The Perfect Media Center – Part 11 – Tweaks and tips

  By David | February 23, 2012 - 1:52 pm | Uncategorized
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Just a couple that spring to mind for now:

  1. If you’re using the Confluence theme and have configured your remote etc as below, then pressing the Windows button will always bring up a progress bar with easy access to subtitles, video settings etc.
  2. Whilst in this view, pressing ‘up’ will usually highlight the ‘x’ in the top corner – this allows you to easily flick in and out of fullscreen.
  3. Where this is not available, pressing left/right to pull out the side menu will normally have a ‘fullscreen’ option at the bottom, to allow you to get rid of any menus and go back to the movie.
  4. Pressing the ‘guide’ button (top left region) brings up the context menu, as if you right clicked, allowing access to much greater functionality.

The Perfect Media Center – Part 10 – Linux LIRC remote control bug on resume

  By David | February 22, 2012 - 8:11 am | Howto
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This post is just to cover you if you’ve successfully resumed your computer with a remote control but suddenly find that your remote doesn’t work anymore. A USB keyboard still functions however.

This is a Linux bug relating to LIRC and outlined in the XBMC wiki here. Just copy and paste the script from there, but for me it wasn’t necessary to change the module or to uncomment the second half of the script as suggested. Make sure you also make it executable, as instructed.

Should you have a slightly different set up to me / different configuration, then this thread has further information on modified version of the 90_lirc script for different set ups. It looks as if additional modules have to be added to it, but if you’ve been following this guide then none of this will be necessary.

I think I did reconfigure the remote as instructed in that post, but it worked fine before hand – just changed some buttons around. From memory, as I was using the Eden build of XBMC, no further sound configuration was needed beyond what was in previous posts, regarding the HDMI passthrough problem also  mentioned in the linked post.

/a

The Perfect Media Center – Part 9 – Resuming from the remote

  By David | February 21, 2012 - 10:37 am | Howto
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This took some time to figure out and much frustration – hopefully I can save most of that for you!

If your experience is like mine, even though resuming from the USB keyboard works fine, you are not able to resume from the remote. Firstly, it’s worth emphasising that you can’t resume from the USB3 ports (blue), so make sure your IR receiver is in one of the other ones.

The second trick that I saw people getting wrong on various forums is that you can only resume using the power button on the remote, not any button!

Once you’ve got your receiver plugged in, forums poster ‘ai4g’ had the answer to why no red light was showing in the receiver when the Zbox was sleeping.

All the following commands will need root access – you can get this by using the command sudo su after logging in, (either by ctrl + f1 to get you to a terminal, or by using telnet/ssh (e.g. putty in windows to log in).

For the Zbox, assuming your IR receiver is in the ‘top’ port to the right of the ethernet cable (not the blue USB ports), you should see the following:

grep -Ri topseed  /sys/bus/usb/devices/*/manufacturer
sys/bus/usb/devices/3-1/manufacturer:Topseed Technology Corp.

Changing the command slightly to:

echo enabled > /sys/bus/usb/devices/3-1/power/wakeup

should now mean the light comes on for the IR receiver when the Zbox is sleeping. I did this for every USB device however, just to cover my bases. If it keeps waking from sleep unintentionally then you may have another USB device triggering this – in which case, remove ‘enabled’ for that one.

Some commentators have said the Zbox doesn’t wake with certain receivers, as it doesn’t provide the receiver with enough power when it’s in standby mode, but this is incorrect. You may notice that the red light appears ‘fainter’ than usual, and we’ll now cover how to ensure that the wake up can proceed correctly.

The final step to ensuring you can resume from the remote involves the following:

cd /sys/bus/usb/devices/

 Typing ls should then reveal a directory listing – as well as the 3-1 and some other files, you should also see usb1, usb2 etc. For each of these, I did the following, repeating for usb2 etc.

echo enabled > usb1/power/wakeup

Once you’ve done this, modify your /etc/rc.local file (e.g. by typing nano – w /etc/rc.local ) and make sure the following lines are in it, before ‘exit 0′ at the end.

# By default this script does nothing.
echo USB0 > /proc/acpi/wakeup
echo USB1 > /proc/acpi/wakeup
echo USB2 > /proc/acpi/wakeup
echo USB3 > /proc/acpi/wakeup
echo EUSB > /proc/acpi/wakeup
echo enabled > /sys/bus/usb/devices/3-1/power/wakeup
exit 0

Ctrl + x, and hitting enter should write the changes to the file.

You also need to make sure that rc.local is executable:

 chmod +x /etc/rc.local

 That, and a restart, was the key to making sure that the receiver was able to get enough of a signal from my remote to start the HTPC.

This is getting a bit long, so I’ll cover what happens if the HTPC resumes, but the remote doesn’t work afterwards in the next part.

/p

The Perfect Media Center – Part 8 – Suspend and resume

  By David | February 20, 2012 - 12:17 pm | Howto
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If you’ve had previous Linux experience, you’ll know that support for suspend/resume can be flaky at times. Fortunately, there are no such problems with the Zbox which will happily resume and suspend without any issues with a little preparation.

You may wish to do a BIOS flash  (e.g. from here) but I haven’t had any problems through not doing so.

It is important to set the following settings in the BIOS first (as well as any other tweaking you want to do):

  • Change IDE SATA drive from IDE to AHCI.
  • Change power saving to S3
  • Enable the video to repost on resume

Once you’ve done that, follow the excellent instructions on the XBMC wiki here to get suspend working with Ubuntu.

I had some difficulty with this part, so solved it by adding all my USB devices to /proc/acpi/wakeup  rather than selected ones.

Make sure you do this step with a USB keyboard and not your remote – we’ll sort that out in the next post, but for now our goal is to make sure suspend/resume from USB work, without adding the extra complication of a remote.

The wiki page refers to a kernel bug at the bottom – this shouldn’t be relevant, so don’t be sidetracked by that. Have you modified your /etc/rc.local file as shown at the bottom of the wiki file? I needed a restart before it worked and if you don’t modify this file, the changes won’t be there next time you start up.

 

TERA – Closed beta – Playtesting a Baraku warrior

  By David | February 19, 2012 - 4:45 pm | Games
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Having not really got on with a sorcerer, I wanted to try my hand at a melee class. It was a good call – the fluid animation and ‘twitch’ gameplay of a melee class does a much better job of highlighting the advances that En Masse and Frogster have made in combat.

Dodging blows and chaining attacks together with space allows easy access to a variety of skills, whilst fighting using mostly the mouse buttons and not just sequences of number keys. This greatly enhances the combat immersion of the game and makes every sword impact seem that much more visceral.

Enjoy the latest shots!

The Perfect Media Center – Part 7 – Fixing the sound

  By David | February 19, 2012 - 12:11 pm | Howto
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Provided you’ve followed my advice and used the Eden version of XBMC (latest beta can be found here) then the audio should work out of the box, with no configuration changes required.

If you’re paranoid and want to check, then the file /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf should contain the following on the very last line: options snd-hda-intel enable_msi=0 probe_mask=0xffff,0xfff2

After a reboot, you need to go to the XBMC Audio settings page and change to the following:

  • change audio output: hdmi
  • speaker config: 5.1
  • boost volume: check
  • ac3: check
  • dts: check
  • audio output device: hda nvidia hdmi
  • passthrough: hda nvidia hdmi

If you get no sound, e.g. on high definition files only, then it may be because your receiver lacks the capability for DTS input via HDMI for example – unchecking either ac3 or dts should magically bring the sound back.

First look at TERA – Closed beta

  By David | February 18, 2012 - 9:02 pm | Games
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Well, I’ve just spent an hour or so playing the new TERA. It’s in turns both ridiculous and over the top, yet also beautiful and strangely charming. Particularly refreshing is the combat system which is focussed on real time movement and attacks, just like a single-player game, moving firmly away from pressing 1, 2 or 3 repeatedly as in existing MMOs. If you want to dodge a sword, then you’d better make your character leap to the side!

It’s not all good news however, the female characters are nothing if not parodies – running around in high heels, with impossibly long spandex-clad legs and always standing on one foot with the other coquettishly poised behind the other:

TERA female High Elf

The monsters are graphically detailed, well animated and need a suitable number of hits before falling:

Sorceress attacks a Ghilliedhu

The world is really quite beautiful with rainbows, immense waterfalls, lush foliage everywhere:

Mysterious portal in the skies of the Timeless Woods

Beautiful scenery graphics in TERA

A great magical tree rising out of the Timeless Woods

The camera zooms in cinematically when quests are given, providing a close-up view of your character and equipment:

TERA's camera zooms in for a quest

However some of the weapons are slightly ridiculous, seen here is the Lancer in all its glory:

A rethink over the size of some of the weapons is in order..!

The Perfect Media Center – Part 6 – Remote control

  By David | February 18, 2012 - 12:08 pm | Howto
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Obviously, no self-respecting media center is complete without a remote control. I wanted to get one that was Linux compatible, worked with my Zbox and XBMC and allowed me to control all the necessary functionality.

My research also revealed that there were several different types of remote control and that so-called ‘MCE’ remotes, named after Microsoft’s Media Centre Edition were well supported and would automatically work for the most part.

After looking through the wiki at the various models of remote, as Microsoft had discontinued their MCE remotes I settled for the Anyware HA-IR01SV – Multimedia control panel. It’s certified for Windows Vista (and will certainly work in Windows 7 as well) and had excellent reviews on Amazon.

It has a decent set of playback controls, as well as directional arrows, a helpful windows ‘menu’ key that returns you to the ‘home’ page in XBMC and plenty of extra buttons to interact with more advanced features.

Most importantly, it also comes with it’s own infra-red receiver, so it can be used to wake your Zbox from standby without having to get up – the power savings will mount up over time! Next time, I’ll focus on tuning the Zbox to get the best performance out of it and later articles will cover getting the remote working correctly.

The Perfect Media Center – Part 5 – Which flavour of XBMC?

  By David | February 11, 2012 - 4:04 pm | Howto
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There are quite a few options for installing XBMC which can be confusing for the uninitiated. I ended up going with the Eden Beta (covered at the end of the post), but I’ll run through the options first.

Installing straight from the XBMC website is fairly self-explanatory and the team have helpfully included various guides in the links on that page

Alternatively, there are specific, stripped-down, builds that include XBMC and almost nothing else, for those that like to optimise their set-ups. One such that I tried was OpenElec, a distribution optimised for running from a flash drive or compact flash card. This is ridiculously lightweight – the full install is around 100MB and it’s been tailored to remove many of the niggles you might find.

As well as the current ‘Dharma’ version of XBMC, there is also an ‘Eden’ version still in Beta – I ended up using the Beta 2 as it seems to automatically fix several niggles I had with the nVidia ION 2 graphics card in the Zbox. The current version would appear to be Beta 3, so no doubt it is even more polished.

In addition, after trying several different versions of XBMC, I settled on ‘XBMCbuntu’ – this is effectively a version of Ubuntu that comes with all the various XBMC bells and whistles working out of the box, helping to ensure a speedy setup.

You can download the XBMCbuntu .iso for the Eden beta 3 from here (right click, save as).

I went with a Ubuntu base rather than something more stripped down just as it guaranteed the largest community for help if something went wrong and also means it’s much easier to use the HTPC for other tasks as well as just being an HTPC, as you have access to all the Ubuntu repositories of programs.

In the next post, I’ll cover remote controls, so you can control your new HTPC in style…