Archive for tag “lang:en”
Subscribe to this tag or categorySince we got a 52″ Samsung LCD TV almost a year ago as a gift from relatives, I knew it was time to attach to it a dedicated computer and have a full digital media experience in the living room. I’ll tell you here my experiences building and running this thing that makes all my guests very impressed and desiring one.
Things you can do with a Media Center
- Play all your digital music (MP3, M4A, FLAC etc) as albums, custom play lists or randomly.
- Browse all your digital music semantically, by Genre or Artist or Song Name or Album. This is very practical and much faster than searching for a CD on your shelf.
- Tune hundreds of Internet radios that play all kinds of specific music as New Age, 80’s, 70’s, Classical, Flamenco, etc.
- Watch movies downloaded from the Internet in Full HD quality (1080p) or almost (720p) with or without subtitles. Who needs Blu-ray ?
- Play last trip photos as a slideshow in a 52″ TV. Who needs to develop photos in paper anymore? You can also play in the background music from your MP3 collection while watching the slideshow.
- Browse photos by trip, year and people that appear on them (if you tag them).
- Watch in a 52″ TV the clips from your last trip.
- Download a collection of 80’s music clips, invite your friends and make a very funny multimedia 80’s party.
- Watch YouTube videos in a 52″ TV.
- Browse Google Maps in 52″ TV.
- Control all the above using a nice handy $20 remote control.
- Let your iPhone/iPod browse, access and play all your music as it is loaded on your iPhone, through UPnP and PlugPlayer.
How to build a Media Center
Its easy and cheap to build a Media Center. In fact, the most expensive component is the TV, not the computer. You can do it with whatever operating system you like: Linux, Windows Vista or Mac. I wanted to do it with Linux because I am more fluent with this platform, but I had to use Vista because Linux audio drivers for my computer were not ready at that time. I’ll put bellow all the conceptual components in an modular way so you can understand what is important on each. But usually you will find them together in a single board very well integrated. In fact, unless you know what you are doing, I recommend using integrated components as motherboards that have a good GPU plus audio integrated in a single HDMI output connector.
The physical ingredients to build a Media Center are:
- An LCD TV. Looks like Plasma is an obsolete technology but I’m not the right person to ask about that. An LCD or Plasma TV is a plain big computer monitor, there is no big differences when compared to the computer monitor you are using right now to read this. Make sure the TV you buy has HDMI input connector, is Full HD (that is, its physical resolution goes up 1920×1080 (a.k.a. 1080p) or more) or at least is Full HD Ready (its maximum physical resolutions is less than 1920×1080 but can handle 1920×1080 signals with distortion), has a VGA input connector and a stereo audio input connector.
- A regular dedicated computer with at least a dual core CPU and 2GB RAM. This will be connected to the TV and forget about using it as a regular desktop. Intel or AMD will do here. If you will play only those low-quality, old, 700MB DivX/Xvid files, a generation before dual core (as AMD Turion) will do, but if you are going to enter the HD world with H.264 (a.k.a x264), MP4, MKV, you’ll need at least 2 cores. About the 2GB RAM, this is a guess and you may play well with a bit less too, but never tested. My system is a Quadcore AMD Phenom, 4GB RAM (because I use it for other purposes too) into a XFX 8200 HDMI-enabled motherborad (this board has unsolved issues with audio over HDMI and high power CPUs, thus I would recommend you look for another brand or model).
- A video card/chip that can go up to 1920×1080 resolution with DVI or HDMI output connector. People keep saying that you need NVidia and this is a lie, let me explain. NVidia or ATI GPUs (graphical processing units) have capabilities and hardware accelerators used by advanced 3D games, not by video players. So unless you are going to use this PC also as an advanced playing station, any GPU (a.k.a. graphic card/chip) will do the job, including those very popular Intel GPUs found on board in laptops. Just make sure to configure your BIOS and set video RAM to the maximum, otherwise you will have video delay problems playing Full HD (1080p) videos. If the video card only has VGA output, thats fine too but be aware that you’ll need extra cables for audio. Read next item to understand.
- An audio card that outputs 7, 8 or 13 channels of sound. Stereo (2 channels) is old school. Today’s any regular DVD has 5.1 (6 channels) surround audio (2 front, 2 rear, 1 center and 1 sub-woofer) and you want to take advantage of that. This is today very common and easy to find in stores, just make sure this component is integrated with the video component above and both use one single HDMI output connector.
- Remote Control. Your folks will call you a complete geek if they’ll see you browsing photos and music with a keyboard and mouse. Out of fashion. I bought a simple but effective infrared remote control that has a receiver that plugs into the USB for about $20. It has specific buttons for Pictures, Video, Music and works well with Vista Media Center.
- Lots of storage. If you are going to collect HD movies, rip DVDs, store photos and rip all your CDs, start with at least 1TB hard drive. Also make sure you have internal space in your computer to receive additional hard drives because you will run out of space sooner or latter. Another option is to have a motherboard with external SATA connectors (similar to USB connectors) and connect external SATA hard drives for increased speed and flexibility. An example of such an external SATA storage is Sagate’s FreeAgent XTreame.
- A silent power supply. Nobody thinks about that but I believe this is very important. Since this PC will stay in your living room or some place for multimedia contemplation, you don’t want to be disturbed by the computer’s fan noise while listening to your collection of zen Ambient music. Spend a few dollars more and make sure your power supply is quiet. I am a happy and zen user of a 450W Huntkey power supply.
- HDMI cable. This is the single cable you should use to connect the Media Center PC to your TV. This single cable should carry Full HD video and 13 channels audio, it should costs $20 and is a clean and modern solution.
These are the aproximate brazilian prices I pay for the hardware parts
| Description | Part Number | Price US$ |
| Motherboard XFX 8200 GeForce | MI-A78S-8209 | $172.22 |
| AMD Phenom Quadcore 9750 | HD9750WCGHBOXSN | $338.89 |
| Seagate Barracuda 750GB | 9BX156-303 | $205.56 |
| 4GB RAM | $133.33 | |
| HUNTKEY Power supply 14CM EPS12V | LW-6450SG 450W | $94.44 |
| HDMI cable | $16.67 | |
| Nice PC case | $138.89 | |
| Gotec Remote Control 3801 for Media Center | $26.61 | |
| Total | $1,126.61 | |
Home Networking
You may want to have Media Center(s) in several spots of your home playing media from a central network file server located somewhere else.
You should pay attention to not overload your home wireless network. I had bad experiences streaming HD media from one computer to another over WiFi. A single wall in between can dramatically decrease the kilobits per second the wireless signal can carry, to a level that is lower than your movie’s kilobits per second. The result are unwatchable movies while streaming. Big photos will also take longer to load to a point that will affect negatively your ambient slideshow.
To avoid that:
- Have your files physically connected to your Media Center. This can be a plain internal disk (this is my choice) or an external SATA or FireWire or USB attached disk. Remember that USB is much slower (even than FireWire) and file transfers (as copying lots of movies to/from a frined) will take longer time.
- Have a separate file server but connect it to your Media Center over a wired network.
Software Requirements
Your Media Center will have several simultaneous purposes. The most visible one is to feed your TV with content, but I also use it as a host to run several virtual machines, a web server, file server and to download things. I use mine 40% as a visible Media Center, 30% as a Media Server (to serve media to other computers) and 30% as a host for other purposes.
Forget about using your Media Center as a regular PC with keyboard and mouse. It is simply not practical and will prevent your wife and kids to use it because you are locking its TV. You can connect to and work with it remotely though, with SSH, VNC, Desktop Sharing, Remote Desktop or whatever technology your platform supports. And this can happen while your folks are watching a movie. I found this way of managing my Media Center very practical and productive.
- Linux-based Media Center
Linux would be my preferred platform for running a Media Center. It is highly configurable and gives its owner a lot of power. To feed your TV, use MythTV or XBMC. Just make sure that devices as remote control, audio and HDMI interface have drivers and will work on Linux. I had problems with that.
- Mac OS-based Media Center
If you are an Apple person, a Mac mini will do the job. It is compact, silent, has a strong enough processor and comes with a nice remote control. If Mac OS is your platform of choice, use FrontRow or XBMC. You will also need a codecs to play all types of media, so download the free Perian codec pack. I don’t know much people that use Mac OS as a Media Center, let me know if you do. You can also use an Apple machine to run Windows.
- Windows Vista-based Media Center
Windows Vista has a lot of improvements for managing media when compared to Windows XP. The native File Explorer support for MP3 and photo tagging is excelent, uses open standards as ID3v2 (MP3) and EXIF and IPTC (JPEG photo) and Vista Media Center has partial support for browsing you media collection through these tags (album, artist, genre, date picture was taken, IPTC tags etc). Strangelly, Vista Media Center does not support browsing by multiple genres and multiple artists so an album simultaneously tagged with genres “Samba” and “MPB” will appear only when you list by “Samba”, not by “MPB”.
Microsoft locks their desktop operating systems in a way that multiple users can’t use it simultaneously, even if there are multiple users created on the OS. This can be fixed installing a small terminal services-related patch. There is also a post-SP1 version of the hack.
So the modus operandi is to create one user called Media that will automatically login and run the Media Center program at boot, and another one for me to login remotely with Remote Desktop and run stuff simultaneously. The Media user has to be administrator and codec packs and plugin must be installed by him.
To play advanced and HD audio and video, H.264, MKV, MP4, DivX/Xvid, FLAC etc, you will also need a codec pack for Windows. I recommend the K-Lite Codec Pack and I use its Mega edition. Having that, Vista Media Center will play any type of media.
I must tell that Windows alone can’t satisfy all my media management needs. Thats why I run a Linux as a virtual machine on the Media Center to make massive manipulations of MP3, photos, video compression, etc.
Still on Vista Media Center, I use several useful plugins:
- Media Control. Improves usability of the remote control and lets you set subtitle and audio languages, enables fast forwarding etc while playing video.
- Google Maps for Windows Media Center. Turns my 52″ TV into an interactive map that I can control with my remote control. I don’t know how life was before this.
- Yougle. Lets you access Internet media from Vista Media Center. In other words, lets you browse and watch YouTube videos, Flickr photos, Internet radios etc.
Happy entertainment !
I love to see crackers attacking my computers. I even wrote a Linux Magazine article about a successful invasion (portuguese).
Since recently, I leave a virtual machine with an easy password ready to be attacked, just to see these crackers’ leftovers, their rootkits and what they’ll do once they brake into my system.
Guess what. Once inside, they use my system to attack more or to create DDoS-capable networks ready to put some website down. They are not looking for my files, nor my other passwords. They are actually looking for my compute power and want to preserve their anonymity through the use of my Internet address. Pretty useless lifestyle.
Those crackers will rarely explore some Apache or Samba vulnerability to get inside. Few of them have brains for this difficult task. They manage to get inside a system simply because some user password is very simple. They use port scanners to find your SSH TCP port open and then try thousands of combinations of user+password until they login. Once inside, they install this same scanning tools and user+password databases to attack other computers on the Internet.
I started to collect this user+password databases in an alphabetically sorted file and realease it here so people may check if some password they are choosing is well known by crackers or not.
Some classical combinations you’ll find in the file are:
root changeme root default root l1nuxb0x root passw0rd root password oracle oracle123 sapdb sapdb
Remember, you will greatelly avoid having your Linux/Unix/BSD/Mac computer being attacked simply following this rules:
- Disable SSH “root” login having the following in your /etc/ssh/sshd_config file:
PermitRootLogin no
- Don’t use a user+password combination that can be found in the file I linked above. Use passwords that are difficult to guess.
- Change your SSH daemon listening port to something different than the default 22 in /etc/ssh/sshd_config. This is a bit inconvenient — but very effective — because you’ll have to remember to provide the non-standard port everytime you want to access your system.
Pretty obvious, but I keep finding Internt-connected systems with very weak and well known passwords.
Pay attention to this screenshot. This is Mac OS running as a VMware virtual machine.
Pretty cool as a proof of technology. But let me tell you, this is quite a useless virtual brick.
The UI is extremely slow. I had to remove the background to improve it a little bit but couldn’t resize to less than 1024×768. Console over network is more than slow, is completely unusable.
Oh, and by the way, there is no networking. The preferences panel recognizes a network interface but it is disabled for configurations, meaning it doesn’t have a driver for VMware virtual network interface. What can be more brick than that ?!
I wanted to have a Mac OS machine to get to know this beautiful platform, maybe develop some apps etc. But I guess I’ll have to wait for improvements for this VMware patches.
The kind of thing you can find circulating in São Paulo, friday at noon.
I was oweing this for the lovers of M. C. Escher works.
Last July I visited the wonderful Escher Museum in Den Haag, Holland. One of my preferred works is the Print Gallery where a painting gets mixed with the surrounding real world in a precise geometrical way, as you can see bellow (borrowed from aixa.ugr.es/escher/table.html).
It is intrigating what happens in the center of the picture, where the distortion would be very chaotic.
In the museum there was a screen that played the following video with a computer simulation recreating the chaotic center. I recorded it with my own camera. Quality is not perfect, but watchabel.
It was calculated and produced by some university I can’t remember the name. If you know who made it, please let me know to put the credits here.
Check it out.
In September 1956 IBM launched the 305 RAMAC, the first computer with a Hard Disk Drive (HDD).
Its weight was close to 1 ton and had a capacity of 5MB. So now please do not complain about the lack of storage in your 2GB pen drive.
Great wine. Recomended. By the way, 2005 is a great year for chilean wines.
The Iron Man movie is all about programmers. Being challenged and have to invent something that will make you get rid of hand work, the adventure of a project, to mold, test and debug, and the joy of having a prototype inspiring the next perfect design.
Just don’t miss it. The metal man movie has a lot of Heavy Metal music and Robert Downey Jr., both fit perfectly.
Oh, and stay until after the final credits to see what are the plans for the next movie.
There was an ISO/IEC/JTC1 meeting in Oslo, Norway wednesday and the local community protested against OOXML and demanded more integrity in ISO’s processes. I couldn’t agree more.
Check it out:
From: “***FONDONORMA***” <in*&%@fondonorma.org.ve>
To: <ki*%$#@itscj.ipsj.or.jp>, <br*%$#%@iso.org>, <tak*%$#%@iso.org>, <ga*%$#%@iso.org>, “Maria Teresa Saccucci” <mar*%$#%@fondonorma.org.ve>, “Norma Arias” <norm*%$#%@fondonorma.org.ve>, “***FONDONORMA***” <in*%$#%@fondonorma.org.ve>
Date: Fri, 28 Mar 2008 14:04:26 -0430
Subject: Modification to the vote on DIS 29500 – Venezuela (FONDONORMA)
Toshiko Kimura
Secretary ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 34Att.: Mr. Keith Brannon, Mr. Maho Takahashi, Ms. Martine Gaillen
Dear Mr. Kimura,
Attached please find a letter from Mrs. María Teresa Saccucci, Standardization Manager of FONDONORMA (Venezuela) through which Venezuela wishes to modify its position on DIS 29500, Information technology – Office Open XML file formats from “Approval with comments” to “Disapproval with comments”.
Best regards,
Leonardo Di Bartolo
Coordinator of International Relations
FONDONORMA
Venezuela
This NO was a result of a very difficult meeting. Consensus was not reached and a lot of confusion happened. Exactly as in the first brazilian NO.
The NB had to decide the final vote based on technical issues still open in OOXML. The problem was the method of deciding and those technical points were not presented. So people only had in their head the Microsoft arguments that I already knew were part half trues and part complete lies.
I participated in the OOXML process in 3 countries and I was able to build an opinion on how normalization happens today in the world, and I’ll show some ideas in a future post.
By the way, this is how Caracas looks like, a city surrounded by huge green mountains that have behind them the Caribbean Sea.
