Montag, 3. Oktober 2011

mplayer: switching between languages via lirc/remote

Do you love original languages but need the translation?

Well, mplayer is able to switch between audio tracks (e.g. languages) during playback together with lirc.
Opposite to mythtv and mythfrontend mplayer requires commands, not keystrokes. Also I noticed that sometimes with frequent changes mplayer likes get the hiccups - e.g. loosing audio completely or crashes.

But here is the solution. Edit the mplayer-related lirc file (which is /home/account/.lirc/mplayer) in mythbuntu and add a section:

begin
    remote = Technotrend
    prog = mplayer
    button = KEY_REPEAT
    config = switch_audio
    repeat = 0
    delay = 0
end

KEY_REPEAT is the remote key to be used to toggle between languages and defined in /etc/lircd.conf.

MythTV - My Setup

The 1st Post

It's now almost five year since I started to use MythTV - based on Debian and Mythbuntu - as my personal PVR solution. Over the last five years my setup changed frequently and I had good and quite bad experiences with MythTV. But I thought now that it make sense to share some of the tips, gotchas and solutions I found over the years...

For all of you who are not really familiar with MythTV - it's a Linux based personal TV/recording/movie playback solution. A nightmare to setup, but once it's working it's just a dream...

My current setup is a combined backend and frontend solution (as I do not have a basement to keep the backend somewhere else). Based on a Quad-Core at 2.83 GHz (M-version) with 4 GB of RAM it has one single 160 GB SSD for operating system and 2 x 2 TB for TV recording - this totals to about 4.000hrs of standard SD television or about 1.500hrs of HDTV television. The system is tied to a Denon AVR 1709 DTS Receiver and Teufel Boxen and a 50 inch plasma TV.

Some archived recordings are stored on an external QNAP NAS filer - I prefer RAID5 or RAID6 over storing data on single drives combined with the MythTV backend.