Episode: 568
Title: HPR0568: Hack Radio Live 7
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0568/hpr0568.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 23:17:15

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This train is a little bit of inbound.
I'm afraid.
Safety systems.
My crime is that of outsmarting you.
If you have not yet submitted your identity to the Retinal Clearance System.
Communications interface online.
You're not dealing with AT&T.
Automatic medical systems engaged.
Welcome to the Internet, my friend.
How can I help you?
Defense of a weapon selection system activated.
Have a very safe day.
From San Diego, California, I'm Drake Anubis.
And your radio voice is quite interesting.
Oh, I can hear the radio.
Hey, everybody, I'm from San Diego, California.
This is Drake Anubis.
You're doing over there, good buddy.
Sunny Tampa, Florida.
I'm Monigma.
You know, what's his name?
Wanted me to do the more goldman voice more often.
What's the more golden voice?
I'm sorry.
Oh, my psoriasis.
Oh, okay.
Gotcha.
Yeah.
Okay.
So what have you been up to, Drake?
Not much.
I've been doing stuff.
I've been out town with the road trip thing going on.
Mainly I've been maxing, relaxing, all cool.
Yeah, yeah.
And as usual, putting in the 50 hour weeks, it's the, it's the schmuck, so.
I have a shirt that says that it has the, the fresh prince air conditioner on it.
And you can turn the settings from a chilling out max and relax into all cool.
Huh.
Yeah.
You get the reference?
No, I don't.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Got it, got it.
Okay.
Chilling out max and relaxing all cool, kicking some b ball outside the school.
A couple of guys.
Okay.
You can stop that now.
It's important to the show.
It matters a great deal.
It does not matter.
Okay, go.
What's going on tonight?
What, what does matter a great deal?
I don't know.
What, what are we talking about tonight?
Isn't my topic tonight?
I guess my topic tonight.
All right.
So I guess I don't have anything.
Oh, so it's your fault.
So I guess we're going to talk about.
Okay.
You can pin this all on me.
I was wrong.
You remember the song I was just playing.
Yes.
I remember the song.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I got it.
Oh.
We were having fun.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I got it.
Oh, we were having some technical difficulties before the show.
So it was.
I think the left.
I did not leave.
I was alone.
I said, baby, come back.
And you even played it.
And you even played it.
You want to play a little bit of it?
Baby, come back.
Yeah.
Baby, come back.
Yeah.
Baby, come back.
Yeah.
Baby, come back.
Yeah.
Baby, come back.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And it is one of the bands that played at Eurovision 2009.
It's kinda American Ile for the European, area.
Okay.
It' a song about shoes.
And if the sky had better shoes, maybe he could marry the girl of his dreams.
Okay.
The voice is awesome.
We'll check out the voices on predicted.
You know that which sounds really awesome, by the way.
Not the song itself.
the song itself, but, you know, just across the mumble,
little server we're using, but anyway.
Yeah, it does.
It does, it does.
So for the love of science, what are we talking about tonight?
I'm all amped.
You're all amped.
I guess we're gonna talk about, you know,
home, CVR, DVRs, I was amped.
Why were you, what the hell?
What the hell, dude?
Well, that was that, but I'm just,
I'm channeling the audience.
The audience is like, oh, I'm ready for such a great show
and then they're like, huh, okay.
Thanks.
Appreciate it.
Don't kill the messenger.
You're killing me here.
You're killing me.
So, so I have a question for you, right?
What, what do you run?
What do you run with your DVR, you know,
media stuff at your point?
Well, I'm not a big fan of the TVs,
but we do have a moving that occasionally.
And for that, we tried for the longest time
just to run the projector off of the computer.
It's, it's not so great.
So we solve the problem for the most part
with an, with an Apple TV.
It works very, very well.
So how do you like in the Apple TV?
I actually like it a lot.
It's, I, um, I wouldn't have bought it
if I wasn't making so much money at the time
and I, but it couldn't get such a great discount on it.
Um, but it's actually pretty cool.
It's so small, it's so cute.
Yeah, it doesn't have a power button.
So tell me a little more about the Apple TV
because I don't know much about it.
It's, it's, it's just, it plays files that has on it.
It has a hard drive and why fine.
It syncs automatically with iTunes.
So whatever move we're gonna watch,
I put it into iTunes and then it just,
it shows up on the Apple TV.
But it has to be in the proprietary, whatever.
Yeah, it does.
You do have to actually go and convert it,
which is kind of a bitch to be honest,
but it works so well after that.
Now I, I didn't want to run into the problem
because I've, I've had, you know, open source media players
before where it will play anything,
but then you put anything in there
and it's jittery or drops frames
or just doesn't work perfectly.
The Apple TV works flawlessly
and I can control with, with my iPhone.
Yeah, but you've got distortion
with the whole converting crap and...
I can convert like a pro, you don't understand.
Well, for the app...
That's why it sounds so great.
For the average home user, I wouldn't recommend, you know,
going that route, especially...
No, but what you would recommend
is going with the, they should have Linux in their front room.
Much less complicated.
Well, it's the, it's pretty much out of the box these days.
I mean, you know, some of the,
some of the distributions like MythBund2 or NotMith
are fairly simple to install.
Like I'm running...
Yeah, NotMith.
It's a Nopex.
I think they changed the name of it,
but it used to be NotMith.
Not good?
It's not great.
Shut up.
It's basically the Myth TV,
which for those who don't know, Myth TV is an open source,
PVR, DVR, whatever you want to call it.
The Legend of Myth TV.
Thanks for your witty banner.
Basically, it's, you know, a DVR like you would get
from Brighthouse or BIOS or wherever
or your Apple TV, you know, just on a Linux platform.
But the benefits for going with Myth TV
is it's completely customizable.
I mean, you can write your own scripts to do
whatever you want on the front end or back end.
You can get a plug-in, like I have a Hulu plug-in,
like the box talks right to the Hulu service,
which you know what Hulu is, Drake.
I'm well versed in the Hulu's.
Okay.
Well, then I can play Hulu right on my,
on my TV via the Hulu desktop.
That's cool.
That's cool.
It's kind of clunky.
It doesn't work with my, all of my applications,
because I've got like an iPhone app
that I use as a remote control.
So I don't have a true remote for my Myth box,
but I use the Apple, or the, I forget what it's called.
Hold on.
One moment.
It's just called remote.
Now it's, it is called MyMote.
Oh, you use some kind of off-brand third party nonsense.
Well, it's an iPhone app.
Steve Jobs only knew.
It's an iPhone app.
It was free.
I was perusing the app store and found it.
And it works wonders.
You know, I would, I would actually want to install
some kind of third party thing on the Apple TV,
because you can do that.
You can rip it off and put on like X, B, M, C, and such.
And it won't run away.
And I'm going to get to that, but let's go with my evolution
of, you know, where I started and where I'm at now,
and where I want to be.
There's so many jokes I can think of.
I just don't know which one to go for.
Yeah, thanks.
Why don't you do your segment
and I'll think of the right joke and come back to you.
Thanks.
So originally back in the day,
you've heard about my torrent box, Drake,
and you make fun of my torrent box.
And we'll let the audience in, I do not make fun
of your torrent box.
I can't believe you would even say that.
You make fun of my torrent box.
Okay, so what do I say?
You say that why would you have a box dedicated to torrents
and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Okay.
Is that how I sound?
Yes, that's how you sound.
The blah, blah, blah.
Yes, how you sound.
And your scanner made a beep, but that's beside the way.
That was the sound for me.
So anyway, I have the need for, I don't pay the speed.
I do, you know, I was a poor college student once
and I didn't feel the need
to buy HBO Cinemax Showtime blah, blah, blah.
So I acquired such things from, you know,
the internet with, you know, things like Hulu
and certain services like that in torrents and, but anyway,
you know, I had a friend that, you know,
a friend, my friend, my friend was doing this torrent box.
So I have a certain, did he think it was dumb too?
Is it just me?
So my friend has a server that has, you know,
couple hundred gig of storage space on it
that runs this application called Torrent Flux,
which is a web application.
It's a PHP front end with a MySQL back end
that you, it's kind of like the thing you have on your computer,
only it's not on your computer.
It takes up a lot more power space and it makes noise.
It does, but it also doesn't take my ban
with the way from my desktop.
It does too.
Well, I mean, it doesn't, if I'm doing some,
it doesn't take any processor set goals,
it doesn't take any RAM.
What are you doing on your desktop
that you need all your processor cycles?
You have like four cores.
I didn't at the time.
I only had like two cores, but you do now.
Agreed, but I don't have the size of the,
the disk space in the box that I usually use,
my laptop versus...
Frayed your two-can-sam microphone in for a terabyte.
You know, they don't put terabyte drives readily
in laptops these days.
Oh, your desktop's a laptop?
Well, my computer that I use on a normal basis is a laptop.
Okay, fair enough.
Screen saver, no, screen saver, don't do this.
Yeah, you've just saved it
because you went crackly again, so.
Are we okay now?
Yes, we're okay.
Anyway, back to my story.
So at the time, I didn't have the highest end equipment
that I have now, and thus I had the need
for a dedicated...
Iced end equipment.
I can torn stuff out of my phone.
To stop.
All right, so I have this file server
that sits in my apartment that contains all of the
AVI files that I have acquired throughout the years,
you know, 200 and some odd gig of files.
Anyway.
But you don't go back and rewatch them.
I do go back and rewatch them,
but that's beside the point.
Oh, no, you might actually.
Anyway.
So at first I would watch them on...
I'm gonna give you a good setup.
I've great setup.
So you have all these files,
but how are you gonna get them to your TV?
Well, thank you.
I'll tell you in a minute.
But at first I...
Oh.
I would watch them on my laptop
and that got old real quick.
A 17-inch monitor versus a 40-inch TV, you take your pick.
Let me try again.
If only there was a way you can get them onto your TV.
But there is.
Oh, good, sir.
So the first thing that I did was,
well, hey, why can't I just attach a computer to my TV
and watch them off of a, you know,
any Linux distribution that I wanted?
So that's what I did.
So I had a Ubuntu server or a Ubuntu desktop
attached to my, to my TV
and I would just play across, you know,
the network by Asamba shares.
Asamba.
Yes, Asamba.
Yeah, asamba.
Okay.
So that was Evolution 1.
So I wanted to take it a step further
and want...
New and improved.
The new and improved.
So we went with a distribution called MythBuntu,
which is Ubuntu with a MythTV front end.
All pre-packaged and nice.
Comes on one ISO, install it,
installs everything for you, no problem.
A couple of things you need to be aware of with MythTV
is it does require, well, it doesn't require,
but to get any benefit out of MythTV,
what's the way you have to have a capture card.
And you could...
It's such a pain in the ass to configure.
They aren't really, not these days, but...
Not capture cards, but MythTV, I mean...
It really isn't.
The hardest part is the capture card
and that really isn't that bad.
Oh my God, you know the coolest thing
that we're not to cut you off,
but the coolest thing I've ever seen
is that I actually had a MythTV box in my mind,
my living room once because we didn't have,
there was some kind of building dispute
and we didn't have satellite for a while.
My dad's like addicted to TV.
So he was watching to pop the Myth box
and he was having some issues
and I had to go in and play with the setting.
So I go to this, I have a rack mount server in my garage
and I go out there, I have a rack mount server in his garage
and I go out there and I'm trying to find a good setting
and I type in the wrong thing,
I just type in MythTV, which is the launch of the front end
and the MythTV front end just appears on the server rack.
I get launches X and everything, it's right there.
I'm like, holy crap.
Because apparently the front end and the back end are separate
because we had the front end and the living room
in the back end out here.
So you can just spawn the front end wherever the hell you want
and it's like all your media is right there.
It's like running a thin client
and having on the processing power somewhere else.
Yeah, so you can do that
and I was gonna get into that in a bit,
but not there yet.
That's where I wanna be.
You gotta send me show notes so I know what we're going on.
Yeah, well, we'll get there eventually.
What is this?
Show six, show seven.
Yeah, something like that.
Anyway, so I went with MythBund2
because it was easy to install.
The hardest part again was the capture card
and a couple of things to note on the capture cards.
You need to make sure and put this in double quotations
or double exclamation points.
Ensure that MythTV supports the capture card
because it doesn't on a lot of them
or doesn't on some of them, let's say.
I went with, are you familiar with the hogpog cards, Drake?
Yeah, I just have a hundred pronounce it.
I call them Apache a lot.
Well, they're called hogpog, or hogpog, I think.
They're not called hogpog.
What are they called?
Pots?
I think it's like a hop-a-choz.
Hop-a-choz.
What?
There's a pet-choz.
Whatever, we'll put it in the show notes.
Pyo.
Those cards are universally supported
through most versions of MythTV.
So I went with, I believe the,
I'm gonna butcher the name, hogpog.
Windy.
Hogpog, but yeah, it's like a posh-pogosh,
but for a TV tour.
It's a HD PVR 1600, I believe,
was the card that I used?
Oh, so much better than the 14.
You know, stop with your witty banter, you know.
Get off me for a minute.
So I went with one of those cards
and another thing to note is you can only record one show
at a time, like you have to have a tuner card per,
like if you wanted to watch a show
and record a show at the same time,
you'd have to have two tuner cards.
This is true.
So like my current setup only has one tuner card,
so I can only watch, watch or record something live.
Okay, but you can still record something
and watch something you already have.
That is true.
That's where I was getting to.
Normally when that scenario, it, you know, occurs,
I'll just watch something for your recording.
And there are a couple of things in the Myth TV
that I really like are what's called Myth Video,
which you can put your, you know, AVI files
or whatever in this directory and Myth TV will pick it up
and, you know, can play them for you.
You can attach like a Samba Share to it.
That's what I have currently.
I basically have my Samba Share, you know,
my server that has all my AVI files attached to my Myth Box.
And what about like a, you were talking about Hulu,
how does that work?
Hulu actually takes a little bit.
It's not built in.
You have,
oh yeah, that's going back and forth
because they always try and take it out and such.
Well, you have to, the front end is completely customizable.
It's all written in XML.
So you can add a line of code
and I can put this in the show notes of,
you basically download the Hulu desktop,
install it onto your Myth TV box.
And then put this line of XML code
that basically calls the Hulu desktop
and your Myth TV will actually open the Hulu desktop,
you know, just launch the application.
So it's just launching another application.
Oh, so that's not very safe.
It's really not.
What about like a, like a YouTube or Netflix?
YouTube had, there is a customizable plugin for that.
Netflix is a little trickier.
There really isn't anything right now
that not to my knowledge where you can play like streaming Netflix.
Oh, that would have been nice.
What was that?
Oh, that would have been nice.
I think there is something for XBMC that will do.
And I know that's based on Myth TV.
So I think that I think you might be incorrect.
I think there might actually be a way to do that.
Okay, well then there might be,
I do not know of one off the top of my head.
Yeah, I know that.
Um, so going back to the setup,
basically the hardest thing is the capture card.
When I first set this box up,
I had some issues with the product
U.S. broadcast versus U.S. cable.
One of them is over the air.
Basically you have to set up
what feed in sort or, you know,
what incoming feed you have.
And if you set up U.S. broadcast,
it's the over the air cable.
And if you set up the U.S. cable,
it's actually pulling from your cable.
Makes sense.
It took me a few hours to figure this out.
But really because I got it just now.
Yeah, thanks.
Well, I didn't notice it.
I went at the time.
I didn't know there was another option there.
You bastard.
You'd like some kind of subhuman of intelligence.
Thank you.
So once you have that setup,
you can, you can purchase a,
there is one thing you do have to purchase
for Myth TV setup.
And that is the schedules direct.
That gives you.
That gives you.
The, basically the programming,
the programming guide.
And it's, I think it's like $20 a year.
It's cheap.
It's like 20 bucks.
And that gives you all of the programming
so you can record shows.
And it will download automatically
every, I believe, day.
You can set it up where it'll go out
to schedules direct and download the next day.
Two weeks worth of data on your drive.
Does it accept VCR plus codes?
I do not know.
I just, tangential relationship.
I moved to VCR the other day.
That had one.
It was a big deal because it was one of the first VCRs
to have VCR plus.
What is VCR?
I'm back in the day.
You used to be able to buy a TV guide.
And some of them would have like these,
these six digit or nine digit codes next to the show.
And if you punched in the code,
it was some kind of shared algorithm.
And the VCR would know.
And automatically set the record start and start time
the date and all that.
That's cool.
You didn't have to dig around with the setting.
It was cool.
It was a VCR.
So it was as cool as VCRs can be.
It was white text on a blue background.
Right.
But yeah, I just thought about that.
Hmm.
No, I don't know if it says I wouldn't think so,
but anyway.
I mean either.
So.
Your screen saver again.
No.
No, I think it's fine.
No, it's not.
Oh, my God.
You're not.
You're a rebel man.
There was something.
And everything about you.
Anyway.
So where were we?
I don't know.
You were washing a window.
We're talking about the best kind of windows to you
or something.
You know.
People might actually think you.
I wash windows for a living.
No, people don't understand them.
We stop the show.
We stop the show.
We stop the show.
We stop the show.
We stop the show.
We stop the show.
We stop the show.
We stop the show.
We stop the show.
We stop the show.
I got such great show.
It's better than the time that I had to wash without the good
Windex.
I go, oh, God.
Here we go.
There goes no, no, no.
Windex is so much better than window X.
There are two different brands.
Drake.
I should write down your little speech that you give and read a
pack.
It's kind of fun.
Yeah, thanks.
Okay.
So I was talking about Myth TV.
Yeah, that too.
Yeah, something like that.
So I was talking about Schedules Direct.
Basically, you purchase the service that's $20 a year.
And it will give you all of the programming and fairly simple
to set up.
You can do it right within the Myth TV setup.
And it basically set up a username and password and you're good
to go.
Other than that, it's a pretty simple install.
And then all the plugins are the hardest portion.
Like the Hulu desktop took me a little bit to figure out.
The Samba share thing took me a little bit to figure out.
But other than that, it's just reading the documentation and figuring out
what you want to do with it.
And there's a lot of things that you can do with it that I even touched
yet.
So especially when it comes to decoding the or encoding movies or
encoding shows.
Because like the data that sits on my drives are really huge.
I record in a raw format.
So like a half hour TV show sucks up like 1.1 gig of space.
It's insane.
Is this standard death or high death?
That's standard death.
Well, 4k.
4k because I don't compress any of it.
Not even like 8.264 or I'm pegged to.
I'm pegged to get blows.
I think it's 8264.
That's compressed.
That's not much.
It's not an X-vid.
Yeah, that's fair.
Do you remember that scheme?
X-vid had where you'd buy or I'm sorry.
Where you'd buy divx disks like at your 7-11 and then play with your house?
Yeah.
That's not.
Yeah.
But like it uses ffmpeg behind the scenes so you can take a...
I pronounce it ffmpeg.
Well, I pronounce it ffmpeg.
So you can do any encoding that you want.
I just took the default and it sucks up a lot of this space at the moment.
Could you theoretically use mpeg and record straight to DVD or something?
Yes.
Oh, faster.
You could do that.
It will also...
There is options in the default menu to play back DVDs.
I've been trying to figure out how to do Blu-ray, but I don't have a Blu-ray player.
That sounds expensive.
Yeah, that's probably expensive.
Come on HD DVD.
No.
So a couple of things I learned from my first build, which is kind of sitting on my floor right now,
is one you need a fairly quiet machine to build this on because it's mine's kind of loud.
So get the quiet power supplies, get the silent fans or what are cool it or whatever you want to do.
Just make sure it's silent because it is very noisy.
It's your TV doing that.
You need water cooling.
I wasn't talking about the TV.
I was talking about the computer that's sitting next to the TV.
That's fine.
That's what I meant to say.
But I mean, you can't just get...
You know, they make just really big eat sinks.
They don't even need a fan.
Yeah.
Well, that's what I said.
Either no fan at all, quiet power supply and, you know, do whatever you need to do, but make it quiet.
Because it's rather your attaining DVD.
Yeah.
So that's one.
Two is this space.
If you're going to record in the raw or just leave it at default, you need a lot of this space.
Even if you, you know, compress it, it does take a lot of video takes a lot of this space.
I only have like 300 gig in the box.
And the new version 2.0 that's sitting next to it that hasn't been built yet is going to have a terabyte of space in it.
Whereas I go in with this.
I probably know where.
I think off a cliff.
Yeah, thanks.
Appreciate it.
Your opinion is important to me.
I need the instant.
You know, I love you.
Just that we were doing the show that the people appreciate the banter.
I'm sure I'm sure they do.
So I guess the there's a couple of other.
P.V.Rs that we haven't talked about.
Another one that's open source is Linux MCE.
You know, much about it, Drake.
It feels like I do.
It's called Linux Media Center Edition.
Oh, really?
Thanks.
I didn't know that it wasn't for MCE.
Yeah, thanks.
Hey, I didn't know.
I want to go home.
You are home.
Can I turn this show around?
Can I turn this show?
But this is, I saw a really cool video and I think there was a hacker public radio episode on it.
Where this guy did some cool and, you know, like out of the squirrel things.
That's the one where you can like turn off your courtroom lights out of that.
Yeah.
Yeah, I'm sure that doesn't work at all.
It does.
I've seen.
Oh, yes.
You have to have the right cards for it, though.
You can buy these PCI expansion slots, cards that do different things like door controls.
You can get what's called, they make a thing called the firecracker.
It's for controlling X10 units.
It's a, it's just this loud thing that you put in the back of your serial port and they will just shoot off X10 commands.
And they also make a USB X10 module you can plug in.
So you can write little macros and stuff for all your X10 stuff.
And X10 is the largest cheapest manufacturer of controlled lights and systems.
Yeah.
So you can control your lights.
You can control your doors.
You can control.
So I saw a video, you know, that's where I want to be.
Is like controlling lights, controlling doors, having like webcams where I can, you know, see outside my front door, you know, crazy things like that.
But you can do all do that through, you know, the power of open source and the power of, you know, systems like these.
So myth TV is just like scratching the surface.
You can go, you know, way to the dark side or way to the, you know, the low of the surface, you can go way to the extreme of, you know,
controlling your whole house from a centralized.
And why stop there?
Friends pets?
A boss?
Yeah, why not?
Why not?
So another setup that I was looking at doing is having a, you know, how you were talking about the back end front end.
Doing something like that and having like the, the back end sit in, you know, my office.
And having, you know, front ends in every room.
So you would have this small front end and how many TVs do you own?
I own two.
I have one.
I have one.
Well, actually, I own three.
One is this little nine inch thing that I have next to my computer that I watch TV on.
Well, you know, I just have something planned while I'm, while I'm in my office, either coding or whatever.
I have my 40 inch, or I'm sorry, my 46 inch TV that's out in the living room.
And then I have a 40 inch TV in my bedroom.
So anyway.
So that's my setup.
Basically, what I would want to do is have a small, you know, form factor device in each room.
Talk to my miss TV back end and grab all my shows for me or all my reported content.
Or just like buy an Apple TV or not.
Or not.
How about not?
Because the power of miss TV is the fact that you can have, you know, this, you know, back end front end scenario
where I could have all my recorded content on one box.
And they have at least a Linux MCE has it.
I don't know if it TV does, but they have this Bluetooth application that you can like put on your phone.
And you can hit a button and say follow me and your show will actually go from front end to front end.
So you don't even have to stop.
You can pause your show, walk into the other room.
You can watch TV 24, seven.
Why leave the TV?
You know,
geez, you're killing me.
Great.
TV everywhere.
Don't you think the applications are cool?
Yeah.
Well, they would annoy me a little bit.
Why would they annoy you?
The whole thing where it looks like I've had the whole miss TV setup a couple of years ago.
Yeah.
And it's as you described where if you want to launch some kind of external thing, it has to like go back to the desktop
and you always do a bunch of a desktop or resolution changes and all kinds of weird things.
No, it doesn't do that.
No, it doesn't do that.
No.
That's an improvement.
No, it's fairly seamless.
The only thing that annoys me about the Hulu desktop plugin is the fact that I can't control it with my remote control, my iPhone app.
What happened to your TV everywhere in the world of phones?
What do you mean my TV everywhere in the world?
You were just going to have this phone that everywhere you go.
Now you have TV.
What?
The follow me thing.
Oh, the follow me thing?
Got it.
That is a Bluetooth application that just senses where you are against where the front end is.
So basically you have a Bluetooth device on the front end and you have a Bluetooth device on your phone.
They communicate and you have to have it on every single front end.
It probably kills your phone's battery life.
I would assume so, yes.
Have you tried like XBMC or any of the alternatives?
Well, XBMC actually has a Myth TV plugin and what my plans were is to, well, I tried it once and I blew up the Xbox.
So I purchased, so here's the story.
What an endorsement.
Have you tried this great product?
Yeah, I blew up my Xbox.
It's better than that.
I purchased this old Xbox, right?
You know, 50 bucks at GameSpot got a refurbed Xbox.
I actually got a game with it too, but they left a game in it, but that's another story.
Which wasn't a bad game, by the way.
What game was it?
It was like, it was NFL.
It was a football game.
It was a bad game.
Anyway.
So I bring it home.
I follow the tutorial on how to install XBMC.
Basically what you got to do is you got a hot swap of cable.
What the hell was that?
You're static again.
Come on, dude.
Do you want to start playing music again?
Please hold.
Are we done yet?
So can I go back to my...
All right.
Thank you.
So where was I before I got interrupted by your technical difficulties?
You're really having some technical difficulties tonight.
It's all new.
This whole computer thing.
This whole computer machine thing is new to you.
Yeah, the internet.
The internet.
The inner webs.
All of them.
All of them.
So, oh, okay.
I was talking about the front end versus the XBMC thing.
So they do have some alternatives like XBMC is one of them.
There's a couple others, but XBMC is the...
is another media...
I don't know what to call it.
A media...
Give me a word here.
Inglomerate.
No.
Give me a word.
Bathhouse?
Try again.
Media player.
Media player, I guess, is the best word.
What's pretty close with bathhouse?
Bathhouse.
Come on.
Okay.
So it's a media player that you can install on embedded devices like...
your Xbox, for example,
hence XBMC.
Your SCADA system?
No.
We can go into a tangent about SCADA systems another day.
So I had this Xbox that the way to get XBMC on it is you have to...
There's a couple of ways.
There's a soft mod and a...
and like a hot swap of the cable.
So I didn't have the game.
I think it was mech salt something.
There's basically a buffer overflow that you can perform on it if you have the saved game file on...
on one of the memory cards.
Anyway.
So I went with the hot swapping of the cable.
Probably not the best idea.
So I was okay.
I actually got it.
I got the hard drive.
Basically the hard drive is locked.
So you can't modify any of the contents on the...
it's like a 20 gig hard drive or 40 gig hard drive.
So the contents is locked on the drive.
So you can't modify it.
So you have to perform an unlock procedure either with the soft mod or the hot swap.
So I chose the hot swap.
Basically you plug it into a...
Sounds hot.
You plug it into a computer.
You boot the system with this boot disk.
And in the middle of the boot, you swap it with the cable that's plugged in your Xbox.
But both systems have to be on.
So not for the faint at heart.
It's fairly simple, I would say, how to go.
Badly, but not because of the hot swap.
How did I know you were going to do that?
That was good.
I liked that.
We should keep that on the sandboard.
Yeah.
So I got the hard drive unlocked.
No problem.
The problem was when transferring the files over to the hard drive, the XBMC files, I ran out of space.
Probably because there was saved games on the drive.
So I went the route of swapping out the hard drive with a newer or a bigger hard drive.
So I chose like a 160 gig hard drive I had laying around.
So in doing this, you basically have to take the screws out
and basically take the dismantle of the top of the Xbox to get to the hard drive.
And in doing so, I laid the hard drive down on top of the device.
And I hit the power button accidentally.
And metal touch metal and magic sparks came out, which was really cool, by the way.
Wish I had a picture or wish I had some video of that, because it was really cool.
You have the charisma of a damp rag and the appearance of a low grade bank cloth.
Where's that from?
That is a representative Farge arguing with the president of the EU.
Cool.
Anyway, I brick the Xbox.
Long source short.
Can you unbreak it?
No, it's the motor.
The motor is fried.
And the little fan motor is toast.
So it's it's junk.
So long story short is be careful where you set things and when you turn the power on.
But anyway, that's for another day.
So I guess the goal for my next MythBunt2.0 is to have a back-end front-end scenario
where I have the box sitting in a room where it's quiet.
And have the front-end out in the living room with a smaller form factor.
Because it is kind of ugly for someone that's not a geek.
All the wires kind of laying around the front room is kind of not appealing.
I think the Apple TV has screws.
Yeah, shut up.
So if I didn't have a geek for fiance and I didn't have a geek for, you know, she would kill me.
But is this the fiance who lost episode?
You said she was a horrible person or something.
I did not say she was a horrible person.
If she listens to this, I'm going to have her kick your ass.
I'm going to go back.
I didn't say that.
I'm going to go back.
Well, anyway, she, you know, she's a geek like me.
So I'm fairly safe.
But, you know, for the average guy that, you know, lives with a girl that's not a geek.
A normal person.
Probably not the best idea to have a computer sitting next to your TV.
Ill-advised?
Yeah, ill-advised. Probably get you some in our arguments.
Now, I do have a friend at work that has a similar setup.
Doesn't have a myth TV, but you're using the windows alternative.
Yes, don't send me hate mail.
Can we have a boo on the...
I don't have a boo.
The best I can do is something really...
I can give you this sound.
All right.
But there's a building...
What the hell is it called?
Windows Media Center?
Oh, Windows Media Center is great.
It is not. It sucks.
Have you seen it in Windows 7?
It uses the same system of navigation that Windows Phone uses.
It blows.
It does not blow.
It takes way too much disk space.
More than...
More so than myth does.
And it's in a proprietary codec.
So you can't even take the file.
And that's not true.
It will play anything that Windows Media Play will play.
Yeah, but it's proprietary.
Meaning you can't encode it in an avi.
It will play avi.
It will play avi, but it won't encode it in avi.
Not to my knowledge.
Why would you want to encode something in avi?
So I can take it and put it on another device.
When does that ever happen?
All the time with me.
Exactly.
Well, it's not like it saves it in some kind of crazy file.
It just saves it in like Windows WMV or avi.
Which is a very bad codec for...
I think it might just save it.
I think it might just save it in an avi file if you ask it to.
I don't think it does, dude.
Well, even if it's Windows WMV, WMV is just like avi.
No, it's not.
Well, it's the...
No.
What the hell is WMV?
It's a bad codec.
It's not from mpeg.
Yeah, I'm trying to think of it.
It's actually not that bad.
It was right back in the plays for sure days.
You know, the zoom is not a play for sure compatible device.
I actually have a zoom, but that's another story.
A friend has a zoom.
It's pretty bad ass.
That's not bad ass at all.
No, not bad ass at all.
Okay, well, what else do we have going on?
I think that's it for today.
We're going to probably go into configuration and some more advanced topics on DVRs later on a later show.
But I think that's it.
We've been talking for about 40 minutes, so that's good for me.
Okay.
Are we talking feedback tonight or...
Do you have...
Do we have any feedback?
I have feedback. I know we have feedback.
Well, no.
To all those who sent in feedback, we appreciate it.
And...
That is such a lame.
Okay, well, we'll see you next week.
See you next week.
Tuesday. Go to the site hackradialive.org.
You'll know it's the greatest site ever.
Well, you're going to say something about the greatest site ever.
Hackradialive.org.
No, how about about hacker public radio who started everything?
It's not the greatest site ever.
Yeah, I think that's the greatest site ever.
Hackradialive.org.
Hackradialive.org is where you want to go people.
The greatest site ever was a party going on non-stop leave comments.
Leave feedback and engage.
What the hell is this?
Shut up. Engage with community members.
And...
Hold on a second.
Is it hackradialive.org?
Why are we the best site ever?
Yeah, yeah, I thought so.
Um, why did you have boy band music playing?
It's showing.
Why is boy band music?
Okay, we're just going to end the show right there.
I'm done.
I'm done.
Okay, that's good.
We're just a wrap.
Good night, everybody.