Alessio Sangalli has been maintaining a guide for a few years that shows you how to create a serial port IR receiver from scratch and use it in both Windows and Linux. Her design is pretty slick since, as you can see from her photo above, the whole package fits neatly inside a standard 9 pin serial connector. There are still plenty of machines that don't have built-in IR support, so this could be handy if you're thinking of turning an old box into a media player or DVR.

How To Build A Simple But Cool IR (Infra Red) Receiver

Team Twiizers is at it again, releasing a Wii port of the MPlayer media player. If you've already added the homebrew channel, you just need to download an install a couple of files to get things working.

You can read more details about the port at HackMii and WiiBrew. There's also a convenient instructable to hold your hand through the install. It seems silly that Nintendo didn't release this as a built-in feature, but at least you can get it working on your own now.

Instructables - Use Your Wii As A Dvd Player
WiiBrew - Homebrew apps/MPlayer
HackMii - libdi and the DVDX installer

Paul McGuinness wrote in about a home theater PC system he is building, and tipped us off to a GPLed software package called MediaPortal. It's a full-featured media center package for Windows users, featuring (HD)TV, DVD, photo, music and radio support. It also has a scheduled recording feature and a bunch of other niceties that basically beats the pants off of the media center software that comes with your PC.

MediaPortal: the open source media center - [via] Link

Rod wrote:

I have a Pioneer DVR-531H and I recently subscribed to Verizon FIOS TV, that uses a cable box (Motorola QIP2500-3). The Pioneer DVR is like Tivo in that it has a built-in TV Guide, but this doesn't work with the cable box and Pioneer doesn't make an IR blaster so that the DVR can change the cable box channel to record. I can leave the Pioneer DVR set to channel 3 and program it to manually turn on at the correct time, but I can't make the DVR turn on and select the right channel on the FIOS Cable box.

My idea/question is:

Does someone know how to create a way to automate the FIOS Cable box remote so that it can change the cable box channel when I want to record to my DVR? In other words, the set up would be:

1. Pioneer DVR set to channel 3
2. Pioneer DVR programmed manually to record at a certain time
3. Automated remote would turn on the FIOS cable box and select the appropriate channel prior to the DVR turning on to record

So - how to create something that could be programmed to operate the FIOS cable box remote to turn the box on and select the right channel when the DVR is programmed to record?

Jason Striegel's suggestion is to set up a Linux box sending infrared commands using LIRC at the specified times; use it to send commands to the DVR as well as the FIOS box. Let us know in the comments if you have any ideas of your own!

First, get HandBrake - Link. There are also PC versions of HandBrake, it might work about the same way.

Install it, run it. Pop the DVD in. Pick the DVD volume. Choose your settings, I use the defaults usually.

It takes about 30 min or so, it runs fine in the background.

Drag the MP4 file it makes in to iTunes, in videos tab in iTunes for the iPhone select the movie, click Sync.

In a couple minutes it transfers over.

It's about a gig.

The video is in the videos section. iPod / Videos.

It looks and sounds great!

*Joe notes - I found if you create a new preset for iphone in handbrake and set the video dimensions to 480x320 you can crunch movies down to a much smaller size optimized for the iphone native resolution.

Wii Media Center X is a Java-based web media server that you can have up and running in about 15 minutes. After downloading and unzipping the application, just run the following command (from the mediacenter folder) to start it up:

java -jar MediaCenter.jar

I've noticed a few problems with playing audio files and the video isn't sized optimally (you can zoom to adjust for this), but this shows a lot of promise. With this running on my primary desktop machine, I can encode/download FLV files that I want to watch and MP3s that I want to listen to. You just drag them to the Video/videos and Music/music folders. You can do this during the day as you come across things, and then you can view and listen to media in your living room whenever you like.

With a little spit and polish, this could be like having all the AppleTV or Windows Media Center functionality right on your game console.

Red Kawa Wii Media Center X - [via] Link

Ever since I got my first set-top box at the end of last year, I've been itching to connect its FireWire port to my Mac. My friend Emilie called today to alert me to a CBS Sunday Morning report on Maker Faire, which I managed to record, and that gave me the push I needed to figure this all out.

There are a few sets of instructions out there on how to do this, but in a nutshell, you connect your Mac to the set-top box, load up a program that can record directly from FireWire set-top boxes (unfortunately, iMovie won't cut it), and do whatever editing you need to the video once you've brought it in.

I found that Ammesset Software's iRecord did the trick perfectly: I checked its preferences to make sure that my Motorola DCT-6412 was detected, told my set-top box to start playing back the video I had recorded, and selected New Immediate Event from iRecord's File menu. When it was done, I selected Stop Event from File menu.

This left me with a .m2t file that I didn't know what to do with at first. Squared 5's MPEG Streamclip is a free program that can open and convert all kinds of streams. Using MPEG Streamclip, I was able to trim the clip and export it to one of the many supported codecs.

Resources

• iRecord - Link
  
• MPEG Streamclip - Link
  
• What to do if iRecord's events get stuck in pending mode - Link
  
• macteens: Make your own Home Theatre Mac (HTMac) - Link
  
• AnandTech: The Mac mini as a Media Computer - Link
  

...then I realized why I first didn't find the Media Key: it was removed from memory after the Volume ID was retrieved and the VUK calculated. I also saw that in my "corrupt" memdump the VUK, Vol ID, Media Key and the Title Key MAC were all closely clustered in memory: in the first 50kb (of the entire multi megabyte file!) but there were large empty parts around it. Almost as if it was cleaned up.

This gave me an idea: what I wanted to do is "record" all changes in this part of memory during startup of the movie. Hopefully I would catch something insteresting. In the end I did something a little more effiecient: I used the hd dvd vuk extractor (thanks ape!) and adapted it to slow down the software player (while scanning its memory continously) and at the very moment the Media Key (which I now knew: my bottom-up approach really paid off here) was detected it halted the player. I then made a memdump with WinHex. I now had the feeling I had something.

And I did.

Processing Key, Media Key and Volume ID found!!! - Page 6 - Doom9's Forum - [via] Link.