The only issue I’ve had is that the included proprietary ATI driver fails when you try to use suspend, however this is apparently easily circumvented by using the most recent driver from the ATI site (it was a bug with their driver.)

Using the open source driver results in poor power management, so I’d advise against doing that.

Install:

apt-get install trac libapache2-mod-wsgi


Initiate the trac environment:

trac-admin /var/www/srdev/trac/ initenv


Set permissions:

chown -R www-data /var/www/srdev/trac/


Install the wsgi script and web resources. The first argument before ‘deploy’ should match the install environment (the path above.) The second argument following ‘deploy’ can probably go anywhere, but I just shoved it in the trac dir.


trac-admin /var/www/srdev/trac/ deploy /var/www/srdev/trac/www/


Next, we need to tell apache how to call the wsgi script, we do this using an alias. You can use / if you just want it to be in the same dir as your virtualhost, but in my case I wanted trac to be in a sub directory of the site (www.mysite.com/trac.) Add this to your virtual host (/etc/apache2/sites-enabled/whatever.)

The directory directive specifies some permissions for the script.

WSGIScriptAlias /trac /var/www/srdev/trac/www/cgi-bin/trac.wsgi
<Directory /var/www/srdev/trac/www/cgi-bin/trac.wsgi>
WSGIApplicationGroup %{GLOBAL}
Order deny,allow
Allow from all
&lt/Directory>


Finally, enable the wsgi module, and then restart apache. Now it *should* work

a2enmod wsgi
/etc/init.d/apache2 restart


The reason for this warning is because PHP4 can’t communicate with a MySQL5 server unless it’s using old passwords (set by using the OLD_PASSWORD() function below.)

There are two simple ways to fix this. The first would be to upgrade your version of php. Unless you *really* need php4 (or below?!) upgrade! I’m not sure php4 is supported any more and should be considered a security risk. If you can’t upgrade, just do this in your database:

update mysql.user set password=OLD_PASSWORD('thepassword') where user = 'theusername';
and:
flush privileges;

This should do the trick. Be warned, if you issue any GRANT statements after this you will have to update mysql.user again.

Playback of any AC3 file seems to result in a barely noticable (but very annoying) 100ms or so audio lag. This doesn’t drift which is good, but it makes watching anything with an AC3 soundtrack very annoying. I’ve tried various things to try and fix this and make sure it’s not me or my files, but the unit. Strangely, this only seems to occur when playing back NTSC files, and not PAL (25fps) files.

Other than that, it’s pretty good. I’ll hang on to it until I can test it on someone else’s setup. Otherwise it might have to go back to the shop!

*update*

After more testing with different files, it seems to be off-sync with a bunch of files, not just ones with an AC3 soundtrack. I also tested the device at a friends place before finally taking it back. If Western Digital manages to sort this bug out, I may consider buying it again…probably not though, manufacturers need to start testing stuff rather than just putting things out there and then releasing good firmware a year later.

I also just found out the WDTV violates the GPL, so I don’t want it anyway!

*update2*

Version 1.02 firmware is now released for the WDTV, and I’ve recently bought an AV reciever which has built in a/v delay stuff (and optical/hdmi inputs etc..) so perhaps it is time to re-purchase WDTV after all. Converting MKV/h264 to AVI/xvid for my xbox w/ac3 isn’t so great.

*update3*

I did re-buy the WDTV, and I’ve been very happy with it, but only if using firmware version 1.02.03 (I think it’s that one) which has all the sync issues sorted. Recommended!

The xbox360 doesn’t like divx/xvid files that have ac3 sound tracks, so we can use mencoder to convert these files so they use 128kbit stereo mp3 soundtracks instead. This isn’t too hard to do, just use a command similar to:

mencoder input.avi -ovc copy -oac mp3lame -lameopts cbr:br=128 -channels 2 -o output.avi

Easy when you know how.

Before I began I read on the Ubuntu forums that many people had problems trying to get the thing to work. I found it was fairly straight forward which is probably a result of the new(ish) drivers on the edimax website for Linux.

You can download the latest source from http://www.ralinktech.com/ralink/Home/Support/Linux.html – I didn’t see any restrictions or licenses on there for the source, so I’ve decided to compile and upload the modules as I need them. You can check back here to pick up the latest if you’re not confident compiling it yourself.

Please don’t try running the modules on kernels that they are not for. This will not work! You will need to compile it against headers for your currently running kernel if you don’t find it listed here.

Then you’ll want to extract the kernel module:

bunzip2 rt2860sta.ko.bz2

Now test that it works before you continue:

sudo insmod rt2860sta.ko

Now run iwconfig to see if the module loaded OK. If so, you should have the ra0 device listed.

If all is well, copy the module to the kernel module directory:

sudo cp rt2860sta.ko /lib/modules/2.6.24-19-generic/ubuntu/net/rt2860/rt2860sta.ko

Now we’d like to tell it to auto-load upon system startup. We can do this by adding the line: rt82860sta to the /etc/modules file. Easy!

Update!!

I’ve recently found a link to a dynamically building kernel module .deb file, which is great because it means you can just install this .deb on your system and it should work. With a bit of luck the Ubuntu team will include the driver in Intrepid, but I wouldn’t hold your breath:

http://www.array.org/ubuntu/dists/intrepid/eeepc/binary-i386/rt2860-dkms_1.7.1.1_all.deb


kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.24-19-generic root=UUID=75a92494-bdae-4715-92d9-f06d1887008e ro all_generic_ide


e.g – Add the all_generic_ide parameter. All should be fine once again. I believe this is a strange Ubuntu kernel bug, although I’m not sure.

At the time of writing, the xbox360 doesn’t support anything other than 2 channel AAC audio for mp4 streams, so you’ll have to put up with that. It does work well though.

1. Gather video information
mkvinfo movie.mkv
Look for things like the following:

|+ Segment tracks
| + A track
| + Track number: 1
| + Track UID: 1
| + Track type: video
- snip -
| + Default duration: 41.708ms (23.976 fps for a video track)

This shows us track 1 is the video stream. Remember that, it’ll come in handy later. Also, make a note of the fps, if you get the FPS wrong later you’ll have a/v sync issues. Generally track 1 is always the video stream and track 2 is always the main audio stream:


| + A track
| + Track number: 2
| + Track UID: 445320639
| + Track type: audio
- snip -
| + Name: Main audio DTS 1536
| + Audio track
| + Sampling frequency: 48000.000000
| + Channels: 6


Make a note of whether you’re dealing with a DTS stream (as in my example) or an AC3 stream. There is a newer format ACC3 or something..I don’t know much about that.

2. Extract the video and audio streams from the mkv
Remember, mkv and mp4 are just like avi (in some ways.) They are all container formats, not the actual video itself. Now we extract the audio and video streams we want. If you like you could choose different audio and video streams you discovered using mkvinfo.

Extract the video:

mkvextract tracks movie.mkv 1:video.h264


Next we have to do something quite strange in order to make our h.264 file compatible with the xbox360. Run hexedit video.h264 and change the sequence: “67 64 00 33″ to “67 64 00 29″.

Now we have our video file ready for muxing, we need to deal with the audio stream:

mplayer movie.mkv -novideo -ao pcm:fast:file=audiodump.wav -channels 2

This gets the audio from the mkv file and saves it as audiodump.wav ready for re encoding using nero’s AACenc program (http://www.nero.com/eng/down-ndaudio.php):

3. Encode the audio dump to AAC format
Now we encode the wav file to AAC:

neroAacEnc -lc -ignorelength -q 0.50 -if audiodump.wav -of audio.m4a

Both the audio and video streams are now ready to be muxed (put together) by MP4Box:

4. Mux the files

Remember to use the correct FPS value we obtained using mkvinfo from earlier!

MP4Box -new output.mp4 -add video.h264 -add audio.m4a -fps 23.976

output.mp4 is now ready to watch!!

Footnotes:
1. I didn’t have any luck getting windows media player 11 to stream the mp4′s to my xbox, I got the all to common ‘format not supported’ thing on the xbox even though they played just fine on WMP11.

2. You’ll want to split your original MKV into just under 4GB chunks if you’re putting the files on anything other than DVD5/DVD9. Do this:
mkvmerge -o output_part.mkv --split 3900M movie.mkv

*note – we leave it just under 4000M for two reasons, firstly fat32 can’t store eactly 4GB, secondly I’m not sure if it’s GiB or GB…!

3. Special thanks to Mike from Linux Love. For some tips that actually worked!

4. I’m not sure if there’s an artificial limit on the file size of mp4s that can be played back, but I will know by this afternoon!

Update:
It appears as though the xbox360 doesn’t like any media files > 4GB, a bit of a shame really. Hopefully the next dashboard update will fix these issues. Until then, looks like we’ll have to put up with split files.

Check it out: Banshee 1.0!