GTA4 and new Ubuntu!

I picked up GTA4 for PS3 last night at got to play for about an hour. It seems pretty good, supposedly really sandboxy/open ended, but as of yet I'm running around doing missions with some loser Russian guy. As an interesting comparison, it looks to me as if the Xbox360 version of the game is sporting better graphics:
http://www.gametrailers.com/player/33470.html

It looks much less blurry on the Xbox, but this is a pretty low res comparison, and who knows how they did the capture...it must've been done via component cables, so there is no indication how the purely digital HDMI would stack up against each other.

In other interesting news, the newest Ubuntu release (Hardy Heron) is out! I somehow missed out on the buzz over this release...but I'll have some reviews of features once I get it installed. It'll be a few days I guess because the Canonical servers seem really bogged down by the legions of users upgrading, and I'm getting about 50kb/s to the upgrade server at the moment.

Installing Gutsy on PS3 and musings on Blu-ray backups

Well, its done. The instructions on psubuntu.com are really all that you need, so I won't go into much detail here. I'll note that I tried an update straight up using the update-manager, but this left me with an unbootable system, so I decided to install from scratch. Then I upgraded the kernel to support Bluetooth, Wifi, and UDF 2.5.

I popped in a Blu-ray movie, and was amazed to see that the UDF 2.5 functionality actually works and the disk was mounted as a drive almost immediately. I was able to browse through the disk's directories etc. but due to AACS, was unable to play any of the m2ts files containing the actual video and audio. Next thing I'm going to tackle is how to work with Blu-ray movies to decrypt them and put them onto my external drive for watching. The following things come to mind, which remain to be tried out:

1. Using the dd command to rip an ISO of the entire disk from PS3 to an external drive, then mounting that ISO in Windows and using AnyDVD to do the decryption.
2. Using DumpHD in on the PS3 itself to do the decryption (I THINK this is written in Java, have to make sure).

Of course there are annoyances here with number one, like determining what filesystem plays nice with Windows and Linux while supporting 20 GB files, all the while remembering that my target drive is formatted for playback with my Mac. I think HFS+ is my best bet, as Ubuntu supports it, MacDrive is available for Windows, and its Apple's native format. Number two sounds easier, but I'm not sure at all how user friendly the UI is. I guess I'll post another update maybe after Thanksgiving.

Upgraded to Gutsy

The upgrade went off without a hitch! I'm now a proud user of Ubuntu 7.10.

In terms of features, it is more of the same of what you love about Ubuntu. The system runs as it should, and I'm happy with it. I really haven't noticed much new, other than the Display control panel that now has support for multiple monitors. It didn't do what I wanted really (screwed up the resolutions), so I went back to the files I had from when I manually edited my configuration files to work perfectly. Its a shame that this was supposed to be one of the biggest features, but doesn't seem to quite work. The whole system seems a little more snappy and responsive though which is nice, but it could just be my imagination.

Upgrading to Gutsy Today

I decided to beat the rush and get the newest Ubuntu a day early. It goes official release tomorrow, but there is a chance that the servers will be overloaded on release day. For those of you wanting to do the same today, just run "update-manager -d".

Gutsy Counter

Its just a few days now until Gutsy goes official. If you've been on the fence about Linux, give this one a try when it officially comes out.

Gutsy goes beta officially tomorrow!

As I've mentioned in previous posts, I've been using Linux at work for about 9 months now, and switched to Ubuntu from Red Hat Enterprise a few months ago in hopes of having GUI configuration of multiple monitors. The version of Ubuntu that is the newest officially supported one (Feisty Fawn) has no such tool, but the release that is coming out next month (Gutsy Gibbon) does:
And this goes officially beta tomorrow! I'm excited. Of course it's been available in alpha form for a few months now, but the development process is moving along towards the release date next month.

Multiple Monitors in Linux

I had been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 at work for about 6 months. It was truthfully a pain in the ass to use because the package management is based around rpm and a Red Hat tool called up2date. The default repositories up2date looks at are pitifully lacking substance. I'd found a useful repository of RPMs, but I found changing a bunch of .conf files to point to the new repo was still painful. Then recently my configuration tools like up2date, the screen settings, and the print settings wouldn't launch. For those of you in the Windows world, all of my "Control Panels" were unavailable. So, my desire for a nice GUI update/package manager combined with the non working control panels lead to one conclusion: scrap RHEL4, install Ubuntu. I decided to add another graphics card and monitor to my setup at this point too, hoping the Ubuntu install would pickup on the hardware and automagically set up multiple monitors. Unfortunately I was wrong.

Quick and Dirty secrets of xorg.conf
My Ubuntu install went off without a hitch, but the second monitor never came on. To be clear, I have a main AGP graphics card, and a much older crappy PCI one. They both connect to their monitors (two of the same model of Dell LCD) via VGA. It turns out the problem is with the X server, which is the thing that is the basis of every GUI on Linux, be it GNOME, KDE, Xfce, whatever. Configuring X is the first step in getting multiple monitors with the proper resolutions, color depths, etc. There is this file /etc/X11/xorg.conf that does the magic. If you have the right configuration settings here, you can make wondrous things happen. The first thing I thought was "Hey, Ubuntu probably has a really nice GUI multiple monitor configuration!". Turns out it doesn't so that means that I'd have to modify xorg.conf by hand. At first I tried setting up something called Xinerama using a forum post I found. No luck with this, even though I am convinced I did things exactly like they said. After digging around some more, I came up with the following, and it pretty much works. Where the Debian configuration of X failed to find and set up the second monitor, X's own configuration of itself does not. Try the following:

1. Reboot into a failsafe shell/single user mode. This keeps X and your desktop environment from running. You need to do this to configure X (can't configure itself while its running). Failsafe mode usually involves stopping your boot loader by pressing some buttons during bootup, then picking the appropriate option. Note that you'll be root, so be careful.
2. Make sure all graphics cards and monitors you want are hooked up and ready to go.
   
3. Do a "X -configure". This gets you a local version of a configuration file called xorg.conf.new
4. Now try it out: "X -config /root/xorg.conf.new". You should be greeted with some test patterns on both screens! The mouse will move back and forth across both screens too. Simple as pie.
5. Now quit X: ctrl+alt+backspace. If you didn't get the test patterns...abandon all hope, I know not what else to do.
   
6. Backup your working xorg.conf just in case: "cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.working"
7. Copy over the new config file to where X expects its configuration file "cp xorg.conf.new /etc/X11/xorg.conf"
8. Do a "reboot"

There you have it, you should have two desktops! If it didn't work, you'll get some scary output...no fear if this happens. You'll be in a root shell, so just replace the file with your backup ("cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf.working /etc/X11/xorg.conf") then "reboot".

If it worked, this gets you a fresh, working start to editing xorg.conf. The two Desktops are still distinct and have no way of moving windows between them at this point, so one last thing to enable that is to open up your xorg.conf ("sudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf") and add the following line:
Option "Xinerama" "true"
To the "ServerLayout" section. Save the file, then do a ctrl+alt+backspace to try it out! Remember if you screw things up, just go back to the backed up file you have. You might need to edit the "Screen" section some to support the display modes you want, and maybe comment (#) out the HorizSync and VertRefresh parts of the "Monitor" section. You can see your backed up copy of xorg.conf for the formatting of the display modes.

Final Thoughts
It's not Windows. It's not easy. It's kind of a pain to set up. Oh Ubuntu, why don't you make a GUI tool to make this configuration nice and easy, and why oh why don't you include it as a System->Preference option? I guess they're working on it for 7.10. But I hope I have saved you some of the trouble I came across when trying to configure multiple monitors. Happy editing!

Why the PS3 is NOT a HD media Hub

I just bought a Playstation 3, my rationale being that it is "three revolutionary devices all in one" (sorry Steve): a Linux PC, a gaming device, and a Blu-Ray player. And after the latest price drop, it was more attractive than ever, who could resist? I certainly couldn't, I wanted something to really show off what my new 1080p TV can do. It turns our the Playstation isn't the box to do the things that I want when it comes to HD.

1. Linux is nerfed.
So I get the box home, get Ubuntu 7.04 on there, open up Synaptic, and download VLC. I try some 1080i MPEG2 content from a USB external HFS+ formatted drive I have. These recordings are direct, uncompressed digital rips of DVB-C MPEG2 recorded from my Cable Box via Firewire. When the picture looks grainy and the framerate is about 10fps, I remember that the Linux kernel is running on top of a hypervisor that restricts access to certain parts of the hardware, namely the badass mother of a GPU. Without access to the graphics hardware (and without a custom kernel and apps designed for the additional six availiable SIMD cores), there is no hope of being able to decode a 1.5MB/s MPEG2 stream. So I give up on Linux as my solution.

2. The Playstation3 OS supports no modern filesystem on external media.
As they might say on Law and Order, Linux is OUT. So I try the next logical step, booting up the PS3 OS and seeing if it will support my files. I connect my HFS+ drive...and nothing happens. As a sanity check, I connect a FAT32 drive I have, and it shows up as a USB device. After some google-ing, I read that the PS3 OS will only support FAT on external drives. This KILLS any hope of using it as a HD media hub. Why? Because FAT32 only supports files up to 4GiB in size. While this is okay for 1080i content under about 45 minutes, it is USELESS for movies. I have several 9GB and 10GB rips of 1080i broadcast movies, and I know there are plenty of people out there who are starting to rip 20GB and 30GB copies of their HD-DVD and BD-ROM movies. No dice for you if these are on drives that support large file sizes and you want to use them with the PS3. Hell, the Xbox360 supports HFS+ so that it can play music off of your Mac formatted Ipod. The PS3 needs support for SOMETHING modern that PCs use, either NTFS (Windows), EXT2/3 (most Linuxes), or HFS (MacOS).

3. Even when all else is right, playback can suck!
There is a small piece of good news: the Playstation3 OS can play raw MPEG2 TS, something which was unexpected. This should mean that if you are recording from a cable box via firewire, you don't have to perform a remux to a program stream. Of course it doesn't mean this, because of a bug in the TS playback. It for some reason cannot identify the audio packets in streams that VLC on a computer has no problem with, and doesn't demux them properly for playback. The end result: no sound for some TS files. Okay, so I remux to PS, and playback. Bear in mind these are all 30min TV show files under the 4GiB limit, transferred using a FAT32 drive. Hey, I have sound, I have 1080i video!...I have jerky motion, frames skipped...and this is the best, frames filled in from about two seconds back! Thats right, the scene has cut to the next shot, and I'm seeing randomly interspersed frames from about two seconds ago. Looks like the decoder hiccups and goes crazy when the scene changes drastically but before an I-frame comes up. This problem only happens with content recorded from certain channels, and not with others. Either way, it is a bug in the video playback, with no convenient bug reporting system. Give me bugzilla, and I would post a clip to Sony devs proving that the MPEG-2 playback can choke on regular files that play fine on a computer with VLC. They are no help on the phone, Sony Entertainment pawning me of on Sony Corporate, and vice versa, with no one listening to my complaint. I finally sent an e-mail...I wish I could talk to a developer or engineer.

4. Video File Format Support?
Its nice that the system supports MPEG-4 AVC and SP, somewhat cool for people who have things that were already converted for their iPods. I tried some of my iPod compatible videos both 320*240 AVC, and 640*480 SP, and they worked...but what joy is there in watching these on a 1920*1080 display? The advanced simple profile, however, is not supported, meaning that any DVDs you might have encoded with DivX or Xvid won't play, as these are MPEG4 ASP. I tried a few CDs with 700MB Divx/Xvid files, with the PS3 saying "unsupported format". And anyway these would look like crap on my display.


In conclusion, they shouldn't try to bill it as a HD media hub. It plays games well, and it plays Blu-Ray...but not much else useful.