Evesham iplayer - the Freeview PVR you've dreamt about!

[MarkR]

I appreciate you taking the time, Bob.

I think that’s the trouble. You don’t know if its going to work or not. An Imax file was Xvid and worked for me too.

As a licence payer I downloaded a Planet Earth HD 720p. xvid with (as it turned out) Nero AC3 sound.(I had recorded the original off the TV so thought an HD upgrade was OK). The iplayer could not play it. To be fair WMP had no sound either. Downloaded latest DivX and it told me I was short of AC3 codec. Downloaded AC3 codec and it played with sound in WMP. What chance of the iplayer getting it right?! Included in the DivX download was a trial converter. I told it to convert the HD file (I had problems with) into HD. I hope this will do the trick. Its at 90% (3 hrs).

I have procoder express. It seemed to want to re-encode everything. This is time very consuming. I want to analyse what I have got and do the minimum re-encoding to get it to work. It will be quicker that way.

Either it will end up being practical to watch HD on the iplayer (at the moment I am enjoying the picture quality) or it will be an SD box with a hard drive until firmware or freeview really is HD ready.

Its not such a bad box. Lets see what Netgem / Evesham can do with it.

Cheers

[Bob Crabtree]

Most GUI linux programs have a lot of dependencies. In order to run something like kcalc (a calculator widget) you would need to install something like 150 mb of supporting programs and libraries. (Windows programs have a similar list of dependencies, but you don't notice because they are part of the OS, and unlike linux, you cannot install windows without the GUI environment).

gparted is different. It is specifically designed to run from linux install discs, so the dependencies have been pared down to the absolute minimum. The bootable disc image I pointed to is a bootable linux disc, but because gparted has so few dependencies it is fairly small. Also because it has few other functions it will be less confusing that a full blown knoppix disc that attempts to cram as much as possible onto a 650Mb image. I thing gparted is able to format ext2 partions as well,

Thanks for the further explanation.

No joy, here, though.

I downloaded the bootable gparted image and was able to create a bootable disc but I realised after the event that a further bit of software - e2fsprogs - was required, as per this page, to support ext2.

Naturally I downloaded that but had no clue what to do with it once I had it and, anyway, after I'd booted up gparted, it wouldn't do anything, cos it was locked into searching, non-stop, for available devices.

Ho hum.

Might I suggest that MarkR tells us in what part of the country he lives so that someone local to him can volunteer to format his USB drive as ext2 if he brings it round?

Mark?

[Bob Crabtree]

I appreciate you taking the time, Bob.

I think that’s the trouble. You don’t know if its going to work or not. An Imax file was Xvid and worked for me too.

As a licence payer I downloaded a Planet Earth HD 720p. xvid with (as it turned out) Nero AC3 sound.(I had recorded the original off the TV so thought an HD upgrade was OK). The iplayer could not play it. To be fair WMP had no sound either. Downloaded latest DivX and it told me I was short of AC3 codec. Downloaded AC3 codec and it played with sound in WMP. What chance of the iplayer getting it right?! Included in the DivX download was a trial converter. I told it to convert the HD file (I had problems with) into HD. I hope this will do the trick. Its at 90% (3 hrs).

I have procoder express. It seemed to want to re-encode everything. This is time very consuming. I want to analyse what I have got and do the minimum re-encoding to get it to work. It will be quicker that way.

Either it will end up being practical to watch HD on the iplayer (at the moment I am enjoying the picture quality) or it will be an SD box with a hard drive until firmware or freeview really is HD ready.

Its not such a bad box. Lets see what Netgem / Evesham can do with it.

Cheers

You are right to assume that not everything can be expected to play on the iplayer and, so, it's unfair to condemn it out of hand if you find a particular type of file that doesn't play.

Be assured, though, that the review isn't majoring heavily on that even though it will, as best as I am able, list out what does and doesn't play.

On which subject, I'm reminded that I am awaiting a DVD from a certain agentdav0 of this parish that should contain a whole lot of different files for me to test - and not just video.

David, helloooo!

[damianw]

Anyone know what the firmware upgrade process will be? I guess I'm asking Mark here, as a previous iplayer owner. Will it be OTA, or do we have to browse to a website? I noticed if I browsed to www.netgemplatform.co.uk/upgrade (something I picked up from an iplayer forum) it started prompting to upgrade to "iplayer V" or something - I got out of there pronto!

[chrestomanci]

As for the gparted app - are you saying that you can run this without running knoppix Linux disc? If so, that would be very useful.

FYI, I downloaded and tried out gparted myself. As I expected it booted as a linux live CD. It asked a bunch of questions about my prefered language, keyboard layout and graphics card, and then fired up a GUI. I used it to expand an NTFS partion on an internal IDE drive and it did that without difficulty.

I can't comment on the problems people have had with USB drives. I would be suppriesed if they are not detected at all, though I might expect that a prod would be requried. Have you tried both booting the system with the USB drive allready insterted, and inserting the USB drive after the system started.

I would expect that gparted would be able to format any partion it creates with ext2, so you should not need any other tools.

[MarkR]

Thank Bob. Well thats 2 x 2.2gb files that wont play now. The second was Divx and AC3. It maybe the 2 GB limit you talked about. The divx converter said "converted with errors" and didnt play. Scrubbing that off my system as a waste of time.

I then did a test conversion to a very high quality HD wmv file and that plays and is excellent. I am now converting the whole file which will be 2.8GB (9hrs gone, 3 to go). It better be worth it! If it doesnt play then it must be the 2gb video limit.

Damianw, the old netgem box never did it OTA as far as I know. Either dial up (when you wanted) or if connected to the internet by usb the menu had an extra item saying an update was available. You clicked on the menu item and away you went. You could also navigate to a page on the netgem website and get betas and latest revisions. The Netgem forum was very good for seeing its problems, sorting problems and finding out what the latest firmware fixed. It certainly had its teething problems.

PS I live in sunny Reading (on a hill). I heard someone got the HD transmission near here. I didn't. Is it still on?

Quick update: I split the 2.2gb file in two using virtualdub and it works! Good news. Splitting takes 5 minutes, re-encoding takes 13 hours. I assume if I format with ext2 I wont need to split it either.

[Bob Crabtree]

Anyone know what the firmware upgrade process will be? I guess I'm asking Mark here, as a previous iplayer owner. Will it be OTA, or do we have to browse to a website? I noticed if I browsed to www.netgemplatform.co.uk/upgrade (something I picked up from an iplayer forum) it started prompting to upgrade to "iplayer V" or something - I got out of there pronto!

Updates happen automagically in the early hours of the morning.

[Bob Crabtree]

FYI, I downloaded and tried out gparted myself. As I expected it booted as a linux live CD. It asked a bunch of questions about my prefered language, keyboard layout and graphics card, and then fired up a GUI. I used it to expand an NTFS partion on an internal IDE drive and it did that without difficulty.

I can't comment on the problems people have had with USB drives. I would be suppriesed if they are not detected at all, though I might expect that a prod would be requried. Have you tried both booting the system with the USB drive allready insterted, and inserting the USB drive after the system started.

I would expect that gparted would be able to format any partion it creates with ext2, so you should not need any other tools.

I think you missed my further comment after the one you quote - gparted was unusable, cos it never stopped searching for "devices".

[Bob Crabtree]

I live in sunny Reading (on a hill). I heard someone got the HD transmission near here. I didn't. Is it still on?

Quick update: I split the 2.2gb file in two using virtualdub and it works! Good news. Splitting takes 5 minutes, re-encoding takes 13 hours. I assume if I format with ext2 I wont need to split it either.

Yes, the HD service is still running here (London).

As for ext2 - no practical file-size limit; the largest recording I've got on my USB drive is close to 9GByte.

[chrestomanci]

Might I suggest that MarkR tells us in what part of the country he lives so that someone local to him can volunteer to format his USB drive as ext2 if he brings it round?

PS I live in sunny Reading (on a hill).

If that is Reading in Berkshire, then I live there. If you would like me to format your drive as ext2 then PM me and we can make arrangements.

[MarkR]

Thanks for suggesting that Bob. I have made contact with a very obliging crestomanci. Ta.

BTW I am amazed but it will play a 2.8gb WMV file.

[Bob Crabtree]

Thanks for suggesting that Bob. I have made contact with a very obliging crestomanci. Ta.

BTW I am amazed but it will play a 2.8gb WMV file.

[MarkR]

Terminator 2 Extreme edition arrived today with HD transfer. I surprised myself - managed to get proxy US server and de-DRM the WMV file. Not particularly easy but thought it would be worth the effort. Transferred it onto USB drive and sat back to be blown away. I wasn't.

Very jumpy. Couldn't handle any scene with much going on. When it could handle it, it didn't look superior to DVD. Probably worse. The 5.1 surround was lost. Unwatchable in a nutshell. Not impressed. I did try different settings, turned HD recorder off and switched STB to radio (so nothing else was going on) - no difference. Certainly a concern as it undermines the whole media player bit.

BTW the video was 24fps. I wonder how the netgem deals with this. It might explain why alot of movies stutter at regular intervals.

Will drag my computer downstairs tomorrow to see what it should be like.

[Bob Crabtree]

I discovered an interesting problem today concerning file names on ext2 drives.

It would appear that iplayer is happy to save files to my ext2-format USB drives with file names that totally kipper you under Windows!

Here's an example of such a file name:

Sat 20 Jan 18.00-19.00 - BBC FOUR - Are We Changing Planet Earth? .mp2

The problem is, of course, the question mark which is an "illegal" character under Windows and DOS.

What this means is that the file:

* Can't be played

* Can't be copied

* Can't be moved

* Can't be renamed

* Can't be erased (short of formatting the entire disk)

Unless, that is, someone knows a way to rename a file with an illegal name under Windows.

If, somehow, I ended up with a Windows-formatted drive with an illegal file name, I'm pretty sure that Windows itself could sort out the problem using its checking tools but there is no way I am going to run those over an ext2-formatted disk for fear of what havoc ensue.

Answers on an electronic post card, please!

[chrestomanci]

I would look around for a tool that allows you to read & write the ext2 file system without actually mounting it. You might then be able to rename the offending file. Similar to the way that zip files where accessed prior to windows XP. (Having said that, I did a test by creating a zip file with an illegally named file inside, and windows just reported it as empty.)

I did some googling and found: a diskinternals tool that looks promising.

Other than that, there is always the option of using a knoppix disc.

[Bob Crabtree]

Okay, I've booted up with a Knoppix disc but can't change the name of the file cos I don't have ownership.

The owner is root.

How do I become the owner and then change the name?

Pretty please