Nice to read some new messages on this thread

Jim,
There is a feature that I really miss from my retired x86 frontend: The ability to skip ahead any X number of minutes. On the x86 FE, you can type "17" + CR and you'll jump ahead 17 mins in the recording.

I suspect this is difficult if the roku doesn't support number buttons.

With mythroku, I've been using the FF feature which is great however it takes longer (usually) and I'm not able to control it as well.

Also, I've encountered a problem of REW suddenly not working when viewing long recordings. I recorded the Olympics Opening Ceremony (a long show), and when I watched it the 2nd time, I did a lot of FF and REW to skip to my favorite parts. Well, after doing several of these ff/rew's, the REW just stopped working. If i pushed REW the osd would say "REW 3x" but the playback would not skip backwards; it just kept on playing forwards as if the button was not pushed. If i pressed REW again it would say "REW 5x" but again skipping backwards. If i exit & restart the playback, ff/rew works again (unless I use it "too much").

Have you seen anything like this?

Many thanks sir!
Donn

the lack of buttons is the issue. One could map the zoom in/zoom out onto fixed time ff or rw. I don.t use the chapter feature that is mapped to these keys. N/S move between bookmarks which I do use.

I haven't seen a problem with FF/RW going away after a lot of use, but it is possible it has messed up the seek table. I'll have a poke around the code and see if I can help that. If you exit and come back in the N/S keys should be able to get you back to where you were easily.

The problem with the ff/rw and catching it - its not perfect - is that the mpegdecoder has buffers that mythroku fills. I cannot know exactly where the stream is at any instant. The flush buffer was never implemented. This is the reason that comm skipping at the start is off. I never figured a very good way to do this but am open to clever suggestions.

thank you for the reply Jim. I wish I could help however my programming skills are limited to simple shell scripts!

I think you are saying that I can set a bookmark, then exit the playback, restart playback, and then jump to bookmark using the Up/Down buttons. I will try that.

This reminds of another issue I've seen. If I set a bunch of bookmarks for a show, then replay the show several days later, I find that the bookmarks are gone. Press the UP key returns "No bookmarks." Have you seen this before?

Thanks
Donn

When you exit a recording it should set an bookmark. Replaying N/S allow you to jump between them. They are stored in the tmp directory so if they cannot be read for whatever reason or the file has been deleted then you will get the "no bookmarks" message. To see the file means you have to know the long filename mythtv assigned your recording. There is an option to flush them. I haven't noticed the problem you mention and there should not be a problem with a lot of bookmarks. The zoom in/zoom out connect to chapters and these could easily be reamapped to a skip +/- n minutes.
n could be input from the command line in the mythroku.roku file.

Are you able to skip commercials? A lack of access can mess up the ff/rw

[

A

lso, I've encountered a problem of REW suddenly not working when viewing long recordings. I recorded the Olympics Opening Ceremony (a long show), and when I watched it the 2nd time, I did a lot of FF and REW to skip to my favorite parts. Well, after doing several of these ff/rew's, the REW just stopped working. If i pushed REW the osd would say "REW 3x" but the playback would not skip backwards; it just kept on playing forwards as if the button was not pushed. If i pressed REW again it would say "REW 5x" but again skipping backwards. If i exit & restart the playback, ff/rew works again (unless I use it "too much").

I have noticed this same behavior with Football games. Also my bookmarks do not work.

Chris

hmm, I am not sure why FF/RW stops working but can see a set of circumstances under which it might be occurring. If I understand correctly after a lot of FF and RW ing the button shows increasing or decreasing the FF/RW speed but the show plays at normal speed. Is this correct? I suspect it has got lost in the seek table. I will also look into the bookmark matter. Perhaps they are not being written properly. But hey this part of the code was written by someone else!!!

jm_maclaren wrote:

hmm, I am not sure why FF/RW stops working but can see a set of circumstances under which it might be occurring. If I understand correctly after a lot of FF and RW ing the button shows increasing or decreasing the FF/RW speed but the show plays at normal speed. Is this correct? I suspect it has got lost in the seek table. I will also look into the bookmark matter. Perhaps they are not being written properly. But hey this part of the code was written by someone else!!!

Yes, you got it correct Jim. After a lot of FF/REW'ing, it gets into a "broken" state. In this broken state, if you are in PLAY mode, you press REW, the screen does a little flicker and playback stutters as you'd expect REW to do, but instead of actually jumping backwards what you see is the video that you would have seen if you never pressed REW (normal PLAY video). In other words, pressing REW and not pressing REW results in the same video, except when you press REW you see a little flicker in the playback (and the REW logo increments to "3x" or "5x", etc.

jm_maclaren wrote:

The zoom in/zoom out connect to chapters and these could easily be reamapped to a skip +/- n minutes.
n could be input from the command line in the mythroku.roku file.

That would be cool! I could really use a jump of more than 30secs, in addition to the 30secs. I'd probably use 5 or 10 mins for my value of n.

jm_maclaren wrote:

Are you able to skip commercials? A lack of access can mess up the ff/rw

When in the "broken" state, I cannot skip commercials or any other video using the ff/rew keys. Also, I don't use auto-commercial-skipping. old school

Thanks
Donn

Ok, I have adjusted the FF/RW algorithm to hopefully avoid it getting lost. I suspect it was a race condition between threads. So I have been a bit more careful in finding where we are in the seek table. I did a lot of FF and RW at various speeds and didn't see any issues. I can't make the bookmarks part fail either. I will post a revised version later on after testing a bit longer. Just to be sure my "share" where the executable resides os on ubuntu linux NOT windows, so if the tmp dir isn't writable from the roku that may cause problems. You can look at the files ending .setting. They have the same name as in the myth recordings directory, and see if they get updated when you exit or set a bookmark. As I said I can't reproduce the loss of bookmarks here.
James

On a PS I just added firewire recording on my backend. Works well but I can't initiate livetv from the firewire setup. It starts on the backend but mythroku just shows a blank screen. Anyone else able to view firewire livetv?

Jim,
My tmp dir is set with:

$SXPATH/mythroku.app -settingsdir=/tmp -backend=192.168.1.200 -newestfirst -dbuser=test1

and /tmp is:

# ls -l / | grep tmp
drwxrwxrwt 4 root root 0 Oct 9 22:40 tmp

Contents of /tmp have alot of files that look like:
1544_20081008073000.mpg.png

Also in /tmp are:
drwxrwxrwx 5 root root 0 Oct 8 20:34 .cascade
drw-r--r-- 2 root root 0 Oct 8 20:34 Volumes
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Oct 9 22:40 smbremount.out

I don't see any .setting files
I used /tmp because my mythroku.app is on /mnt/flash1 which is mounted read-only.

# mount
/dev/mtdblock/1 on / type cramfs (ro)
none on /dev type devfs (rw)
/dev/mtdblock/2 on /mnt/flash0 type yaffs (rw)
/proc on /proc type proc (rw)
tmpfs on /tmp type tmpfs (rw)
tmpfs on /var type tmpfs (rw)
tmpfs on /mnt/smb type tmpfs (rw)
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part1 on /mnt/flash1 type vfat (ro,noatime)

I'm running mythroku off the CF card. It is read-only. Could that be the problem?

Donn

Ok, I moved my "settingsdir" from /tmp to /home/mythroku
Rebooted and made some bookmarks.
Now in /home/mythroku I see a .settings file

# ls -la /home/mythroku/
drwxr-xr-x 1 root root 512 Oct 9 23:53 .
drwxr-xr-x 1 root root 512 Oct 4 2005 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 104 Oct 10 00:00 1051_20081009230000.mpg.settings
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 320 Oct 10 00:03 1051_20081009233500.mpg.settings

and the contents of that file is:

# cat /home/mythroku/1051_20081009233500.mpg.settings
#MythRoku File. Do not modify
b /mnt/flash0/home/mythroku/1051_20081009233500.mpg.settings@800986536
b /mnt/flash0/home/mythroku/1051_20081009233500.mpg.settings@961000848
b /mnt/flash0/home/mythroku/1051_20081009233500.mpg.settings@1059304848
b /mnt/flash0/home/mythroku/1051_20081009233500.mpg.settings@1066775952
z 0

I think I found (and fixed) my bookmark problem

Donn

300zx wrote:

Ok, I moved my "settingsdir" from /tmp to /home/mythroku
Rebooted and made some bookmarks.
Now in /home/mythroku I see a .settings file

# ls -la /home/mythroku/
drwxr-xr-x 1 root root 512 Oct 9 23:53 .
drwxr-xr-x 1 root root 512 Oct 4 2005 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 104 Oct 10 00:00 1051_20081009230000.mpg.settings
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 320 Oct 10 00:03 1051_20081009233500.mpg.settings

and the contents of that file is:

# cat /home/mythroku/1051_20081009233500.mpg.settings
#MythRoku File. Do not modify
b /mnt/flash0/home/mythroku/1051_20081009233500.mpg.settings@800986536
b /mnt/flash0/home/mythroku/1051_20081009233500.mpg.settings@961000848
b /mnt/flash0/home/mythroku/1051_20081009233500.mpg.settings@1059304848
b /mnt/flash0/home/mythroku/1051_20081009233500.mpg.settings@1066775952
z 0

I think I found (and fixed) my bookmark problem

Donn

I think it is preferrable to have these files on a network share just because of the finite number of write cycles on flash. Can you not mount the cf card read/rewrite ?

The FAQ http://forums.rokulabs.com/viewtopic.php?t=6259 states:

I've telnetted into my PhotoBridge, but I can't write to my compact flash card

By default when a compact flash card is put into the PhotoBridge it is 'mounted' as being read-only. However it is possible to remount it as read/write using the following command

Code:
mount /dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part1 /mnt/flash1 -o rw,remount,sync

I will post the revised binary this weekend.

James

ah ok, you're right again Jim. I should watch the write cycles on the onboard flash. I'll try mounting the CF read-write tonight. THANKS!

300zx wrote:

ah ok, you're right again Jim. I should watch the write cycles on the onboard flash. I'll try mounting the CF read-write tonight. THANKS!

it works, and i just figured out that I can put this in /mnt/flash1/.flashrc.local and have this done automatically at reboot. nice.

I have uploaded 0.82p which has a more stable FF/RW algorithm. I haven't seen any issues but have not tested on many reordings.
Enjoy!
James

PS out of interest has anyone watched livetv via firewire from mythroku successfully. I tried when I finally got a stable firewire connection from my cable box. Recordings are fine but livetv hangs somewhere. I haven't tried debugging yet as weekend time has been limited.

PPS I have not added the skip +/- n minutes mapped to zoom in/out but will in the next release

Jim

I can not figure out why my bookmarks do not work.

I have my mythroku.roku application on a smb share in the following directory on Sony PC

/mnt/roku/

in the same directory I have a tmp directory so from the root directory it would be

/mnt/roku/tmp


If I telnet into my roku and look for this tmp directory I get there by doing the following

/mnt/smb/sony/roku/tmp

My mythroku.roku file looks like so:

echo $0
SXPATH=`echo "$0" | sed 's/\mythroku.roku//'`
echo $SXPATH
$SXPATH/mythroku.app -cleansettings -settingsdir=$SXPATH/tmp -backend=192.168.15.201 -dbuser=roku


Any idea what I am doing wrong?

Thanks

Chris