XBMC + TVHeadEnd + HDHomeRun

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Guide

How to install and configure TVHeadend and HDHomerun on an OpenELEC machine.

Installation

HDHomerun Driver
TVHeadEnd

Configuration

Configure HDHomerun Driver

Change directory to /storage/.xbmc/addons/driver.dvb.hdhomerun/config
Make a copy of dvbhdhomerun.sample to dvbhdhomerun.conf

Open \\xbmc\Userdata\addon_data\driver.dvb.hdhomerun\adapters and copy the IDs of the two tuners to dvbhdhomerun and set their types (just follow the instructions in the config file.). Alternatively, run userhdhomerun to get the IDs.

Reboot.

Configure TVHeadend

Go to webpage of TVHeadend: http://:9981
Go to Configuration -> DVB Inputs -> TV Adapters

Select the first adapter.
Click “Add DVB Network by Location”
Choose your location
Click “Enabled”
Click “Save”
TVHeadend now starts scanning for channels. You can monitor its progress in the pane to the right. When “Muxes awaiting initial scan” is zero, it’s done.
Click “Map DVB Services to Channels”.
The mapping will also take some minutes to complete depending on how many channels are present.

In the web config in Configuration -> TV Adapters: After all channels have been configured, disable “Autodetect Muxes” and “Idle Scanning“. Having these enabled completely destroyed the stream from TVHeadEnd, making the image look garbled and stuttering. It looked like a low bandwidth connection or bad signal.

Samba Sharing in XBMCbuntu

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Samba is not included with XBMCbuntu (at least in 11.10), so first we have to install it:
sudo apt-get install samba
Open Samba’s configuration file in an editor
sudo nano /etc/samba/smb.conf
Scroll down to the bottom of the file and add the following sections, which will create a public share with read/write access without password validation:

[global]
workgroup = Workgroup
netbios name = XBMC
server string = XBMC Server
log file = /var/log/samba/log.%m
max log size = 50
map to guest = bad user
socket options = TCP_NODELAY SO_RCVBUF=8192 SO_SNDBUF=8192
local master = no
dns proxy = no


[public]
path = /media
public = yes
only guest = yes
writable = yes
force user = xbmc

The above configuration example shares everything under the /media directory in a folder called “public”. The “force user” property must be set to a user with write access to the directory being shared. All files and directories will appear to have been created by this user.
Run “testparm” to check if your Samba configuration is parseable. For configuration changes to take effect, the Samba daemon can be restarted with
sudo /etc/init.d/smbd restart
The following screenshot shows my XBMC box sharing the /media directory which contains mount points for two harddrives (ingeniously named according to their capacities…):

DD-WRT on Linksys E2000

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These are the steps I took to flash a Linksys E2000 router with a DD-WRT firmware.

Background information

http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Linksys_E2000
http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Installation

Steps Taken

– 30/30/30 Reset
– Upload dd-wrt.v24-18024_NEWD-2_K2.6_mini-e2000.bin via Linksys firmware upgrade page from ftp://ftp.dd-wrt.com/others/eko/BrainSlayer-V24-preSP2/2011/12-20-11-r18024/broadcom_K26/
– Wait 5 minutes after upload completed.
– Web interface for DD WRT appears.
– Do a 30/30/30 reset again.
– Wireless > Advanced Settings enter 50 in the Tx Power entry. This should make for less Tx/Rx Errors and help the unit run cooler.

General:

– Initital DD WRT firmware flash must be a trailed build. A trailed build has “*e2000.bin” in its name. Following flashes must have “*e2k-e3k.bin” in their name.

Debug a Junit Ant Task from Eclipse

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Sometimes you run into a test that works when run from within Eclipse but not from the command line. To debug the failing test from Eclipse, you can configure the Junit ant task to accept remote debugging sessions.

This can be done by adding the following lines to the junit task:

<junit fork="true">
		
		<!-- For remote debugging from Eclipse -->
		<jvmarg value="-Xdebug" />
		<jvmarg value="-Xnoagent" />
		<jvmarg value="-Djava.compiler=NONE" />
		<jvmarg 
value="-Xrunjdwp:transport=dt_socket,address=8787,server=y,suspend=y" />

This will make the task wait for an incoming debug connection on port 8787. It is necessary to have the fork attribute on the junit task set to true, because the jvmarg values can only be given to a starting Java virtual machine.

Get XML String from JQuery XML Object

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Problem: You have an XML structure in a JQuery object and now you want to extract a string with the raw xml.
Solution: Use the XMLSerializer class. This class provides methods for serializing DOMs and nodes into text or byte streams. In our case, we will call the serializeToString(data) method:

new XMLSerializer().serializeToString(xmlDoc);

Linux Commands

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find

Find all files from current directory and subdirectories
find . -name '*.doc' -print
Result
report.doc
somedoc.doc

Finding files by date: http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/howto-finding-files-by-date/

du

Show total disk usage of a directory:

du -sh /tmp/somedir

Computer Forensics

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The tools I use for computer forensics.

Windows

  • Recuva – Excellent at recovering data from Windows partitions and free to boot.
  • UFS Explorer – Not free, but is able to recover from linux partitions (Recuva is better for FAT/NTFS)
  • explore2fs – Access linux partitions from Windows. Free.
  • HFSExplorer – Access Mac partitions from Windows

Linux

  • Hiren’s Boot CD – Contains an impressive lineup of programs for computer forensics, but its legal status is often debated.
  • Trinity Rescue Kit – A live distro with backup programs, Midnight Commander, testdisk, shell and other good stuff. Legal!

Java Array Cast

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Casting the array obtained by invoking the toArray() method on a collection yields a ClassCastException.
For example:
String[] strings = listOfStrings.toArray();
will throw the ClassCastException.
The trick is to use the overloaded version of toArray(), which takes an array as parameter. This the javadoc description of the method
toArray(T[] a)
"Returns an array containing all of the elements in this list in the correct order; the runtime type of the returned array is that of the specified array."

The solution is therefore to do this:

String[] sv = (String[])v.toArray(new String[0]);