of Valve’s ‘Steam’ system.

The key factor is the network, separating the dangerous, untrustworthy user machine from the trusted key server. Since the online key server can act as a platform for trusted, known-insubvertable code to run, along with the video server, both being under Google’s control, it’s actually possible to build reasonably solid DRM on this model. That’s as opposed to the usual case, where a reasonably determined teenager can break it in a week of school-nights. ;)

Anyway, that’s speculation. It remains to be seen if they’ve come up with something along the lines of WON authentication — and if it’s still easily subvertable or not.

Update: Aristotle Pagaltzis has a pretty good point in the comments:

Watching video, unlike playing a multiplayer game, is not an activity that inherently requires connecting to a server. Playing a multiplayer game, OTOH, inherently is.

So cracking a multiplayer game’s key check is fruitless, because then you can’t play online anymore, which was the whole point of the game in the first place. In contrast, a video player with a cracked key check still fulfills its purpose just fine.

I think he’s right. That’s a key point, demonstrating how WON authentication still can’t help — media playback, as a task, is itself fundamentally crackable.

Tags: authentication, dont-be-evil, drm, google, google-drm, half-life, tv, video, won

Hardware: On my home network, I recently replaced my NetGear MR814 with a brand new Linksys WRT54G.

My top criteria for what hardware to buy for this job weren’t price, form factor, how pretty the hardware is, or even what features it had – instead, I bought it because it’s an extremely hackable router/NAT/AP platform. Thanks to a few dedicated reverse engineers, the WRT hardware can now be easily reflashed with a wide variety of alternative firmware distributions, including OpenWRT, a fully open-source distro that offers no UI beyond a command-line.

Initially, I considered a few prettier UIs — HyperWRT, for example — since I didn’t want to have to spend days hacking on my router, of all things, looking stuff up in manuals, HOWTOs and in Google. Finally I decided to give OpenWRT a spin first. I’m glad I did — it turned out to be a great decision.

(There was one setup glitch btw — by default, OpenWRT defaults to setting up WPA, but the documentation claims that the default is still no crypto, as it was previously.)

The flexibility is amazing; I can log in over SSH and run the iftop tool to see what’s going on on the network, which internal IPs are using how much bandwidth, how much bandwidth I’m really seeing going out the pipe, and get all sorts of low-level facts out of the device that I’d never see otherwise. I could even run a range of small servers directly on the router, if I wanted.

Bonus: it’s rock solid. My NetGear device had a tendency to hang frequently, requiring a power cycle to fix; this bug has been going on for nearly a year and a half without a fix from NetGear, who had long since moved on to the next rev of cheapo home equipment and weren’t really bothering to support the MR814. I know this is cheap home equipment — which is why I was still muddling along with it — but that’s just ridiculous. None of that crap with the (similarly low-cost) WRT. OpenWRT also doesn’t contain code to DDOS NTP servers at the University of Wisconsin, which is a bonus, too. ;)

Sadly, I don’t think Cisco/Linksys realise how this hackability is making their market for them. They’ve been plugging the security holes used to gain access to reflash the firmware in recent revisions of the product (amazingly, you have to launch a remote command execution attack through an insecure CGI script!), turning off the ability to boot via TFTP, and gradually removing the ways to reflash the hardware. If they succeed, it appears the hackability market will have to find another low-cost router manufacturer to give our money to. (update, June 2006: they since split the product line into a reflashable Linux-based “L” model and a less hackable “S” model, so it appears they get this 100%. great!)

Given that, it’s interesting to read this interview with Jack Kelliher of pcHDTV, a company making HDTV video capture cards:

Our market isn’t really the mass market. We were always targeting early adopters: videophiles, hobbyists, and students. Those groups already use Linux, and those are our customers.

Matthew Gast: The sort of people who buy Linksys APs to hack on the firmware?

Jack Kelliher: Exactly. The funny thing is that we completely underestimated the size of the market. When we were starting up the company, we went to the local Linux LUG and found out how many people were interested in video capture. Only about 2 percent were interested in video on Linux, so we thought we could sell 2,000 cards. (Laughs.) We’ve moved way beyond that!

Well worth a read. There’s some good stuff about ulterior motives for video card manufacturers to build MPEG decoding into their hardware, too:

The broadcast flag rules are conceptually simple. After the digital signal is demodulated, the video stream must be encrypted before it goes across a user accessible bus. User accessible is defined in an interesting way. Essentially, it’s any bus that a competent user with a soldering iron can get the data from. Video streams can only be decrypted right before the MPEG decode and playback to the monitor.

To support the broadcast flag, the video capture must have an encryptor, and the display card must have a decryptor. Because you can’t send the video stream across a user accessible bus, the display card needs to be a full MPEG decoder as well, so that unencrypted video never has to leave the card.

Matthew Gast: So the MPEG acceleration in most new video cards really isn’t really for my benefit? Is it to help the vendors comply with the broadcast flag?

Jack Kelliher: Not quite yet. Most video cards don’t have a full decoder, so they can’t really implement the broadcast flag. ATI and nVidia don’t have full decoders yet. They depend on some software support from the operating system, so they can’t really implement the broadcast flag. Via has a chipset with a full decoder, so it would be relatively easy for them to build the broadcast flag into that chipset.

Aha.

Tags: freevo, hackability, hdtv, homebuilt, linksys, mythtv, netgear, ntp, open-apis, open-source, openwrt, pchdtv, pvr, router, tv

TV: I’ve taken a little time to throw up my PVR build log.

If you’re hacking on one yourself, or curious about what it takes, or just like reading cut-and-pasted UNIX command lines — go take a look!

Tags: command, look, pvr, reading, time, tv, unix

TV: here’s a quick update on my PVR box progress. I have a very extensive /etc/LOG which I should probably just publish as-is, really, rather than trying to make it legible ;)

Anyway, the hardware arrived last month, but the main VIA EPIA ME6000 board was non-functional — it could never get as far as powering up the CRT for the BIOS self-test. So it was RMA’d back to http://www.mini-box.com, and they sent out a replacement, which arrived a couple of weeks ago.

I finally got to checking this out the weekend before last, and hey presto, it powered up nicely. There followed a whole week of busy nights doing a load of cautious hardware hooking-up, not-so-cautious KnoppMyth installation, and thoroughly non-cautious hacking crazily at the desired enclosure with a hacksaw (because I was too cheap to buy a Dremel).

Things got a little hairy with respect to CPU temperatures, but some looking at specs (the VIA Eden CPU can deal with up to 90 degrees C!), and repurposing of a bin-bound case fan together with some soldering and snipping, has that under control.

Eventually, we’re now at the stage where it can:

• watch live TV in perfect realtime, pause, rewind, timeshift, ffwd, etc. (the PVR-350 output is good)
• record our desired shows (bloody Antiques Roadshow! argh), according to the TV schedule
• play mp3s
• be ssh’able and sftp’able via a wifi USB dongle
• expose its schedule and allow recording via MythWeb
• expose its full desktop UI via x11vnc

and it looks good doing it, too. Credit goes to the MythTV guys for a fantastic job on their project, especially with its well-polished UI.

In addition, I have to plug KnoppMyth heavily. They’re dealing with an awful situation with hardware compatibility where bleeding edge features like MPEG2 decoding and TV out are concerned, and doing a great job — there’s been several occasions where I’ve been staring down the barrel of a daunting patch/rebuild/test cycle, and then find out that KnoppMyth includes that component built-in for free.

But — on the other hand — no credit to the hardware vendors. As I link-blogged yesterday, VIA is doing the classic ‘throw it over the wall’ trick with respect to their linux support — video drivers are written and deposited on their website, with scant documentation and virtually no support.

That’s bad enough, but even worse is the situation with Hauppauge’s PVR-250 and PVR-350 TV encoder/decoder cards. I realised soon into the setup process that other options for these should have been considered – Hauppauge have done a great job at confusing the issue for driver developers, as far as I can see. Here’s an example. When you buy a ‘WinTV PVR-350′ card, you may get the same box with the same manuals etc., but including these bonuses under the covers:

• one of seemingly about 5 different tuner chips, which you’ll need to edit /etc/modules.conf for;
• one of about 3 different remote controls with differing output codes;
• a good chance you’ll have to enter two mysterious ioctls to fix the colour registers, because recent PVR-350 models have changed these somehow and everything shows up as purple-on-green through its TV-Out.

It’s absurd. The results are threads like this and a truly daunting setup procedure, which (of course) everyone blames on the software (and Linux itself).

Anyway — how am I doing vs. Brendan’s progress? ;)

• pro: my X display sizes are good
• pro: no need to switch audio outputs
• pro: I’m not using a separate cable box, so no need to hack up something IR to switch channels for me
• con: I can’t yet watch AVIs or other video files, which I think he has working.

More on the latter when I eventually solve it. (it’s tricky. I suspect I’ll need to run two X servers with two TV-Outs to do this acceptably, and that’s uncharted waters.)

Tags: box, hardware, job, knoppmyth, log, progress, pvr, schedule, tv, update, via

TV: A choice quote from NBC’s Olympics coverage: ‘This girl (one of the US beach volleyball team) reads a book a week!’ (delivered in shocked tones.)

Tags: beach, book, choice, coverage, girl, nbc, quote, team, tv, volleyball, week

TV: RTE’s ‘Prime Time’ secured a fantastic interview with GWB, with Carole Coleman asking a few very pointed questions. Watch it with RealPlayer, or listen to the audio in MP3 (2.7Mb).

There’s a pretty accurate transcript here:

Let me finish! How many times do I have to tell you how to do your job? See, I gotta insult France at least once. Then I gotta claim ‘merica to be the most generous nation in the whole wide world, even though it’s not true. And listen, let me mention that democracy in Pakistan, too. And guess what? I’m the first president to ever call for a Palestinian state and I’m damn proud of it - just look at the size of my smirk now. Listen, as long as I keep repeating myself and mouthing empty platitudes, you won’t have a chance to call me on any of the bullshit coming out of my mouth.

OK, the official one is here.

It appears that the White House just dropped the ball on this one; reportedly, they had her list of questions three days in advance, but given that they suggested that she ‘ask him a question on the outfit that Taoiseach Bertie Ahern wore to the G8 summit’ (!!!), they weren’t paying attention, and expected some kind of giggling moronic schoolgirl, or something.

Hilariously, the White House has since complained to RTE, the Irish Embassy, the Irish Government, and the reporter herself. Probably God, too. I doubt Prime Time will ever get a White House interview again, but given what they clearly expect from the poodles in the White House press corps, that’s hardly much of a loss.

(I’d love to see what’d happen if he had to deal with Paxman ;)

Also, went to see Fahrenheit 9/11. Fantastic movie, and best of all, incredibly well-attended.

My favourite moment: the reminder of just how easily the US news media sold itself out during the war. Seeing Katie Couric blurting ‘Navy Seals rock!!’ like some kind of starstruck 5-year-old with an Action Man toy, was a classic. It’s good to see that this will be immortalized in celluloid, as it was truly shocking at the time. (Not much has changed; Judith Miller is still writing for the NYT.)

Tags: gotta, gwb, house, interview, irish, kind, prime, rte, time, tv, white

TV: from the #tvtorrents FAQ: ‘Wildfeeds’ are ‘a transmission by the network to distribute the episode before it airs around to the tv relay stations. You need to be in the correct location and have a large satellite dish in order to receive them.’

Word for the day!

Tags: are, dish, episode, faq, location, network, relay, satellite, transmission, tv, wildfeeds