September 2008 – Roo's View

AspireOne fixing MPlayer..

The stock MPlayer that is included with the AspireOne didn’t see to have support for very many codecs. It certainly didn’t handle the quicktime videos (.mov) that our Kodak point and shoot created, nor did it manage to handle a xvid encoded video I had converted from DVD using DVDRip.

Many users of the AspireOne simply install VLC Media Player, there is a pretty long how to thread on doing this in the aspireoneuser.com forum. There are also plenty of comparisons out there on the web about vlc vs. mplayer – I’m not going to go there. The reason that I didn’t immediately go the VLC route was that the AspireOne shipped with MPlayer, and it seems more reasonable to ‘fix’ it than simply throw it out and start fresh. (of course, my end solution was basically toss the stock MPlayer and install a new more useful one).

I can’t take credit for figuring out how to do this. Some web searching turned up the answer posted with nice detail on another blog. I would recommend that you review the comments to the posting before trying to upgrade your Mplayer. I had some problems, all of which were addressed in the comments (and for the most part have been rolled back into the main post). The only problem I had that was not covered in the comments, and is likely due to some of my previous hacking was missing dependencies, which was cleared up by issuing a “sudo yum update fedora-release” before trying the install. Hats off to Mike Silva for posting a great how-to.

This now makes it possible to use the AspireOne to watch movies converted from our DVD collection, handy for when we’re travelling. The updated Mplayer can also handle quicktime movies created by our camera, giving us another good reason to drag it along on trips.

Installing and Using SlimRIO

I’ve previously talked about the SlimRIO project, but I finally got around to actually getting it properly setup and installed in the playroom downstairs. I figure I should give back to the community and write up a short How-To article.

Continue reading “Installing and Using SlimRIO”

Mom Knows Best..

The other day my Mom came by for a visit and she had brought along a 1st generation iPod shuffle that she “had never got it to work properly”. Being one of the geeks in the family, I tend to get random computers and what not brought by for me to fix up – so this was no surprise. I zipped upstairs and plugged it into my PC and it was recognized and looked to be fine.

It was a bank account give away my Mom had picked up a year or two ago, and apparently she has no use for it and I was free to hang on to it – or find it a happy owner. Initially my reaction was, hmm.. who’s going to want this? Then Jenn had the insight to suggest that I use it. It took a while for me to warm up to the idea.

It appears my 30G Video is dead – or at least, the logic board is bad. I could likely buy a used one locally for around $120 either for parts, or just as a replacement. There is a good chance I could recover some of the cost of a new device by parting out my busted one as the drive and screen appear to be in “ok” shape (and have some value). Of course, the (refurbished) 8G touch is tempting – but going that route means living with a subset of my music. So.. if I can fill the portable music gap with this old (free!) shuffle, it will also let me experiment with life with a subset music collection.

The shuffle is actually a good match for my music listening, for the most part – I listen to a single smart playlist on shuffle. I did use the video on plane trips to watch ripped DVD movies, and I’ll miss that. As well, ever once in a while I’d get a song served up to me that I didn’t know who (or what) it was – having a display is nice there.

The first challenge was deciding what should go on the shuffle. Based on my past toying around with playlists, I simply fired up MusicIP and used it to build a new playlist starting with the Liar’s Rosebush track Artcrime. The free version of MusicIP stops you at 75 tracks, but the 512MB shuffle can only store around 70 tracks at my MP3 encoding rate, it’s fate I tell you.

Secondly I had to fight with iTunes to get it to copy the playlist onto the shuffle in the order of the songs on the playlist. I managed to make this work, but I’m not sure I can explain it – the key is to get iTunes to copy files in the correct order. I’ll just say again how much I dislike iTunes on Windows, its performance really eats away at the Apple “cool factor” for me.

So I’ve joined the iPod cult again (did I ever really leave?) rocking some retro gear. Thanks Mom!