Cable News and Signal Strength

One of the channels I knew that we would both miss is MSNBC.  In looking through the content on Roku, I found Roku Newscaster.  The channel has ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, FOX, NPR, BBC and a few others.  I just watched yesterday's Rachael Maddow show.  The feeds are from the following day.  Watching breaking news isn't this channel's strong point.  But it is not only free, but free of commercials.  Plus, I can pause the feed to answer the door.

Somewhere I read that Vizio didn't include signal strength meters to keep the cost down. Yesterday I discovered that under System, there is a signal strength meter.  It gives a numerical number, it looks like from 1 to 100, on the strength of the antenna input.  You do have to go back to the menu every time you change channels.  Not a big deal, but that does slow you up.

Home Media Center Up and Working

Did a temporary fix to the script and now the Home Media Center is up and working.  Streaming a movie from my DVD collection as I write this.  Quality is good.  There have been three or four buffering events so far.  Only other issue is screen size.  If I play the same movie on the Blu Ray player, I get full screen.  Streaming through the Roku gives a standard screen size.  There are some choices in Handbrake that may solve this problem.

Still working on Home Media Server

The biggest problem so far has been getting traffic to the tornado web server on port 8888.  I finally decided that the problem was Apache listening on port 80 and grabbing the traffic before iptables redirected it to the tornado web server.  To fix the problem Apache was moved to port 8000.  Then iptables was able to redirect port 80 to port 8888 with no problem.  I used the following iptables command:
iptables -A PREROUTING -t nat -p tcp -d <server_ip_addr> --dport 80 -j REDIRECT --to-ports 8888

The next problem was the lack of image files showing up on the HMS administration page.  Looking at error messages, python was not able to import Image.  I use pip to add PIL to the virtual environment.

pip -E pyvirt install pil

  

Now images show.  

Next item to tackle is getting Roku to get past the page requesting the server address.  I see the request for users, but nothing is displayed on the TV screen.  

Home Media Center - Setting up the Virtual Python Environment

Brian Lane's instructions are very good, but on Ubuntu 10.04 thing are somewhat different.  For example to install "Development Tools" under Fedora you use the command yum groupinstall "development tools"  but under Ubuntu the command is sudo apt-get install build-essential.  However, I was still getting errors after installing all of the requirements.  What was needed was to install python2.6-dev.  Once I solved the missing piece the virtual environment setup went smoothly.  My home media server is now waiting for someone to access it!

Home Media Center

People have asked me for a diagram of my setup.  So here is a quick attempt, using Dia to diagram the setup.

I get feeds from a indoor antenna and DSL service from Qwest.  Once the Home Media Center is running, I hope to build a MythTV to capture HD video from the antenna.

Save money by renegotiating your cable rates

Interesting article on how to save $420 a year on your cable bill.  While I like his determination to keep renegotiating for low rates, the comments are even more interesting.  Like many I thought that the franchise agreement that Comcast signed with the city of Seattle was to protect the residents.  One of the comments goes into some detail on what exactly is covered and what isn't.  Start reading the comments from the bottom.

Cut the Cord

This morning I disconnected the Comcast cable box and connected the TV to the antenna.  Wow.  Great picture.  I even watched a commercial.  The colors were vibrant and crystal clear.  Then can a Dino Rossi ad so I turned it off.  He could have at least used a HD quality recording for his commercial.

When I returned the cable box to Comcast I expected to get a sales pitch.  Happily I was just given a receipt and was told that the account was closed.