Atkins Meyer

HDTV’s are awesome. Watching HD video on HDTVs is even more awesome. Playing HD mkv files with anything other than a home theater pc (htpc) is not awesome. About a month ago I moved my desktop PC in to my living room and gave it HTPC duties. It served it’s purpose well but I’d like to reclaim it so I can do some after hours coding on a side project. Apple recently released an upgraded Mac Mini and it appears to be quite a capable HD media center device. The entry price for a Mac Mini is $599 and before I purchased one I decided it was due diligence to see what the same $599 could get me on the PC side. Here is what I was able to put together.

hec Black 7K09 Micro ATX Media Center / HTPC Case $48.99

GIGABYTE GA-E7AUM-DS2H Micro ATX Intel Motherboard $119.99

Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 3.0GHz LGA 775 65W Dual-Core Processor $164.99

CORSAIR 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 $44.99

Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST31000333AS 1TB SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive $89.99

SAMSUNG 22X DVD±R DVD Burner with LightScribe Black SATA Model SH-S223Q $24.99

Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-2250 Dual TV Tuner / Encoder 1229 $109.99

The total here is $603.93 and includes everything needed to build a complete HTPC. Below is a comparison of this machine and a Mac Mini.

VS

Analysis: The Mac Mini lacks HDMI output. You would need to run a DVI cable to your TV and an optical audio cable to your amplifier. This requires a separate optical TOSLink cable. With this cable the Mac Mini outputs 5.1 surround sound but is unable to do 7.1 or DTS audio.

Another concern with the Mini is the cpu speed. The 2.0GHz Cure 2 Duo chip will not be able to decode Blu-ray and high bitrate h.264 video without dropping a significant number of frames. There are ways to make HD playback work. The 9400M gpu can easily handle HD video decoding but you need to have the proper software. In Windows, you need NVIDIA’s pure video HD package installed for gpu acceleration in windows media player. You could also pick up PowerDVD which does very nice gpu accelerated playback of all video except mkv files. Seriously PowerDVD what the fuck. Unfortunately, the Windows version of XBMC (my personal favorite htpc application) does not support gpu accelerated playback at this time.

In Linux the VDPAU libraries recently released by NVIDIA do a good job of gpu HD video decoding. Most of the major Linux apps, VLC, MythTV, Xine, MPlayer and XBMC have preliminary support for VDPAU now. A Mac Mini running Ubuntu, via Boot Camp, would be a good choice to take full advantage of the Mini’s hardware.

I’m not an OS X expert but I’m going to assume that the Apple engineers have enabled gpu video acceleration within OS X. Long story short, If the Mini can use its gpu for video playback, it’s in the clear. If not, then 1080p video and Blu-ray is going to look shitty. The 3.0GHz Core 2 Duo chip in the PC box is fast enough to decode Blu-ray video along with other high bitrate h.264 videos. The faster cpu gives you a lot more flexibility when you choose your OS and media playing applications.

The PC also has a TV tuner card so you can use MythTV or MediaPortal to turn your box in to a fully featured digital video recorder.

If you’re interested in saving money you could save about $100 on the PC cpu and get Core 2 Duo at around 2.0GHz. You could also lose the TV tuner for another $100 of savings. Finally you could save an additional $50 by getting a 250G hard drive instead of a terabyte hard drive. This would put the total cost of the PC around $350 and would still be a little better hardware than the Mac Mini.

When it comes down to it, you pay Apple for the OS and the form factor. The Mac Mini looks pretty sweet. It’s quiet and uses less power than a PC build. OS X is a solid operating system with some very nice features. For me, virtualization on OS X is amazing. In a perfect world, I’d surround myself with Macs running VMWare Fusion 2.0 and I’d be knee deep in OS X, Windows 7 and Ubuntu 9.04. In this world, I need HDMI output, DTS sound, Blu-ray and h.264 decoding so I’ll stick with the PC hardware.

Last summer I started down the dark and confusing path of high definition media when I bought a Samsung 52LNA650. I’m very happy with my TV and I’d recommend Samsung sets to anyone interested in getting a 32-52 inch LCD display. About an hour after I had it out of the box, I realized that I needed a new video playback device. I’d been using an original Xbox with a mod chip for all my media playback. An original Xbox running XBMC was an amazing combo of hardware and software that played any low definition content that I’d throw at it. Have an xvid movie on a cdr? no problem. How about a set of 50 rar files, containing an iso image of a dvd9 in a shared folder on my desktop pc? Again, no problem, everything played seamlessly.

XBMC was so good I worried that by getting a PS3 or a Xbox 360, I’d be getting a much worse media center device. The problem was that I needed more up to date hardware to play HD video. The original Xbox can output at 720p and 1080i; however its hardware does not have enough power to decode HD video at those resolutions. The 733mhz custom Intel cpu and 233mhz Nvidia gpu was very outdated.

My first solution was to get a Xbox 360. I bought it as a media center controller and the fact that it plays games was just a bonus. At first things looked ok with the 360. The 1080p output was nice. The 360 interface looked sharp and seemed pretty feature full. The up-scaling DVD player looked pretty good. All of my xvid movies played back very well. Things seemed great until I downloaded a 720p mkv video.

The Xbox 360 will not play mkv files. If you’ve never used a mkv file, it’s a great format. The mkv file is a container which holds video, audio, subtitles and other dvd menu like features. This means you can have a movie with English and Spanish audio, subtitles in German, Swedish, Japanese and Korean… all in a single file. This is awesome and will be the format of the people for the HD era. The Xbox 360 can play h.264 video which is the most common video type in mkv files. Most mkv files contain 5.1 or 7.1 Dolby encoded audio streams and the Xbox 360 is only able to play 2.1 AAC audio.

There is no easy way to get the Xbox 360 to play these files but there are a few options. First, re-encode the mkv in to a wmv file or a mp4 less than 4GB. The end result here is pretty good. You get a slight loss in quality and a single file that makes the 360 happy. The bad news is that it takes 10-20 hours on my desktop pc to re-encode a single 2 hour movie. The second option is to use a tool like XenonMKV to convert the file. XenonMKV takes the mkv, and repackages the h.264 video in to an mp4 file. It also down samples the audio stream to a 2.1 channel stream. This process takes about 20 mins per video. The big drawback is that is uses an mp4 container which must be smaller than 4GB for the 360 to play it. This is a pain, most 720p mkv files are about 4.5GB so that they will fit on a DVDR. You now either have to split the file in to two parts or try to drop the quality of your audio stream to get the end result under 4GB. Having two parts of a movie is terrible since the 360 does not have a video queue and you need to manually start the second part of your video. The PS3 is very similar to the 360 in terms of video playback: no mkv, only mp4.

Long story short, the 360 and PS3, blows for playing mkv files and all I want to do is download and watch mkv movies and television shows.

I eventually became so frustrated that I grabbed my desktop pc and hooked it up behind my entertainment center. I installed the Windows version of XBMC and was blown away. My ATI Radeon 4850 decoded video much better than the 360. Playback was smoother and there was noticeably less jitter. The MediaStream skin included in XBMC looks amazing and downloads full 1080p images and metadata for your movies and television shows. The library in XBMC is much improved and does a fantastic job of organizing and presenting your media. I’m very happy, again, with XBMC. My only complaint is that I tried a bunch of other shit before I realized that XBMC has completely spoiled me and that there is nothing better out there. I am keeping my eye on Boxee which is a modified version of XBMC that includes a lot of online media and social networking features. I’ve played with the Linux alpha and I’m patiently waiting for the Windows alpha to be released.

Finally, the last bonus of having a media center pc is that pc games look amazing at 1920×1080. A newer video card looks noticeably better than a 360 or PS3.

Great news for people using Wiigator’s backup launcher. He has just release a new version which is easier to install, runs more games, and loads them much faster than the initial version.

Check out Wiigator’s blog for the full story.

Please note that this is all done with version 3.3 of the Wii system version. Doing the recent update to 3.3E will cause you problems.

The big news is that the backup loader no longer needs dvdx. The installation is much simpiler. If you already are using the homebrew channel you’re 90% done. Next on the news list is that you no longer need to decrypt Wii images. This new version will play both 1:1 backups in addition to discs made from the backup-creator from the inital release. The last thing I want to mention is that it loads fast and a lot of bugs have been fixed. Mario Kart Wii ran perfectly for me and I no longer noticed slow load times.

If you followed my tutorial for setting up the initial release of the wii backup loader then all you need to do is download the new backup launcher and add the two apps, Backup_Launcher and cIOS_Installer, to /apps on your sd card. After that, run the cIOS_Installer and then launch a game with the Backup_Launcher. I was able to use cIOS_Installer without uninstalling anything and it worked perfectly the first time.

Download Wiigator’s Backup Launcher 0.3 beta

Download Wiigator’s Backup Launcher 0.3 gamma

** This is old news. With the release of Wiigator’s Backup Launcher 0.3 beta, it is now much, much easier to setup and run backups on your Wii. Please see my update to this tutorial.

With the recent leak of Waninkoko’s backup iso loader and an improved loader made by Wiigator, it’s now possible to softmod a Nintendo Wii to load burned backup discs created from iso files. I got this working on my Wii a couple of days ago and had to look all over the web to find the correct and most up-to-date directions. I’m going to post what I did and what tools I used in this blog so that everything can be found in one place. While this process is far from difficult, I’m hoping someone comes up with a homebrew package that does the following hacks in an easy, run once format. Anyhow, lets get started.

First, you need to find a copy of The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess for Wii so that you can run the twilight hack and install the Homebrew Channel. I’m not going to cover that part, since it’s already well documented. Even if you’re not interested in the backup loader, I highly recommend installing the Homebrew Channel to everyone out there. It’s fun, legal and very safe.

Now the fun part. Fire up some Dio or Foreigner and get ready to rock.

Add the following apps to your SD card in the \apps\ folder so you can run them from the homebrew channel. Note that you will need to make a folder for each app (ex. \apps\dvdx) and put the .elf or .dol file in that folder and rename it to boot.elf or boot.dol. Do this with the following apps:

• DVDx – download
• WAD Manager – download
• Wiigator’s GeckoOS – download

Now download CIOS36_rev5-64-v1042.wad and place it on your SD card in the \wad folder. Now stick your SD card in your Wii and do the following

• start the homebrew channel
• run the WAD Manager and install the CIOS36_rev5-64-v1042.wad file and return to the homebrew channel
• run DVDx, select advanced install and install CIOS249
• shutdown your Wii and restart it

Your Wii is now ready to run burned dvd-r discs. You can run them by inserting the dvd-r, starting up the homebrew channel and launching Wiigator’s GeckoOS. From there just select Launch Game. Wiigator’s GeckoOS will launch both PAL and NTSC originals and burned dvd-r games. I believe that it will also launch all kinds of Gamecube discs too but I haven’t tried that.

Finally, to make a Wii iso compatible with the loader you need to do the following. You need a Wii iso file which you can rip yourself or download. There is a tutorial at wiiisos.com on how to create an iso from your original Wii disc. Please note that downloading Wii iso files is illegal.

Now download backup-creator-v1.zip and place your iso and the contents of the zip in to a folder. Open a command prompt and cd to that folder. Run backup-creator.exe with the name of your iso (ex. backup-creator mario-kart.iso). Lastly, burn the newly created partition.iso file with the free burning software ImgBurn. I use all the defaults options with ImgBurn and burn on dvd-r (not dvd+r) media at slow speeds.

The Wii scene is changing fast. The loader and the cIOS will surely be updated again soon to iron out the bugs which are in this early release. Update the loader and the cIOS as new ones are released. Currently, there are a couple of problems with this method. First, read speed is locked at a max of 3x, which means load times are longer and full screen video is slow or jumpy. The second problem is disc compatibility isn’t 100%. Currently PAL games work better than NTSC games and around 20% of games will crash or freeze.

*Update April 22nd, 2008 11:21am CST – I added a small fix to correct the estimated time remaining before you have enough of each resources to build a new field. Please re-install the script to receive the update.

I’ll admit it, I’m a total Travian addict. It’s just so fun and I’ve built so many little towns and lived through so many epic battles that I just can’t let it go. Fortunately, the server which I play on is nearing its end and the game will be reset within a month or so.

Anyhow, I’m a power gamer and I like using the best tools around. I’ve been using a script called Travian Beyond for about 8 months now and I really enjoy it. It is a script which overlays additional information, links and game play options on top of the normal Travian page. This is done using Firefox and a Firefox add-on called Greasemonkey.

Unfortunately, earlier this week the Travian developers decided to try limit Travian Beyond’s ability to add functionality to Travian. Long story short, I’ve fixed the majority of the problems that their update introduced and you can install the new version of Travian Beyond at the bottom of this blog post.

Thanks to Victor Garcia (aka Croc) for writing the original Travian Beyond and to Szabka on userscripts.org for making some further modifications. Finally, check out the Travian Beyond 3 – all language thread over at userscripts.org for further updates.

Install Travian 3 Beyond

When I moved to Chicago in the summer of 2007, I thought that living near a beach would be a summer time bonus. It turns out that Lake Michigan freezes over in the chilly month of February. Living on the banks of Lake Michigan is kind of like living on the ocean. The body of water is so large that you can not see across it even on the clearest of days. If the weather is just right, you can see the smoke stacks of Gary, Indiana and Michigan City. Since the lake is so massive and sea like, I wasn’t expecting much ice to form on it during the winter months. The ice formed in amazing patterns and melted and refroze in a rapid manner. Ice near the beach would reach 20-30 feet in to the lake and 5-10 feet above the beach, then in a matter of 24 hours, it would be gone and the lake would instead be frozen out towards the horizon.

I started taking pictures in January and tried to take them as often as possible. I took the photos using my iPhone camera, which is great because it’s quick and not so great when there is a lot of reflected light. When the sun was hitting the ice on the lake, the reflection caused photos to appear almost as if they were taken at night. While interesting, these photos are not ideal for the photo documentary. Anyhow, on to the goods.

Here are some of the highlights. The complete set is available in high resolution on my flickr account.

** My method is now old news. Jailbreaking, activating and unlocking a 1.1.3 iPhone and iPod Touch can now be done quickly and easily using ZiPhone. Happy Hacking!

Since Nate True released the iPhone jailbreak for firmware 1.1.3 this week on his blog there have been a lot of people having a lot of problems getting everything working. There are a handful of tutorial available now but I had to piece together steps from many different sources before finally getting a fully functional 1.1.3 jailbroken.

I have an OTB (out of the box) 1.0.0 phone and yes, I paid the apple nerd tax. I have a contract with AT&T. This tutorial is only for people using an iPhone OTB version before 1.1.2 and are legitimately activated through AT&T. That being said, this method will produce a fully functional and jailbroken (not unlocked) 1.1.3 install. Some of the problems that people have with poor 1.1.3 upgrades are broken ring tones, broken location finder, missing edge icon, broken iTunes preview, broken youTube, input characters vanishing and settings not being saved. Most of these problems seem to come from the 1.1.3 soft upgrade using the 1.1.3 iPhone software and older, 1.1.1 or 1.1.2 iPhone firmware. The method below will result in a jailbroken 1.1.3 iPhone using 1.1.3 software and 1.1.3 firmware.

First of all you going to need to download the following things:
iBrickr Classic – That’s right, do NOT use Nate’s new 1.1.3 iBrickr
iPhone firmware 1.1.1 and 1.1.2 – Available from iphone.unlock.no
Touchfree 1.1.2 Jailbreak – Available from Conceited Software
iTunes 7.5 -This is important so uninstall a newer version if you need to.
a virgin 1.1.3 lockdownd file

Long story short this is what you need to do:
1. upgrade your iPhone to the real 1.1.3, which updates the software and firmware.
2. downgrade to 1.1.1 which downgrades the software to 1.1.1 but leaves 1.1.3 firmware
3. jailbreak 1.1.1 using the jailbreakme.com activation method
4. update the installer, community sources and install the BSD subsystem and OkToPrep
5. use iTunes to update to 1.1.2
6. use the 1.1.2 jailbreak
7. install the 1.1.3 Jailbreak DevTeam package
8. reactivate the phone through iTunes using a virgin lockdownd file

To start I reccomend that you backup you data so you can restore your 3rd party app settings later. Use winscp with opensshd on the iPhone to save the contents of your user folder to someplace safe.

Now, this will blow your mind. Use iTunes to update to the real, legit, non-jailbroken 1.1.3 firmware. This will update the software and more importantly the firmware on your iPhone. Once that is complete your ready for hack-tastic fun. Now you need to downgrade to the 1.1.1 firmware using recovery mode.

To enter recovery mode, connect the phone to the computer and press and hold the Power button (on top) and the Home button (on bottom front) simultaneously. After about 15 seconds phone will appear to turn off, release the Power button but keep holding the Home button. After about 15 seconds the computer and iTunes will detect the phone in recovery mode, and you can perform a restore. IMPORTANT: If you just click the restore button, it will restore it with the latest firmware. It’s much safer to manually select firmware instead. If you want to manually select a different firmware you can hold down SHIFT key (Windows) or Option/ALT-key (Mac) when clicking the Restore button, and it will let you choose firmware file. Choose the 1.1.1 firmware you downloaded earlier.

iTunes will now install the 1.1.1 software and error out after trying to install the 1.1.1 firmware giving you a 1050 error. This is fine. You now need to fire up the old iBrickr and it will find your phone in restore mode. Tell iBrickr to boot the phone and hope for a red screen. If you get a green screen try using iBrickr’s option to downgrade to 1.0.2, which will display a white screen and then restore the 1.1.1 firmware. Once the phone has booted you will have invalid sim errors and an unactivated phone.

You now need to do the old school 1.1.1 jailbreak using jailbreakme.com. An excellent tutorial can be found at iphone.unlock.no. Once you’ve jailbroken 1.1.1 you need to fire it up, update the installer and community sources, install the BSD subsystem (to be used later) and the OkToPrep package. Once this is all installed you clear to update (not restore) to firmware 1.1.2. This can easily be done by shift-clicking the update button in iTunes. 1.1.2 will do the same thing that 1.1.1 did. It will update the software but leave the 1.1.3 firmware in place and error out with a 1050 error. This is fine. You need to use iBrickr again to boot the phone. Like the first time you want a red screen followed by a reboot and sim errors. Now it is time to run the 1.1.2 jailbreak. After it completes, you will have an jailbroken and activated 1.1.2 phone with sim errors.

Now install the 1.1.3 Jailbreak DevTeam package and be sure to follow all the instructions. Turn on wireless, dock the phone, disable autolock and make sure you have installer updated and the BSD subsystem installed. This will run for about 20-30 mins and reboot the phone when it is done. The phone will boot up a jailbroken 1.1.3 firmware without sim errors but you will not be connecting to the at&t network.

The final step is to install openssh and use winscp to connect to your phone so we can replace the hacked lockdownd file with our virgin one. Put it in /usr/libexec, use term-vt100 or ssh to do “chmod 0555 /usr/libexec/lockdownd” then reboot your phone. Connect it to iTunes and it will activate it for you.

You should now have the fully functional jailbroken 1.1.3 software and firmware on your phone. I’ve tested it pretty extensivly and all the 1.1.3 features work perfectly. I no longer have trouble with ring tones, itunes previews, map location fuctionality and other oddities that I had using Nate True’s 1.1.3 iBrickr alone.

Lets hope someone comes out with an easier and cleaner way to jailbreak 1.1.3 but until then this method should work a large number of people. Good luck!

After a little over a week I was able to repair my computer, restore my data and get everything back up in working condition. I should have more time to work on naivarT and other nerdly projects.

Well, it is a say day for me. My main computer died. I haven’t quite figured out exactly what’s wrong yet but it appears to be the motherboard or the power supply. I’ll get things fixed up and get back on the blog train.

Update: 1-16-2008

Time to buy a new motherboard. I ordered one and hopefully it arrives before the weekend.

I’ve been very happy using the Google Desktop software lately and have done a little bit of widget programming. Google Desktop adds, among other things, a Vista style sidebar to your desktop which can be filled with a ton of great gadgets. The selection of gadgets that are available in Google Desktop seem to be far and away better than what I’ve seen created for the Vista sidebar and it has officially won me over.

That being said, I had not found a weather gadget that I liked. There are many weather gadgets that show the current temperature and all the standard weather information; however, I really wanted something that gave me quick access to my favorite weather maps. So, I modified the U.S. Weather Map gadget, which is by Vishnu.S, and came up with my own style.

This one is for the weather enthusiast and includes U.S. weather, radar, satellite, water vapor, precipitation, current temperatures and forecasts on a national and local (Chicago) level. The national maps should work great for all the U.S. users out there and the local maps can be changed pretty easily by anyone with a little XML knowledge. If you have any interest in the gadget, please click below and check out the page I’ve made for it.

Take me there!