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mythtv: A personal TV recorder

September 14th, 2008 edited by Vicho

Article submitted by Karl Erlandson. Do you think there are better alternatives to the packages posted here? Help us! Submit good articles about software you like!

No one likes to sit at home and wait for their favorite show to come on anymore and many have turned to buying hardware to record them for later viewing. Popular solutions to this problem include the expensive and proprietary TiVo and cable/satellite boxes with built-in TV recorders.

MythTV aims to solve these problems without the need to rent a cable box ($15/month) or buy a TiVo (~$200). An older computer can be used and all that needs to be purchased is a simple TV card, which can be found for under $30 on eBay. An HDTV card will cost you more, and will also require a more recent computer. If your TV card doesn’t come with a remote control, a controller will have to be purchased separately.

As of last year, the TV guide info used for MythTV in North America is no longer free. Unfortunately, if you live in the USA or Canada, you now have to pay a subscription fee if you want to access the TV guide info, but the cost is negligible at $20/year and going down with every new subscriber. There is a free trial period available. If you live in another country, you may find TV listings for your country in XMLTV.

Features

MythTV main menuWhat MythTV gives you that those other boxes don’t is freedom, it’s open source so you can do whatever you want with your machine. For example, you can set it to automatically skip commercials (a feature that surprisingly works!).

MythTV can be divided into two main programs, the Backend and the Frontend. The Backend refers to the program that actually records programs and must be installed on a computer that has a TV tuner. The Frontend program allows you to view content from the Backend. Importantly, the Frontend program can be installed on the Backend or as a stand-alone program on any computer. With a Frontend only install, you can watch what you’ve recorded in any room of your house. They will also have the ability to watch live TV (with options to pause, rewind, fast forward).

MythTV also offers many recording options with the ability to record a show daily, weekly, once, only in a certain timeslot, etc. Since it is open source, various improvements have been added. An interesting plugin was developed that overcomes the problem of recording sports when games go on longer than scheduled. This program actually checks the web to see if the game it is recording has gone into extra time and adjusts the recording time to end later.

Mythtv browsing through the video library

MythTV will organize your music and video libraries and allow all that downloaded content to be played on your home entertainment system. Album and DVD art can be automatically downloaded from IMDB. I have to say that the music system could use a lot of work.

MythTV web interfaceOther options include the ability to schedule your recordings over the internet, watch your shows over the internet, display weather alerts, and notify you of new emails on screen.

Availability

MythTV is not available as a Debian package due to licensing/legal issues, but it is on debian-multimedia. To enable this repository, add this to your /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://www.debian-multimedia.org/ stable main 

(instead of stable, put “testing” or “unstable” if you use that flavors of Debian). Now run apt-get update. The MythTV wiki provides instructions to install it in Debian stable (Etch), Debian unstable (Sid) and Ubuntu. The Ubuntu community has its own set of installation instructions. I found the KnoppMythWiki very useful in setting up my machine. They also offer a MythTV distribution.

Posted in Debian, Ubuntu | 6 Comments »

mrxvt: Fast, light multitabbed terminal emulator

September 7th, 2008 edited by Tincho

Article submitted by Hugo Carrer.

As any other Debian user I love writing obscure commands on my terminal. I love too having so many open terminals that I have to come up with a special system to find the one where my favorite obscure command is running on.

To be able to enjoy this I need a very fast multitabbed terminal emulator: mrxvt.

Some of the things I like the most about mrxvt are for example,

  • It is very fast and light.
  • Fast pseudo-transparency.
  • Background with your favorite images.
  • Highly configurable keyboard shortcuts.
  • You can have the same command typed on every tab at the same time. This feature is disabled by default. you can enable it by editing /etc/mrxvt/mrxvtrc and uncommenting the ToggleBroadcast macro (around line 171). After that, Ctrl+Shift+d toggles input broadcasting to all tabs.
  • Automatic or “by-hand” tab labeling.
  • It is independent of your desktop (no KDE or GNOME needed).
  • Did I mention that is very fast and light?

After installing it would look something like this:

a just installed mrxvt

You can change this rather old fashioned look by copying the example config file from
/usr/share/doc/mrxvt-common/examples/mrxvtrc.sample.gz
And placing it in ~/.mrxvtrc

The file is full of comments helping you with the meaning of each option. Of course you can find all available options in the man page. Some useful shortcuts are Ctrl+Shift+t to open a new tab and Ctrl+Shift+m to show the menu.

So, after playing, trying and tweaking for a little while you can get a futuristic look for your terminals. Like this one of me sketching this article on an emacs session inside mrxvt (Note all those beautiful tabs up there)

mrxvt in action

Downsides? Well it depends on the kind of user,

  • No UTF-8 support.
  • It has no config menu.
  • You have to remember the shortcuts or read the config file every now and then.
  • And as with anything worth doing, to get things working the way you want to you’ll have to read through the man page and maybe scratch your head once or twice but it’ll work.

To sum up, it’s the perfect application to config during those boring rainy weekends and then show off to your friends at work.

mrxvt is available in Debian stable and in Ubuntu too.

Posted in Debian, Ubuntu | 10 Comments »

DevTodo: a reminder/task program aimed at developers.

August 31st, 2008 edited by Vicho

Article submitted by Raman Pandarinathan.

DevTodo is a simple command-line-based package to keep todo lists. Lists are prioritized and hierarchical. Each task in the list has a priority (very high, low, medium etc.) and a given task can be linked to another todo database, making the list hierarchical. The lists are stored as an XML file (.todo) in the current directory, so if you manage multiple projects, you can have different todo lists and DevTodo will update the information based on your current working directory.

As the Todo list is stored in an XML file, you can use an XSLT template to export it to other formats. In Debian, you can find templates to export to HTML and PDF in /usr/share/devtodo.

Managing your todo lists

DevTodo in action

Basic commands are:

  • todo displays the list of tasks pending in the order of priority.
  • tda adds a task to the list. The optional argument -g links the task to another task (creates a subtask).
  • tdd marks a task as complete (done) with comments.
  • tde edit a task.
  • tdr removes a task completely.

With the use of some small shell scripts, when you cd into a directory with a .todo in it, DevTodo can display the Todo items for that directory. There are scripts for bash and tcsh in /usr/share/doc/devtodo/examples. To enable it under bash, add this to your .bashrc:

if [ -f /usr/share/doc/devtodo/examples/scripts.sh ]; then
  . /usr/share/doc/devtodo/examples/scripts.sh
fi

Pros and Cons

  • Pros
    • Simple command line interface.
    • Easy storage using XML.
    • Fast and elegant.
    • Oriented towards developers.
  • Cons
    • No GUI.
    • No recent development (last commit was at the end of 2007), upstream seems to be inactive.
    • No calendaring.

Availability

DevTodo is available in Debian since Sarge and in Ubuntu (universe) since Dapper.

Posted in Debian, Ubuntu | 8 Comments »

EasyTag: a graphical interface to managing your music files’ tags

August 25th, 2008 edited by Vicho

Article submitted by Dominique Cimafranca.

EasyTag is a graphical utility to edit the descriptive ID3 tags for your music files. One will think primarily of MP3 files, but it also does other formats, such as Ogg, FLAC, MP4/AAC, MusePack, Monkey’s Audio files and WavPack files (APE tag).

EasyTag main windowEasyTag’s screen real estate is divided into three windows. The left window shows you the directories of your file system. The middle window shows you the music files in your currently selected directory. The right window is further subdivided into top and bottom information boxes: the top shows you the technical information about the file (bit rate, frequency, mode, size, and time), and the bottom shows you the actual ID3 fields.

The ID3 fields are pretty complete as they let you fill in all the relevant info you could want to put in, e.g., title, artist, album, year, genre, personal comments. You can also attach a photo to the file.

Once you start up EasyTag, it will search your home directory for any and all music format files. This behavior is either helpful or annoying; if it’s the latter, you can simply stop the search and go to the directory of your choice. It will resume the search from there.

Tagging files

There are three ways to tag music files with EasyTag:

  • Manually.
  • Automatically with the “Fill Tag” scanner.
  • Automatically via CDDB, which is a database for software applications to look up audio CD information over the Internet.

Manual tagging is pretty much self-explanatory (and tedious.)

The mask editor dialogAutomatic Fill Tag relies on the filenames of your music files to automatically fill in the ID3 entries. EasyTag has a couple dozen formats that cover almost every imaginable case.

Automatic CDDB tagging only works if files are sorted per album and if the actual CDDB entry exists. You don’t actually have to have the CD on hand: you can search for the album ID through EasyTag. Once found, it will label the files for you.

All in all, a great way to manage and maintain information on your music files.

Availability

EasyTag is available in Debian since at least Sarge and in Ubuntu (universe) since Dapper.

Posted in Debian, Ubuntu | 10 Comments »

aria2: high speed command line download utility

July 16th, 2008 edited by Tincho

Bonus article this week, submitted by Anthony Bryan and Tatsuhiro Tsujikawa.

If you’re a frequent downloader and comfortable on the command line, then you need to try out aria2. aria2 is a cross platform download utility, similar to graphical download managers except that it uses less system resources.

aria2 has a number of invaluable features such as download resuming, BitTorrent and Metalink support, segmented downloading, downloading a single file from one or multiple servers (including integrated BitTorrent and HTTP/FTP transfers), downloading many files at the same time, automatic error recovery/repair (BitTorrent and Metalink downloads only), etc.

aria2 is a command line application, but don’t let that scare you off. You can use aria2fe, a graphical front end, if that makes you more comfortable.

Keep in mind that aria2 is more for heavy downloading, and if you want a webspider then wget would be a better choice.

How to use it

The easiest way to invoke aria2 is by typing aria2c URL/fileName

$ aria2c http://host/image.iso

The URL can be either a regular URL to a file, a URL to a .torrent file, or a URL to a .metalink file. For BitTorrent and Metalink downloads, there are extra options available such as throttling upload speed, only downloading selected files, changing listening ports, and seed time and ratio. To pause a download, press Ctrl-C. You can resume the transfer by running aria2c with the same argument in the same directory.

Downloading identical files from multiple sources

aria2 supports multiple URLs for the same file. You can specify them on the command line (space separated) and aria2 will download from multiple URLs at the same time.

$ aria2c http://host/image.iso http://mirror/image.iso

This command will split the download between multiple servers. aria2 can even download the same file from BitTorrent and FTP/HTTP at the same time, while the data downloaded from FTP/HTTP is uploaded to the BitTorrent swarm.

Repairing damaged downloads

aria2 can repair downloads with errors by using the information in .torrent or .metalink files.

$ aria2c -M test.metalink --check-integrity=true

The -M option specifies a local file called test.metalink to get the information to repair the download.

Parameterized URLs

You can specify set of parts. The following command will download part of the same file from 3 servers, don’t forget to escape the parameter to avoid shell expansion.

$ aria2c -P 'http://{host1,host2,host3}/file.iso'

You can specify numeric sequence using []. This command will download image000.png through image100.png from the same server.

$ aria2c -Z -P 'http://host/image[000-100].png’

The -Z option is required if the all URIs don’t point to the same file, such as the above example.

Other options

aria2 has a lot more options, you can for instance use:

  • -T filename.torrent to specify a local .torrent file.
  • -M filename.metalink to specify a local .metalink file.
  • -i textfile will download all the URLs listed in a textfile.
  • -s for example -s2 will download a file using 2 connections.
  • -j for example -j5 will download 5 files concurrently.

aria2 has many other options. To read the man page, type:

$ man aria2c

Availability

aria2 is available on most Linux distributions. Official Debian and Ubuntu package are available:

  • Debian: stable, testing and unstable
  • Ubuntu: feisty, gutsy, and hardy.

Community & developers

aria2 is actively maintained and developed by Tatsuhiro Tsujikawa. Bug reports, feature requests, and forums are found on SourceForge.

Links

Posted in Debian, Ubuntu | 16 Comments »

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