User talk:Chewi

Ok, this is my personal page, where I will put my own ideas, that come to my mind when playing around with LinuxMCE...

Please don't tell me where to write what into what wiki-page. This is just my notespad, for you to enjoy if you want... ;)

You are welcome to leave your comments, but please write then italic and sign them...

The MythTV-System

Looks quite nice, but for some reason, the startup does not work properly...

It seems to me, that the time it take to tune to LiveTV with my DVB-T-USB-Receiver is too long. If there is no other way to work without a timeout, maybe the timeout should be increased or set as a variable within pluto-admin, so users with issues can set it.

The Audio Stuff

The Audio Stuff kind of sucks. The most essential thing about audio is playlists and feeding them.

And feeding playlists does not really work, because LMCE always jumps to the newly added entry. I found out so far, that the xine.h only offers an open_media function, I'll have to check qxinewidget from the kaffeine-player to see, how they do things. So there would have to be additional work to be done to add the enqueue-button. Additionally i sometimes would like to enqueue a whole folder; that button would have to be created as well...

next the thumbnails are bad. they have to be set for every single file. I want to be able to set them folder-(which in my case are albums)-wise...

Next comes ripping of cds... i don't want to have oggs. My car-hifi doesn't play oggs... LMCE uses dvdcss2, it can as well use lame-mp3.

So with all this to be done, i'm thinking if it might be a good idea to use music-player-deamon as a backend. it is very easy to interface with, it can be set remotely (e.g. web interface, as with mythweb), and it can issue a shoutcast-stream, so i could listen to my music from work, without installing anything on the computer there. The cover-art and even artist-art in gmpc as well as one of the web-interfaces is working very well. i would guess, that code could be borrowed.

The playlists interface could probably use some polishing indeed, I haven't played with it that much but I have ran into the same problem, the web-admin has some options for that too but again I haven't put much time into that either.

I have hardly looked at thumbnails at all, for the few CDs I tried it did seem to put the covers up when you sort by album (iirc). And you should be able to select a different format (like mp3 or flac) for the ripped tracks in the webmin.

Streaming would probably be a nice feature, there are people looking into integrating video-streaming possibilies already, see the forum for the discussion.

--Zaerc 07:09, 7 October 2007 (MST)

Another interessting part would be, to have the lyriks somewhat similar to gmpc. as linuxmce is inteded to be always onscreen, that would be something to fill the screen with, besides artist-pic and cover-art...

speeking of which, why is the coverart not displayed at all, when playing a song ?

Asterisk

Well i allready put the problem with the from-internal to from-trunk change to the wiki

additionally i had to set some stuff, to get asterisk going.

i created a /etc/asterisk/sip_nat.conf with

externip=myhost.dyndns.org
externhost=myhost.dyndns.org
externrefresh=5
localnet=192.168.80.0/255.255.255.0

as well as set this stuff in /etc/asterisk/extensions.conf to receive direct calls to me

[from-sip-external]
;enable direct sip calls
include => from-trunk

The call routing does not seem to be too intuitive as well, or buggy... I still can't seem to have it working the way i want...

Additionally, it would be nice to be able to assign a certain number to a certain user as well as certain phones to certain users.

Usecase: I live with my girlfriend and we would like to use different numbers, as you only pay for what you phone out on sipgate, so get a number for each of you. and if it rings 10 times on my number, people are asked to either leave me a message or call my girl. that would be nice routing...

Usecase: I have a cellphone that is sip-ready. So on this cell there should only be calls coming in, intended for me, user_1, not for user_2.

To really have the LMCE-Phone-System be compeditive, these things have to be addressed, i think.

Why does pluto-admin only allow me to define one phone line ? see 1st usecase above...

You may want to try "from-pstn" instead of "from-trunk" (which could create a loop I think). And you can do a lot more setup from the integrated AMP website (web-admin: Advanced > Configuration > Phones setup) it has more options to setup call routing and a second line.

--Zaerc 09:09, 7 October 2007 (MST)

Sources

To be able to address these issues, i need the current sources... But I still haven't found out, where to get them. Maybe I'll just download the tar.gz.torrent and see where that leads.

I might start a svn with my patches. But should i make it private or public ?

But what is the thing about this sqlcvs ? how does it work ? does it really sychronize currently ? even webpaul didn't know...

Home Automation

What should it be ? There is no ZWave in germany and it is too expensive. EIB is even more expensive, i'm a poor student.

FS20 seems not to work correctly, according to another user...

Waiting for PCLBUS now... Looks good on Hari's example-install. How about HomeMatic? Are there any best practices?--Martinseidel 13:03, 11 August 2010 (CEST)

Pictures

Why are pictures recognized by LMCE at all ? It's useless. You cannot set them as Background-Slideshow. That's always Flickr...

You cannot build custom slideshows. You cannot rotate pictures... No auto-mount and transfer from a camera... Not even a possibility to watch them fullscreen... it would've been so easy.

Then there is tagging... It's always a pain in the ass, but esecially with pictures there needs to be a nice and easy way to tag e.g. the people visible. or give tags for quality and privacy. I don't want my beach-pictures to be shown at a party-slide-show.

Predefinable Tags, like Cheackbuttons onscreen... If they are halfway transparent, they could be on top of the picture. Kind of a tagging-mode. And then have a tag-slide-show... Show everything in folder /public/pictures/2004/10 with the tag "nice landscape". That would be nice for parties.

What if the jpg images are copied into the folder where flikr is keeping pictures and disconnect that from internet...Will the pictures then appear like looping slideshow... That might be an easier fix.. or is it?

Sure, there are several ideas for manual slideshow-hacks, e.g. in the Forum... But I'm after a mechanism that is consistent with the general LMCE-idea and GUI, which I'm not that happy with right now (see collections-idea below)...

Camera

I want to have recordings from the camera whenever motion is detected. If someone breakes in, i want to give the police a picture and video of the intrudor. best to be streamed to a web-destination. uploaded on the fly in 1minute-files. and a continuous on the hard-disk.

Encryption/Collections

Scenario:

If you're using LinuxMCE with a Roommate or in a Flat Sharing or together with you neighbors, you might not want them to be able to watch your intimate home video and they don't want you to watch theirs. But either one of you or both does have root privileges. So what now.

When transfering a movie to LinuxMCE, you cannot allow them to use it. Copyright forbids it.

Solution:

Use encryption. For the file itself, so nobody can see the content and for the database so nobody can see what movies you have and for the movie thumbnail.

The Idea is to use a field in the database that marks encrypted entries. When accessing this media / media directory, you're asked for a password with a full keyboard (like when entering the usernames in the setup dialog).

This (its hash-value) is then used to encrypt the file using e.g. AES.

For the media-searching (db-entries and cover art) I must come up with a good encryption scheme. e.g. use a master-password for the marked entries. Or use Encryption Sets of movies.

Ecryption Sets

You setup an Encryption Set and give it a name and a password.

You then add the movies you want encrypted (files, db-entries (meaning titles), coverart) to that set. They are encrypted with the pass/symmetric key defined by the encryption set.

You can then lock an encryption set so the movies are not accessable anymore and are also not shown in the media-search

You can unlock them to search through them and watch them.

Collections

These Sets could be called repositories or collections. That could make searching easier.

You have a collection of vacation movies, a collection of party-movies, a collection of children movies and a collection of horror movies.

Why would you want to be able to search through any of those at the same time ?

On the other hand it might be interessting to add a movie to several collections ? No... That would be too similar to the genre tag. Collections are distinct.

Is it still interessting to have private and public collections ? Yes... family collections and stuff...

How could this be done ?

Have a table of collections at the core, that contains only a single blob of encrypted data.

This encrypted data is the actual media-table.

On unlocking a collection, the collection is transfered to the MD and decrypted there (on password prompt) and added to the local media-table.

There the table of media-data is held as long as the user stays there. When he leaves, the table is droped (in secure mode) or kept and collections are deleted from it on locking a collection.

On Follow-Me, the table is transfered to the new MD, IF the pincode (or a password instead) on the new MD was correct and deleted on the old one.

So changes for secure and easier mode would have to be, that instead of looking at the core, the MDs look into their own table. On the core there is an additional table with collections, that can be added to the local table on the MD. When a user activates a MD, the default non-lockable collection (the original media-table) is transfered. When a user leaves a MD, the table is dropped.

DVD-shrinking on ripping...

Right now, DVDs are ripped 1to1. So a bunch of data is stored. This takes a lot of HDD for stuff not needed. Bonus-Material is not necessary. For someone familiar with german and english, frensh is not necessary. And the Movie might be too big. Lesser Bitrates could give a good movie.

At the same time the menu should be kept alive for the optional inclusion of bonus material.

Solution: Shrink it.

1. DVD95 is an example for this. But it has a GUI and according to the developer, GUI and functionality are closely wired together. But he allowed his code to be reused in LMCE, when I contacted him.

1. lxdvdrip is a commandline-based program with the same functionality and no interaction. Only parameters do the trick. So it could be utilized. Problem is, that I did not get it to compile yet. Gonna have a look at it soon...