Category Archives: video

Headless Windows 10

The oldest physical box in the house, a 12 years old Core2 Quad in an old case was my Windows 10 box, nutmeg, which I don’t use very much except to test out various things under Windows. I don’t do much with Windows any more, yet it was attached to one of the three monitors on my desk – using up 1/3 of my total screen real estate; and it was generating heat and fan noise, and its presence offended me. I decided it needed to move to the basement, alongside Cinnamon and Rosemary who are already down there in a rack — banished to the basement because they have a lot of disk drives, and so generate a lot of heat and noise.

I bought another rack mount chassis, and moved nutmeg’s innards to it. This proved annoyingly difficult because various old bits of hardware decided this was a good time to give up the ghost – I lost two old disk drives that decided to stop functioning. But eventually got everything up and running.

The idea was that I would manage the box, on the relatively few occasions I needed to do so, just as I do both Cinnamon and Rosemary, with a VNC connection. So after it was up and running on my work table, I pulled the monitor, keyboard and mouse and rebooted. But attempting to connect with VNC failed. For the record, this was TightVNC.

I eventually found that VNC would work if and only if I had a monitor attached. Furthermore, if I had a monitor attached and established a VNC viewer to nutmeg, if I then unplugged the monitor the VNC viewer would immediately freeze. WTF?

Without making this a long story, I found that the problem could be resolved by changing an option in Settings/Accounts/Sign-in options which is down at the bottom under Privacy, and reads “Use my sign-in info to automatically finish setting up my device after an update or restart.”

So my mental model of what is going on is that if that option is set, windows is attempting to “set up my device” and I suppose the device it is trying to “set up” must be the monitor. What I don’t exactly get is why the VNC viewer should freeze when an existing monitor is removed. I suppose that removal generates some event internally, and processes attached in some way as consumers must be killed or something. Not sure. I don’t need to understand it. I have very few cycles in my advanced age and am not planning to waste any of them trying to figure out Windows.

I was very pleased that after I did this, and was able to connect via VNC, I was able to set the resolution to various values up to 4K. And after rebooting and reattaching it even retained my display resolution setting.

Forcing Monitor resolution

Cinnamon and Rosemary are now both happily rack-mounted in the basement (where it is cool, and where their many disk drives and fans can make as much racket as they wish).

Mostly I control them from the office with ssh and or vnc, but once in a while I need to actually be down there. My neighbor gave me a monitor, I have plenty of mice and keyboards, so I hooked up a KVM switch on the two of them so I didn’t have to keep getting behind the rack to move the monitor.

But alas, neither of them picked up the resolution of the monitor, I suppose (not sure) that with the KVM in the middle, they can’t really read the EDID and such stuff from the monitor. And since it is an “unknown” monitor, the display panel only shows 1024×768, 800×600 etc. The monitor itself helpfully tells me that it wants to be 1440×900 @60Hz.

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Saving YouTube Video

Trying to collect the old episodes of NYPD Blue, and there were some I couldn’t find on usenet. Turns out that the DVDs past season 4 were never produced. But there are old episodes, mostly captured from VHS that are out on Youtube.
After a little research, there is a cute way to capture the video files from youtube.
Click the episode on youtube to start it, and then capture the url in the browser location bar.
Now open VLC, select to play a network stream, and give it that url. It will start to play.
At this point, one can just tell VLC to convert and save, but that takes a long time. An easier and faster technique, as long as the youtube webm format is ok:
In vlc, with the stream playing, open tools->codec information and copy the link that is in the “Location” text box at the bottom.
Paste that link into a browser and go, and now the video plays directly from the Youtube servers.
Now you can just right click on the browser window where it is playing, and save video as.

Notes on setup of HDHomeRun, tvheadend, kodi live tv

HDHomeRun provides a source of tv in htsp format. They provide an app for windows/linux/mac which enables watching the tv stream directly, and changing channels. They also provide a Kodi Add-on which allows watching the streamed material directly from there. However, this is just watching, and doesn’t enable the guide, PVR etc.

To use the built in features in Kodi for “live tv”, you have to have another piece of software, which Kodi calls the “backend”. There are apparently different backends supporting different hardware, but one of the backends is called “tvheadend”, and it supports HDHomeRun, and is supported by Kodi.

The tvheadend software has to be installed. apt-cache search tvheadend shows:
tvheadend – Tvheadend
tvheadend-dbg – Debug symbols for Tvheadend
kodi-pvr-tvheadend-hts – Kodi PVR Addon TvHeadend Hts – PVR API:1.9.2
kodi-pvr-hts – TVHeadEnd PVR for Kodi
kodi-pvr-hts-dbg – debugging symbols for TVHeadEnd PVR for Kodi

The “kodi-pvr” bits are kodi add-ons that have to be added to kodi (in linux only) in order to provide the api between kodi and the backend. Kodi for mac and windows has the pvr bits included, but they have to be added in linux.After the apt install, add-ons->my add-ons->PVR clients,  select TVHeadend HTSP Client and configure it, then Activate it.

Since the kodi I watch is on coriander (the mac mini), the pvr stuff is already installed with kodi. I only needed to install the tvheadend piece somewhere, and I put it on cinnamon where the large file media array is, so that PVR recorded material can be stored there too.
Continue reading Notes on setup of HDHomeRun, tvheadend, kodi live tv