Sat, Jun 28, 2008

Check video encoding script for MythTV

I’m using Xine as the preferred video player on my MythTV frontend, because it has a nice video output driver called “xxmc”. This driver enables hardware accelerated playback of mpeg1/2 streams (e.g. ivtv recordings or DVDs) on Geforce 7xxx and other Geforce chips. The driver should fall back to the xv driver if the stream is in another format than mpeg1/2, but somehow the xxmc drives screws up playback of videos encoded with Xvid as playback gets really jerky.

Sat, May 3, 2008

Completely hide Xfce’s panels

Even though a Xfce panel is “hidden” (i.e. “Autohide” is enabled) 3 pixels of it is still visible. But there is an easy way to hide it completely (Requires Xfwm4’s compositor to be enabled): Right click on the panel you want to hide, select “Customize panel” Set “Transparency” to 100% Click “Make active panel opaque” The 3 pixels are now 100% transparent, but when the mouse cursor moves over the panel, the panel becomes opaque.
Sat, Apr 12, 2008

Check if MythTV backend is up

My MythTV frontend depends on the masterbackend to be up and running, mainly because some partitions are nfs mounted. So I created a simple script to check if the backend is responding to ping: