TheNowhereMan.com

MrAaronWolfe: @nowhereman and thats why i have like triple redundent backups.

nowhereman: Methinks one of my backup drives just bit the dust

nowhereman: RT @jeffjarvis: Komen, like BofA, Verizon & others before, learns the swift power of the social shitstorm.

nowhereman: Got my 20% off birthday coupon from my cigar dealer. Time to go on a spree!

nowhereman: [SeattleTimes] State Senate approves gay marriage bill t.co/O8faSHSt

willie: @nowhereman Don’t get your hopes up on PQ. It’s been like that since the beginning.

Turbo.264 HD

I got a new toy this week. The Elgato Turbo.264 HD. I’ve owned the previous device in the product line, the Turbo.264 for a few years now and have been pretty happy with it despite some initial quirks getting it to work. In fact, my satisfaction with the original was a big part of the reason I was confident ordering the HD. Now that I’ve played with it for a while, I’m sad to have to say that the HD model is a bit of a disappointment. For reference, I’m using v1.2 (1437) of the turbo.264 HD software.

First, let me say something good about it. One of my main reasons for getting the device was to improve the experience of streaming live broadcast TV from EyeTV to my Rokus. I don’t use the feature often, but I had read that the turbo would enable adaptive bitrate streaming and since I’m the guy responsible for the Roku channel, I figured it would be worth trying it for myself. In this regard, the device lives up to the hype. It does not improve the quality of the live streams, but does add a second, lower bitrate variant, which improves the experience somewhat.

Another nice thing about the device is that it saves a lot of editing time when exporting recordings from EyeTV. Without the turbo, you have to first edit a recording, then compact it before you can export it. Compacting is the step that applies your edits and rewrites the original recording file, making your edits permanent and irreversible. With the turbo you no longer have to do the compacting step. Your edits are automatically applied during the encode process without the need to rewrite the original first. This is a big time saver for anyone who edits the ads out of stuff they’ve recorded.

Now, let’s talk CPU usage. Part of the reason for buying the thing is to take some load off my main CPU. The non-HD model does a good job of this, shifting all encoding work to the device. However, the HD doesn’t work that way. It only shifts some of the encoding work to the device while still maxing out your main processor. The idea is to get the encode done as fast as possible, but that’s not what I want. i want to free up my main CPU for other stuff. And the worst part is there’s no option to disable this “feature”. This is not a huge deal, but still annoying.

But what is a huge deal is picture quality. In a word: tolerable. I spent several hours over the last couple days tweaking various settings and have still not come up with anything that I’d call good. I have achieved what I would call acceptable quality, but for a device with an “HD” badge on it, this thing leaves something be desired. I expected to have to sacrifice some amount of quality for speed, but the trade off ends up being more than I think it should be. To my eye, the HD’s main profile h.264 encodes are worse than the non-HD model’s main profile encodes. The non-HD model doesn’t do high profile, but I will say that the HD’s high profile encode is only marginally better than the non-HD’s main profile encode, which is more than a little disappointing.

Of course, x264 blows them both out of the water with noticeably superior quality and a significantly smaller output file. That is not an entirely fair comparison since the x264 encode takes several times as long, but it’s worth noting in terms of a quality benchmark.

And I have to at least mention one super-weird problem I came across. If the source video and the output file both live on network drives, the audio of the end product drifts out of sync with the video over time. Using the exact same source video, but keeping it local while the output file is still on a network store (or vice versa), the problem goes away.

I had high hopes for this little dongle. Perhaps a little too high. I’m hoping that Elgato will improve things with future software updates, but in the meantime it’s still a pretty handy tool.

nowhereman: [GigaOm] Boxee officially pulls the plug on PC client t.co/NYjxgPIH

szul: @nowhereman Amazon is crazy. I bought a book for my wife that was 50% off, plus I got free next day shipping from Prime.

nowhereman: Ordered something from @amazon Saturday evening with 5-9 day free shipping and I’m getting it today #wow

nowhereman: I donated 60 days of cpu time to WCG during the past week t.co/szOGvR6X #wcgrid

billcorbett99: @nowhereman If you don’t think you can grab my show on Vimeo, what about Youtube. I have clips from my show all on my Youtube channel. Thnks

billcorbett99: @nowhereman My TV show CREATING COOPERATIVE KIDS is hosted on Vimeo. Doesn’t this make it an easy MRSS for you to pick up my show?

aravindakshan_t: @nowhereman Ooops, tx 4 ur warning n fixing my sentence

nowhereman: Someone just said I look 26. #EgoBoost

aravindakshan_t: @nowhereman if i remove ur YouTube pvt channel frm my gen 1 Roku, will i loose d channel forever? any idea on official YouTube on Roku?

baskervilleman: @nowhereman so is YouTube ever going to come back to the Roku?

nowhereman: Some signage for my home office t.co/vaz3ykbr

catastrophegirl: @StreamFREE_tv only @nowhereman knows for sure. actually i don’t even know if channel developers can see how many delete/re-adds they get

nowhereman: [AppleInsider] Apple earns record $13B on sales of 37M iPhones, 15M iPads and 5.2M Macs t.co/upQ6oPR6

kcorrigan13: @nowhereman Do you have a golf channel? Looking for streaming golf instruction (Golf Fix, etc.)

nowhereman: Going through airport security with a hole in my sock #ghetto

Hacking Chumby 8

I recently became the proud owner of a Chumby 8 (thanks Mom and Dad!). At first blush, Chumby 8 is not much more than a bigger Chumby. Unlike it’s smaller siblings, it has a web browser built in, but I really can’t think of an occasion where I’d want to surf the web on the device. Aside from that, Chumby 8 plays widgets and streams audio from the internet just like other Chumbies.

The most exciting difference between Chumby 8 and the other models is its ability to play video. For a while, I tried using a Sony Dash for video, but quickly became frustrated with it’s poor interface and lack of a decent podcast client. Out of the box, Chumby 8 isn’t much different. In fact, its video features are much worse than those on the Dash. Both let you play video stored on a USB drive, but the Dash also lets you watch Netflix, Crackle, and a few other “premium” video services. You won’t find any of that on the Chumby, but that’s ok because I really have no desire to watch Netflix on a picture frame. What I do want to do is be able to watch a few video podcasts without having to manually load the files on a USB stick and sneaker-net them over to the device for playback.

With the Dash, this is impossible because of the degree to which the device is locked down, probably so they could pass Netflix certification. But with the Chumby, we’re in luck. Because the device is much more open than the Dash, it’s possible to download and playback video content entirely on the device itself. No sneaker-net needed.

So how can we programmatically play a video file on the Chumby8? First we need to ssh into the device, so we need to enable sshd. Make your way into the Chumby’s settings screen and tap on “Device info”. On the Device Info screen, you will see a little pi symbol in the corner. Tap the pi. On the screen that’s displayed next, tap the button labeled “SSHD”. Done!

Now you can ssh into your Chumby as root and have all kinds of fun. Beware, by default there is no password for the root account, so take whatever security precautions are necessary for your particular environment.

Once you’re logged into the Chumby you can play a video on its screen from the command line. For demonstration purposes, let’s assume that there is a USB drive connected to the Chumby and it has a video on it called myVideo.mp4. First, navigate to the USB drive. The path may vary depending which USB port your drive is connected to:

> cd /mnt/usb
> ls

You should see a list of files on your USB drive, including myVideo.mp4. Before we can play the video, we need to kill the Chumby’s control panel. That’s the piece of software that controls the Chumby UI:

> stop_control_panel

Now we can play the video:

> gst-app myVideo.mp4

That’s it. Your video should be playing on the Chumby’s screen. But suppose we wanted to play a video from the internet without downloading it first. I had mixed results doing this, but it is at least semi-possible:

> gst-stream-h264aac http://www.example.com/myVideo.mp4

These tricks, combined with cron and some basic perl scripting (both cron and perl are installed on the Chumby by default), and you can do some pretty fun stuff. For instance, I can have my Chumby magically greet me every morning at 9am by playing the previous night’s Rachel Maddow Show. No more podcast client running on a separate machine. No more manually copying files to USB drives. No more sneaker-net!

billcorbett99: @nowhereman Let me figure out how to create an MRSS of my show and get back to you. Its a parenting show I’d like to add to your family area