I did a fresh install of Live 10.1 yesterday and ran into some differences between my configuration steps as detailed for 9.11. Again, this information is well documented in the forums but not collected in a single place. I. Install XBMC Live to Revo HDD Download XBMC Live. Download unetbootin. The Mac version didn't work for me so I had to run it under a Windows VM. Plug in your USB drive and format it FAT32. Launch unetbootin, select the XMBC Live iso and select the drive letter of your USB key and then let unetbootin do it's thing. Plug the USB key into your Revo, turn it on and hit F12 for the boot menu and select your USB key. [Note: the guide has you create a file for permanent storage. This is only necessary if you want to run XBMC Live directly from the USB key. If you're installing to HDD then it's pointless.] At the XBMC Live boot menu select the Install to HDD option. You'll then see the normal ubuntu command line installer and it'll walk you through partitioning the drive, etc. Remove the USB key, reboot per the installer and make sure XMBC loads. II. Audio over HDMI [Note: this is very dependent ...

This is a repost of the article, How to Synchronize Your XBMC Media Center Between Every Room in the House, at Lifehacker. The functionality is dead simple, I just wasn't aware that it existed. The advantages of keeping a central library for all of the xbmc boxes in your home should seem obvious; however take a moment to think about the design implications. So, obviously, for this to work you have to have a central server box in your home network that will be on 24/7. On that box, you'll need to install MySQL. I'm not going to replicate any of the details of that from the post because I know that I know how to do that. And since I'm my audience ... Next create a new db for xbmc and create/assign a user. CREATE USER 'xbmc' IDENTIFIED BY 'xbmc'; CREATE database xbmc_video; CREATE database xbmc_music; GRANT ALL ON 'xbmc_%'.* TO 'xbmc'; The Lifehacker author assumes that you only have MySQL running for this purpose and tells you to use grant all on * to xbmc. Not the best choice if you also have MySQL for other things. MySQL has additional security options if you're so ...

[ Information in this post is completely outdated. The best thing to do is install Dharma from source or wait for next release. ] Update 2-12 See bottom of post for instructions on how to enabled gpu acceleration of thumbnails as well as fanart. Replication of this tutorial for having the gpu render fanart images on xmbc live/ubuntu just in case it goes away. This is experimental at the moment and has some drawbacks for every day use, but will show an improvement in scroll speed in the gui as its handing off loading fanart images to the gpu; very handy for low power atom/ion computers. To enable dds fanart in xbmc, create an advancedsettings.xml file in your userdata directory. If using XBMC Live, this will be ~/.xbmc/userdata. Edit advancedsettings.xml and add: <advancedsettings> <useddsfanart>true</useddsfanart> </advancedsettings> I believe you'll need to reboot/restart xbmc for this to take effect. Cons: The .dds images are much larger than the jpg compressed tbn files, e.g. 10MB vs 1.4MB a bit larger than the jpg. I went back and looked and most were only about 1/3 bigger than the original. So obviously this isn't going to work so hot Might be a deal breaker if you're running Live on a small-ish ...

This post is outdated after the Dharma release, I will copy relevant info from this post to the newer post. [Note: There's currently a bug that has been fixed in svn (changeset) that causes Aeon to crash. I compiled and installed from svn and confirm that the bug is fixed; will create an idoits guide to installing from svn soon. Again, like most things XBMC, it wasn't hard but nobody wanted to give up concise, correct instructions.] Notes I'm filling in a lot of blanks from this guide on the XBMC.org forums here, or the Lifehacker guide here. Unfortunately a lot of this info is scattered around forum posts and these guides will only get you most of the way there. For instance, don't mess with adding the nvidia drivers to the iso ... I mean you could if you wanted to but why not just do them after install? Purpose I need to catalogue all of the changes I had to make so that, in the event I ever need to do it all over again, I don't spend the six - seven hours it took me the first time digging through random forum posts. For my purposes, I want to install ...

Sony KDL-40XBR Review Bought a new TV. Another one. Cause our house got straight up robbed. And all they stole was our beloved 37xbr6. No Christmas presents, no jewelry, nothin'. They rifled through everything, and at first I thought they stole our camcorder (with tape that hadn't been transferred yet) and an old sentimental watch. Later it turned out they just moved them while digging through our crap. Sad that all we own worth stealing is our TV. Walked right by my iMac in the kitchen, didn't touch it. They even moved the Christams ornaments that were sitting in front of the TV and set those aside so as to not break them. Thoughtful criminals. Funny story: Logan was so upset that they'd stolen his shows until we explained that his shows were on the TiVo and it was still there. Which means, in about two-three years the natural evolution is that DVR will be built into the TV. His mind was absolutely blown that anybody would enter our house without our permission. He's still kind of stressed about that. Anyway, back to the new TV. It's not as good as our old ...

The PS3MS default icon bah-lows. I tried using all manner of exe resource editors to change the internally embedded icons but after the program wouldn't run. Finally I came across this post on the PS3MS forums. If PS3 Media Server is running, shut it down. In %program files%\PS3 Media Server\ find pms.jar. Rename pms.jar (make a copy just in case) to pms.zip and open with Windows Explorer. Find \resources\images\ Replace Play1Hot_256 (and probably Play1Hot_32 and Play1Hot_16 too). Close and let Windows Explorer recompress. Change name back to pms.jar and restart PS3 Media Server. The only thing I'd add is that the instructions only have you change out Play1Hot_256 but there are also resources for 16 and 32 that I changed out. I didn't leave those as default to see what happened, so if you still have the default small icons that'd be why. Also, the main XMB icon under Video doesn't preserve alpha. I'm currently using this icon I found on deviantart. black green purple yellow So far, I have to admit, I'm only using PS3 Media Server to stream .mkv (usually muxed with mkv2vob first. Sometimes .mkv transcodes can have audio sync issues. But next up I'll look into internet radio, the itunes library integration and web ...

Part 2 in my PS3 Media Server series, icons for movies and folders. This is should be covered extensively in the FAQ, and it may or may not be, I'm not going to bother checking. Primarily this a resource on where to find movie art and icon templates. The naming convention for assigning icons is %filename% (including extension).cover.png(or .jpg). E.g. Man On Fire 1080p BluRay DTS.m2ts.cover.png. Folders: create your folder and drop in a folder.png(or .jpg). Image dimensions are 320x240. [ Finding Artwork ] themoviedb.org Site is mainly for XBMC / Plex style media center apps but it's a good resource for good quality artwork. Look in the lower right corner for the movie poster. GetVideoArtwork (Beta) New one I just found a couple of weeks ago, geared toward iTunes artwork and sometimes slim pickings but really high quality. [ Creating Icons ] PSD Templates: I did not create these templates, I found them in a forum thread about PS3MS thumbnails. I believe it was this thread on avsforum. Click on the image to download the PSD. FullHD Template 1080p text, blue case and disc with blu-ray logo. I turn off the blue glow layer. Create a new layer in the ...

First in a series of three posts about PS3 Media Server. Install is a breeze, just run the installer (as admin) and if you don't have JRE it'll download and install it for you; if you need x64 you'll need to download it manually. The problem I encountered on Windows 2008R2 was that the provided, 'Install as a Windows Service' option didn't work correctly. It uses Java Service Wrapper and seems to install and start correctly. Netstat even shows it listening on the correct interface and correct port. The only thing I could find, was the debug log showed that it was trying to use a temp directory that didn't exist. However, even creating that directory and making sure it had permissions, it still wasn't working. This may also be a problem on Windows 2008, I'm not sure and I didn't find any mention of it on the PS3 Media Server forums. The solution was to use good old instsrv / srvany from the Windows 2003 Resource Kit. Go through the normal process of using instsrv, naming your service and then pointing to srvany. Edit the service in the registry, add a ...

This is all old news, everything I have here is found other places, but I did run into a big bug that I had to sift through forums to find the answer to: 2.8 and above has broken image uploads. And from the forum posts its not just when running on IIS. I hadn't run into it when I was running 2.8 on Apache, but I was also running a very old version of PHP. The symptoms are that when trying to upload a picture into a post, the screen will show, 'crunching' and then, when finished, will be blank where you'd normally expect to see the uploaded image along with it's options. If you check the server, thinking there might be a permissions issue, you will find the image that you uploaded. My solution was to downgrade back to 2.7.1. Couple of things we'll need: Windows 2008 with IIS 7 ... obviously (or 2008R2 IIS 7.5) URL Rewrite PHP 5.2.11 or 5.3 Non Thread Safe MySQL 5.1 Community Server [optional] MySQL GUI Tools Wordpress see release archive for 2.7.1 if newest version is still having problems with image upload The focus of this post isn't a complete end-to-end Wordpress setup since ...

I keep coming back to this one, so I figured I better mark it down for future reference. Also from macosxhints.com. This is mainly for using time capsule / airport drives for Time Machine backups. I'm not sure I'd want to hide usb/firewire drive volumes. To hide: SetFile -a V '/Volumes/Time Machine Volume/' killall Finder And then if you want to bring it back: SetFile -a v '/Volumes/Time Machine Volume/' killall Finder

Since I keep having to look this up I better note the two ways to accomplish this. rename /System/Library/CoreServices/DefaultDesktop.jpg to something else and then copy in your own version of DefaultDesktop. Just make sure you rename the original first so that you've got an easy backup. sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow DesktopPicture "/Path/to/picture/you/want/to/use/image.jpg". Put the image in /Users/Shared so that all users have access to it, otherwise might be permissions issues. You can also always go with a couple little gui progs that'll do this for you too.

I don't think this is wordpress specific, but this where I wanted to categorize this one. I knew enough to enable mod_deflate on apache right from the go, but the other day I was dinking with firebug/yslow ( excellent article on putting yslow results in perspective ) and noticed that most of my js files weren't being compressed. I've got access to the server, and I can't see any reason not to enable gzip across the board, so all my deflate stuff was in httpd.conf. Why were some js being compressed but not all? And then I finally googled upon somebody else having the same issue who had found a solution. Insert the following in the .htaccess file for the site: <IfModule deflate_module> (or mod_deflate.c for non-win32 apache installs) <FilesMatch "\\.(js|css|html|htm|php|xml)$"> SetOutputFilter DEFLATE </FilesMatch> </IfModule> I'm not happy about having to put this in each site's htaccess, and I know if I don't record this it's going to bite me in the ass later when I need to do this again, so that's why this post is here.

Ran into this today, thought I better make myself a note. By default PHP sets a limit on the size of a file that can be uploaded; yeah, great, you'll find how to change that limit on google. But what doesn't get mentioned very often, is that for uploading through the wordpress admin page, there is also another limit that needs to be changed. Both: post_max_size and upload_max_filesize need to be changed. My default PHP install had post max size set to 18M and upload max size set to 2M.