lirc and LCDproc for Soundgraph iMON changes

well… after an update quite a while ago my lirc and lcdproc stopped working. starting lirc on the default ubuntu install would always result in:

unable to load LIRC kernel modules. Verify your selected kernel modules in /etc/lirc/hardware.conf

so trying to add the modules manually would tell me a bit more:

root@augustiner:~$ modprobe lirc_imon
FATAL: Error inserting lirc_imon (/lib/modules/2.6.31-21-generic/updates/dkms/lirc_imon.ko): Unknown symbol in module, or unknown parameter (see dmesg)
root@augustiner:~$ dmesg | grep lirc_imon | tail -n1
[  420.742877] lirc_imon: Unknown parameter `islcd'

i noticed a line in the options that was wrong and removed it:

options lirc_imon islcd=0

lirc was back up and running but not my LCD screen. the logs showed:

[  492.637968] lirc_imon: lcd_write: invalid payload size: 32 (expecting 8)
[  492.762951] lirc_imon: lcd_write: invalid payload size: 32 (expecting 8)
[  492.887947] lirc_imon: lcd_write: invalid payload size: 32 (expecting 8)
[  493.012940] lirc_imon: lcd_write: invalid payload size: 32 (expecting 8)
[  493.137946] lirc_imon: lcd_write: invalid payload size: 32 (expecting 8)
[  493.262958] lirc_imon: lcd_write: invalid payload size: 32 (expecting 8)
[  493.387957] lirc_imon: lcd_write: invalid payload size: 32 (expecting 8)
...

some further googling and i found out that the options line has changed from release to release. to get it back working use:

options lirc_imon display_type=1

to get the write type just look into lirc_imon.c

enum {
   IMON_DISPLAY_TYPE_AUTO,
   IMON_DISPLAY_TYPE_VFD,
   IMON_DISPLAY_TYPE_LCD,
   IMON_DISPLAY_TYPE_NONE,
};

apple blocking trailers for non quicktime users

well the apple trailer site is actually a pretty nice resource for watching new trailers… up until a few weeks ago!

apple has been so nice to start blocking trailer play for users that do not have quicktime installed, so everybody on linux has been locked out of watching trailers directly on the site.

the good thing though is that there’s always a solution (and in this case it’s pretty simple) to this kind of nonsense!

on most apple trailer pages you see the size button for the trailers on the right side… if you copy the url for let’s say the medium video you should get something like this:

http://movies.apple.com/movies/independent/ihopetheyservebeerinhell/ihopetheyservebeerinhell_h.480.mov?width=480&height=204

so to watch this video just open a shell and use mplayer.

  • first we need a user agent to trick apple into serving us the movie file. after some research i found that
    'QuickTime/7.6.2 (qtver=7.6.2;os=Windows NT 5.1Service Pack 3)'

    works nicely.

  • second we need to strip the size parameters from the url which would result in
    http://movies.apple.com/movies/independent/ihopetheyservebeerinhell/ihopetheyservebeerinhell_h.480.mov
  • third since we are streaming the movie let’s add a little buffer so mplayer can seamlessly play the file. in my example i chose 2048

so if we put this all together… the command would be

mplayer -cache 2048 -user-agent 'QuickTime/7.6.2 (qtver=7.6.2;os=Windows NT 5.1Service Pack 3)' http://movies.apple.com/movies/independent/ihopetheyservebeerinhell/ihopetheyservebeerinhell_h.480.mov

and there we go, watching the trailers again…

[EDIT]
changed my code to include linux as the os ;)

mplayer -cache 2048 -user-agent 'QuickTime/7.6.2 (qtver=7.6.2;os=`uname -or`)' http://movies.apple.com/movies/independent/ihopetheyservebeerinhell/ihopetheyservebeerinhell_h.480.mov