This took me forever to find on the internet, so I figured I'd copy/paste the script I put together to transcode movies to something that the Xbox 360 can play via either ushare or fuppes. The benefit of this is that you don't then have to transcode movies on the fly to WMV which fuppes supports. Anyway, here's the script:

#!/bin/bash

for each in *$1
do
output=`basename "$each" $1`_transcoded.avi
echo Transcoding "$each" to "$output"
ffmpeg -i "$each" -f avi -vcodec mpeg4 -vtag xvid -r 29.97 -b 2139k -bf 2 -g 300 -acodec mp3 -ar 44100 -ac 2 -ab 128000 "$output"
done

Put this into a file called "transcode.sh", chmod +x it and then cd into a directory containing movies you want to transcode. You need to pass the file extension of the movies you want to fix, so for example if I have a bunch of mpeg movies I'd run:

transcode.sh .mpg

Really the most important thing I found to make these transcoded video files work on the Xbox 360 is to use mpeg4 for the video codec and xvid for the video tag.

Last weekend I helped my brother in law fix his Xbox 360, it had succumbed to the dreaded red ring of death (3 lights). After lots of searching and sifting through silly websites that sell you a book and kit I found a proper do-it-yourself video, complete with a list of the exact parts you need to do the fix. You at least need T10 and T8 Torx drivers to unscrew everything, and I opted to get an unlock kit as well to make it easier to get the 360's plastic case off. But you don't need an unlock kit either, as shown in this guide to taking apart the 360.

The procedure is straightforward enough. You get the case apart and pull out the motherboard, take off the x-clamps on the bottom of the motherboard (nerve-racking), take the screws for the x-clamps out of the heat-sinks, clean off all traces of thermal grease from the chips and heatsinks using rubbing alcohol or Artic Silver cleaner, then put new thermal grease on the chips, screw the heatsinks back onto the motherboard using the screws/washers listed and finally test and re-assemble. The first test we did still resulted in a 3-light red ring of death, but I believe what happened was the video cable wasn't seated properly in it's connector. The second test went fine. When fitting the motherboard back into the case I found the fit was a little tighter, and it required a little more coaxing to get the front panel circuit board into place.

Anyway, it's been a few days now and apparently his 360 is still working fine...

I get the odd search coming in related to connecting up mpd and icecast together, so I figured I'd actually make a helpful post for once. I'm going to keep this pretty Ubuntu specific as I got this all working using packages that are already available from the Ubuntu repositories.

First off, you want to install mpd and icecast2 via Synaptic. Don't install the "icecast" package, that's the old version of icecast and it doesn't work with mpd. You'll know if you've installed the old one because the configuration file is not in an XML format.

You then need to configure mpd to use an audio output for icecast to connect to. Here is an example mpd.conf that's pretty much what I'm using in-house. Most important things to keep in mind are that "mount" needs to end in .ogg, you'll need to use whatever you set for "password" when configuring icecast, and that "user" needs to be set to "source". You can see in my mpd.conf that I've set up mpd to use both a soundcard and icecast. That means my music collection and playlists are basically available at home or anyplace where I have access to the internet.

To configure icecast2 you only need to make a couple basic changes to /etc/icecast/icecast.xml, setting "source-password" to match what you set for "password" in mpd.conf. You should also change the admin password as well. Also you'll see in my icecast.xml example that I'm using a fallback mount (in the "mount" section of the file). This points to a short .ogg file that consists of just static. The reason for this is that with the default configuration you need to get mpd playing a song before you can connect to icecast. It's annoying, so what you can do is configure a fallback mount. This lets you connect your player to icecast first and then you can start mpd. More importantly, if you skip songs in mpd or change the playlist, you don't have to re-connect your player to icecast, the fallback mount will kick in whenever mpd is stopped or paused. Finally I opted to use static rather than silence for 2 reasons. I found it difficult to make a silent ogg file because silence compresses so well, and icecast won't stream it properly. Secondly, the static is actually handy, as you know that your player is still connected and streaming audio from icecast whenever mpd is stopped or paused.

I was watching last Saturday's Headbanger's Ball last night and started wondering just how metal in general has really gone down the tubes. Hell, Headbanger's Ball alone pretty much is teh suck, but I think the main problem is there's just too many metal bands and they all sound absolutely identical. I can't even believe I'd ever be saying this, given that I've listened to metal for years and years, starting with my very first Iron Maiden tape (Seventh Son of a Seventh Son), moving on to Slayer and Sepultura and so on...

I especially wanted to throw up all over myself while watching yet another DragonForce video, and I was going to go on a long winded rant but luckily someone already has for me.

And before I forget, here's another example of epic fail, Wykked Wytch.

I finally found Encyclopedia Dramatica and I love it.

So the biggie is that my company just announced that we're being acquired by Progress Software. The transaction is expected to close sometime in September. For me it could really be good, as Progress has an office in Nashua, NH and Bedford, MA, which would really help out my commute. Lately the drive down to Waltham has been more atrocious than normal for some reason. But anyway, Progress looks like it's a nice company to work for, so fingers crossed the transaction goes well and they decide to keep the customer service and engineering departments on (it's expected that they will).

Kristen and the baby so far are doing just great. What's really neat is that you can feel him once in awhile, it's really exciting. I just came from an afternoon of holding babies at a friend's birthday party, so I feel all babied up.

Finally, I settled on getting this device to make my music collection available all around the house. I first decided that my webserver machine was just not powerful enough to handle running mpd as well as the website, every time someone hit the website mpd would skip. So I decided to re-enable the onboard sound on my desktop machine and configured mpd to use the onboard sound. I also still configured icecast, 'cause even though I've got the FM transmitter I still want the option to stream audio for when I'm at work or wherever. And I've also configured mpdscribble, so regardless of where I listen to my music from it'll get submitted to last.fm. Again, it's odd that I care about it, must be some deep rooted narcissism or something. I then also thought I'd add some javascript to the page here to query the icecast server and print out what I'm listening to at any given moment.

Anyway, the transmitter so far works really well, I've only done a little bit of cursory testing with it and a couple different radios, one in the bedroom right next to the office and the other in the living room. Once I fastened the antenna to the ceiling with a thumbtack and tried a few different FM frequencies I've got a pretty good low-static broadcast that sounds great. The real test will be to see if the signal can make it out to the screen house as is.

I hope the poor kid isn't gonna be scarred for life when he finds out later on that there's been vids of him posted on teh intarwebs from before he was born.

Anyway, the level 2 ultrasound folks let you bring up a DVD and they'll burn the whole session to disc for ya.

Here's part 1:

And here's part 2:

There's a fullscreen button in the lower-right corner of the player's toolbar. The flash video player by the way is MC Media Player

Lately I've been really into listening to music, or at least just having it playing while I work or clean or whatever. Up until recently I've been using the excellent Jinzora streaming media server, which is a PHP-based web app that can either stream files via HTTP or control mpd. I've mostly been using the streaming feature, either I'd stream tunes to my desktop in the office and just turn up my computer speakers, or I'd set up my laptop somewhere (like out in the screenhouse) and hook it up to some random stereo that otherwise is sitting and collecting dust.

A couple weeks ago though I wanted to have music playing both in the house and out in the screen house. I wound up blasting music from the office and had the laptop out in the screenhouse, however they were of course not in sync at all, so as you came inside you'd be hearing a completely different song. It was mainly a problem if you stood in just the right spot in the backyard, where you could hear two different songs playing at any given time. Pretty awful I thought.

Since then I've been looking for a better setup. I've tried:

• slim server - which worked pretty good, but the Java WebStart program that behaves like a slim server client refused to run on my 64-bit Linux desktop. I also really didn't want to shell out any cash for the hardware devices, though they're a nice-to-have.
• VLC - I wanted to try and get multicast working so I could sync several VLC clients together, but streaming over multicast seemed to completely suck, regardless of how I configured the server I couldn't get anything but a choppy stream. Also I didn't really find a good way to automate the server, or have it behave like a constant stream that I could just connect clients to.
• Jinzora controlling mpd - Problem here is that Jinzora's controls for MPD are pretty basic, and I've been finding that my little server has been getting more and more sluggish with more recent Jinzora releases.

I finally settled on mpd using gmpc to control it. The music server outputs to both the soundcard on my server and to icecast2. And gmpc lets you toggle which output to use, either the stream, soundcard or both. This means I can still stream music from home to work (or wherever else I can get a wifi connection), and from the basement out to the screen house, but I can also have multiple clients connected to icecast2 streaming the same playlist relatively in sync. Or, I can have music playing out of the server (connected to a receiver currently in the basement hooked up to speakers pointing up at the basement ceiling) and streamed to my laptop in the screenhouse, though there's some latency between what comes through the soundcard and what comes through the stream.

I'm also using mpdscribble to submit track info to last.fm. I'm not sure why I care about submitting tracks, but it's kinda cool to see trends in what kind of music you're listening to.

The only downside is that my wife's Windows Vista laptop so far absolutely refuses to play the stream, and I haven't bothered getting an mpd client downloaded onto it, but who cares about that anyway?

We had to go up to Portland, ME to get a level 2 ultrasound since the machine apparently wasn't that good at our normal place. Here's a teaser, click on it to get to the whole album.

And he's definitely a boy! In this pic he's either yawning or giving his primal scream...

At work I was asked to look into any potential open source web conferencing tools that we can use as part of our new support system which will maybe get deployed sometime this year. I recall looking into this a little bit a couple years ago and really didn't find anything, so I wasn't to hopeful I'd find anything this time either.

Go figure though the second hit on Google was WebHuddle, it's GPL, runs on JBoss and has Linux, Windows and Mac support. I had it up and running in about 10 minutes or so and have done a little bit of testing, and while it's not as fast as WebEx for desktop sharing it's still decent enough, I think the cross-platform support beats that out anyway, as the capturing is done by a pretty small pure Java applet.

So just in case anyone is looking for an open source web conferencing tool that you can deploy in your own network I figured I'd like post something on it or whatever.

Just upgraded some stuff on the server this afternoon including the kernel, so I rebooted the box and wouldn't you know it didn't want to come back up at all. I went down into the basement to check it out and of course it was sitting there waiting for the power button to be pressed (it's a pretty old machine). So I shut it off, turned it back on and of course it promptly turned right back off again. I spent a few minutes trying a few things to get it working again, including unplugging the external HD (I had an older one that for whatever reason would cause the box to refuse to power up if it was plugged in), unplugging the UPS, fiddling with the keyboard and so on.

But no luck. So I changed my desktop upstairs to have a static IP address, slapped together a quick "my site is screwed" page and set my router to point to the desktop. I also had to turn on the router's DHCP server, as the web server was handling all of that.

I figured I'd try and get the server back up and running, I mean it's been on and running without a problem for months now. I finally found that I had to unplug the external HD and UPS, hold in the reset key and flick on the switch on the back of the machine. I then had to continue holding the reset key for a good minute or so and then once I let go after about 10 seconds the machine did it's POST beep and started booting. Which of course means I had to frantically plug in the external HD since it's configured in my /etc/fstab.

Then of course my router decided to go crazy on me...