OSD-ng - 3rd party firmware for OSD

[hoofdpijn]

Thanks bmc. I'll give it a try with an SD and report back.

[bigshew]

bmc,

It's not the Youtube videos that lockup. It is after the video has played and you are returned to your search list. The list is displayed and then the OSD doesn't respond. It's happened 2 times and I've viewed about 20 videos..

[ddianes]

I am having problems getting this installed. I wonder if anyone can help with this:

1) I've installed the last Arizona
2) I've copied OSDng-dev-2.52 to an usb drive and went play->browse->upgrade, it all went ok (CF inserted all the time)
3) When I reboot, simply I DO NOT HAVE the new OSDng menu

The properties tell me it is the right firmware (3.33 2.52) but I am still having old Arizona issues: i.e. hotplug does not work well sometimes

Any thoughts?

Thank you bmc for this effort to bring our Neuros back to life!!

[jpg]

I am having problems getting this installed. I wonder if anyone can help with this:

1) I've installed the last Arizona
2) I've copied OSDng-dev-2.52 to an usb drive and went play->browse->upgrade, it all went ok (CF inserted all the time)
3) When I reboot, simply I DO NOT HAVE the new OSDng menu

Try switching your language to "English"... that solved the same problem for me...

[bmc]

Regarding OSDng not appearing on the root menu, I've added the following FAQ to http://osd.oddren.com

Q: After I the the upk install, I don't see an OSDng menu!

A: Change your language setting to “English”. Do this even if your menus currently appear to be in English (Neuros LLC only had translated as far as French and Chinese - all other languages will appear to be english, but have their own language specific Root menus that don't include OSDng).

Once you have OSDng installed, and update to the latest version (>=2.55), you can switch back to another language - OSDng now appears in all languages' root menus.

The next upk release will work around this language-specific problem.

[bruxe]

Hi, Everybody,

First I have to say how thrilled I am to have a fully functioning Neuros OSD (sort of) because of the OSDng. I was really on the point of giving up after my device lost YouTube, Music, and blaster capabilities. I was damned mad that I owned a device that only worked at 50%. Now that I've installed OSDng, everything but the channel blaster works, but the blaster has to do with a Scientific Atlantic frequency problem. I got very close to fixing it with one of your guys, until he flew the coop. In the meantime, being an amateur, I've learned all kinds of new things: Telnet, some simple Unix commands, some video editing techniques. I've put hours and hours into trying to catch up with all of you, which is a tall order for me. That said, maybe some of you will take pity on a newbie and try to answer some questions about this new upgrade, in a language I and others like me can understand and follow:

1. I can't seem to switch between the OS-ng system and the old one (the latest Arizona firmware). I've tried it by restarting, waiting for the red/green flickering, and pressing Home, Enter. This causes the machine to hang right before the "Starting Application" is about to begin. I have to unplug.

I've also tried the Toggle OSDng  function. It does activate and deactivate OSDng, whether it's on my CF card or on my USB drive (I've tried it on both); but that doesn't help, and if I disable it on the CF card, the machine can't boot. I would have expected that it would boot into the old Arizona firmware then. But no. Why do I want this capability? Maybe I'm imagining it, but OSDng doesn't seem to handle color and sharpness as well as Arizona did. So I'd like to be in OSDng when I want Youtube or music, and switch back to Arizona when I want to record.

2. Unable to figure out any other way, I went back to installing wooble and streamfuse the old way I knew, when the Arizona firmware was in place, with lpkg. It did work. I'm just wondering if I could have done it some other way, since one of the new functions of the OSDng is "Packages." All of you talk about ipkg, and I can't figure out what it is, exactly.

3. I'm too dumb to figure out how to use dropbear. First, I'm confused about what name and password to fill in when I open a ssh connection on my computer terminal. Most times it seems to like root and pablod, which is what I've been using for BusyBox on Telnet. Somehow, I manage to find a "key" stored somewhere on my computer that it likes. But the moment it accepts all these things, it goes right into Telnet and BusyBox, which I don't think is the point. To my understanding, Drop Bear is supposed to mount the Neuros OSD, so that I can copy files in and out of it. Can anyone tell me how to do it? I've read lots of posts about it, but still can't make it work.

4. I installed all the OSDng packages, but I can't figure out how to use most of them.  x11vnc works fine, but I was able to start that easily from BusyBox before anyway. I have no idea what any of the other packages are for. It would be great if someone could point me in the right direction to learn how to use them. I'm talking about:  rsync and regina rex, for example. I think osd menus 1.1 may be what brought the option of "clone your osdng" into being, but I'd like to know if that's the case. And of course, I'm also curious about lsof, ldd, bash. Why do I have them?

Maybe it's too much to ask you guys to answer all of this, but at least it will give you an idea of the mind of a non-professional who wants to learn but is often swimming in too deep waters. It seems to me that if the device was for sale, retail-wise, everything it promises to do should somehow work, even for an "early adopter-consumer" type. This has been quite an adventure, but I'm hoping to reach some stable plateau where I can just enjoy the thing. I am, however, grateful to all of you for the many things I have learned. Thanks!

[bmc]

bruxe,

Do you have the email thread for trying to get OSD IR blaster working with your scientific atlanta box?  Maybe post it (as a new topic) in this forum, and someone can try to help you finish it up.

For your other questions:
 
1.  If you're unable to boot back into Arizona, both via the "home" button, and via "disable OSDng" menu option, and Arizona hangs when before the "starting application" dialog, then it sounds like you've removed the extra arizona libraries from your CF card.  Do you see a "programs" directory when you type "ls /media/CF-card/.osd-extended/"?

That said, there's no reason to expect Arizona to behave any better (or worse) than OSDng for recording, color or sharpness.  But I'm happy to help you get back to Arizona to let you do a side-by-side comparison to be sure.

You can also always do the arizona "emergency" upk upgrade to forcibly downgrade completely.

2.  Installing older contributions "the old way" with Lpkg is the right way, for now.  Lpkg requires a bit more telnet/unix wizardry, and I'd hoped people would step forward and package things nicely in ipkg/deb format, or integrate Lpkg with dynamic menus.  But nobody has come forth yet.

So to answer your question "ipkg" is a very common way of packaging up new software for embedded systems.  Lpkg was designed just for the OSD, and worked around some of the peculiarities (read-only root) of the pre-OSDng release.

3.  dropbear package itself is just an ssh client/server.  All it does is give you a more secure telnet-like way to get onto the OSD from  your desktop (and vice-versa).  The way it works (and some side effects) are more powerful than telnet, and so are used by other schemes to enable interesting connectivity options.  Sounds like you're talking about "sshfs".  That's a bit more advanced.  And if your goal is just to share files, you're much better off using cifs (aka "windows file sharing") or NFS.

4,  Some of the other packages are advanced tools.  In general, if installing them doesn't make something show up in the dynamic menu system (like dropbear and x11vnc), then they're command-line tools.  You can ask for "info" about them in the menu system, or run "ipkg list" at the command line for a bit more info.

The "osd-menus" package, is just an update adding OSDng to the language specific menus.

bash is a fancier shell to use at the command line or in scripts.
rexx is a scripting language
rsync lets you efficiently sync files between computers
ldd shows you what library dependencies a program needs (good for packaging things up properly)
lsof shows you what files are being help open by a process (I needed this when doing the double-pivot-root to switch to OSDng at boot-time)

> It seems to me that if the device was for sale, retail-wise, everything it promises to do should somehow work, even for an "early adopter-consumer" type.

You're preaching to the choir.  I'm just a guy who bought the OSD to tinker with.  But I hope the above answers some of your questions.

As for next steps, I'll probably take the "iradio" script and redo it as a shoutcast client integrated into the dynamic menus (right now it works only via telnet, right?).  Is that something you'd be interested in?

I know you were also doing wooble and streamfuse.  If those work just fine as is, all that needs to be done is package them up in such a way that they install from the menus - then neither you nor anybody other non-developers would need to telnet in to install them.  Wooble and streamfuse work as servers, right?  Once installed, no need to do command-line stuff?

[bruxe]

I'm reeling (in the best of ways) from your articulate, complete answers. I didn't expect such generosity.

I can post the IR blaster thread here if you like, but for now, I can tell you that the discussion started here: http://forums.neurostechnology.com/index.php?topic=9729.msg52943#msg52943.
As you'll see, people went all out to take me to the edge of fixing it, but we never got over that edge.

Yes, I do see "programs" when I "ls" the CF card. Here's exactly (to my surprise) what I see when I burrow around in there:

~ $ ls /media/CF-card/.osd-extended/
programs  scratch
~ $ ls /media/CF-card/.
OSDng           OSDng-disabled  data            lost+found
~ $ ls
~ $ ls /media/CF-card/.osd-extended/programs
Qt              Qt-4.4.0        Qtopia          extapp.version  translations
~ $ ls /media/CF-card/.osd-extended/scratch 

But what you were suggesting does make sense to me, because at one confused point, I remember getting a message saying there wasn't enough room on the CF card for a 2nd program. It's just the CF card that came with the OSD, only 250 mg, I think. At any rate, I've now realized I was imagining a change in image quality, so I really don't have a need to go back to Arizona as long as OSDng keeps working so well.

Everything you have explained is crystal clear and I thank you a lot for it. Yes, I'd love to have a working iradio. What I have to do now is telnet, do the command "xmms2" and paste in IP addresses of the various internet channels. No tuning or sorting for me. But you've fixed the Audio, which to me is close to a miracle (it hadn't worked since I bought the device).

Concerning wooble and streamfuse, I seem to have to start them up with Telnet each time I use them (unless I'm just assuming that I have to). The big disappointment with them is that they can't seem to run at the same time. So I can either punch in commands like "Record," etc. (wooble) or watch on my computer what the TV screen is playing (streamfuse and VLC), but I don't have full "slingbox" capability. It would be great to be able to control and watch at the same time. (It's the same problem if I use VNC instead.)

I'll try and figure out what you mean by "cifs (aka "windows file sharing") or NFS" as I haven't researched either yet and don't even know what they are. The only way I've been able to communicate with the Neuros is in a limited way with Telnet. However, Neuros easily gets inside my computer with Network Shares I set up a long time ago using Sharepoints. Neuros can copy from, or paste into. my computer, so maybe one way is enough, and I can stop moaning about dropbear.

I think I've covered  everything. Thanks to you I watched on my TV screen an entire out-of-print feature film from the early 50s that someone had snuck onto YouTube in 11 parts, from a VHS copy of an old television broadcast. Now that's what I consider progress.

[bmc]

I took a peek at wrik's "iradio.sh" Internet Radio player.

The previous effort was a little hobbled by not being able to interact with the menu system, and trying to do all its parsing with shell scripting and many sub-processes, which is a bit slow on the OSD.

I wrote something similar, using the new dynamic menus in OSDng, with perl as the script engine and parser.

Go into OSDng -> Packages, and install the new package "SHOUTcast".

It supports Add/Remove stations from a favorites area, pause/resume/stop, shoutcast "Top" stations,  lots of different themed genres, and the shoutcast "random" genre.

All from within the user-friendly OSD menu system.  No telnet needed.

I'd encourage other folks out there to try creating similar things.  With a lot of the heavy lifting being done by OSDng (perl, wget, dyamic menus are all already in place) the OSD shoutcast client is literally ~100 lines of simple perl code.

My wife and I have a soft spot for Bachata music, which we found was a shoutcast genre...  We've been enjoying browsing the literally thousands of radio stations available now under OSDng and this new shoutcast client.

Enjoy all.

[yanvrno]

Thanks thats a great start, on great feature.
I wondered what your Program menu was going to be used for.

What are the chances of adding recording features
Pressing record looks for a video source of course .
 
Adding the stop/pause/resume options to the start menu without backing out of the menu would be nice.
Using the remotes buttons,  I assume would be a source code edit and interaction to your script, so not very likely.

Only had menu hangup once, had to power down to reset. Damn Rock & Roll  just joking I love R&R
But what I had hoped for was a scheduling of morning talk show recordings.
Is this something that is viable?

[bmc]

> I wondered what your Program menu was going to be used for.

It's for anyone who packages up a contribution - all you have to do is drop a .item or .menu file in the right place, and it'll show up on that menu.

>What are the chances of adding recording features

If you do it, the chances could be very good...   

Turning the OSD into an internet radio recording device isn't something that excites me a whole lot, but I'd be happy to give advice to anyone who wants to take that task on.
 
> Adding the stop/pause/resume options to the start menu without backing out of the menu would be nice.

Try taking a look inside the perl script at /usr/local/bin/shoutcast .  If you make any enhancements and package them up, we can push them back out to the community.

> Using the remotes buttons,  I assume would be a source code edit...

That'd be code changes to the Qt main-menu program, which I've already modified for other reasons in OSDng anyway.

Letting menu items reserve and respond to remote buttons in a generic way wouldn't be too tricky - think of it like dialog default button design - usually arrow keys and Esc/Enter will let you choose different options.

> Only had menu hangup once

Whatever instabilities were in the OSD before will still be there...  I saw a lock-up once too, so something in the xmms2 -> nms -> xmms2d -> etc. chain ended up hanging the system.  Presumably something in the xmms2d or below.

If you found a reliable and repeatable way to cause a lock-up (in xmms2d or anywhere else on the OSD) that'd be a first step towards solving the OSD's stability issues.

> But what I had hoped for was a scheduling of morning talk show recordings. Is this something that is viable?

Look into asking xmms2d to save the audio stream to disk instead of (or in addition to) playing it.  Or find some other simple client that will save the shoutcast stream (Try grabbing one of the URLs from /media/ext/shoutcast.favorites and just start streaming it with wget, even.   You'll have the shoutcast header on there, and you'll have to "stop" recording by simply killing wget, but even that could work).

[yanvrno]

Seemed like cabling the audio output to the input thru a preamp would manage the audio and use a video camera for the needed source. Works with recording Audio over a video source.

But when I tried to use the record feature with Shoutcast running.
I received the following message

Recorder Error
Unable to record. Please report this
server error code as a bug:9-42:-1

Looks like the two processes don't work well together
It was worth a try.

telnet:
I did manage to use wget to record an audio stream
wget http://65.99.205.7:7000 -O /media/USB/shoutcast/comedy.mp3
manages to lockup the menu while recording
ctrl Z to stop recording manually
reboot the system and it is playable.

I added these to the start menu along with the stop pause and resume.
print "Name=Record|Type=System|Command=sh -c  'wget $url -O /media/USB/shoutcast/comedy.mp3' \n";
print "Name=EndRec|Type=System|Command=sh -c 'sleep 2 ; killall wget'\n";
but I am getting two PID running for wget  this hangs the menu. If I kill the first one then the EndRec works

[bruxe]

Is there something I have to do to get the iradio package listed in packages? I've hit every button I can in Packages: Show, Refresh, Upgrade, etc., but when I hit Show Available, it just says "No items to list." And what's also weird is that I installed everything available before, and dropbear and X11vnc do show up as Servers, but when I go to packages and click on Show Installed, it also says "No items to list."

[bruxe]

Please ignore. It was just that the CF card had no more room on it. I switched everything to the USB and it works fine. Thanks!

[bmc]

I made a few more changes to the SHOUTcast client:

* Found the main source of freezing was deadlock in the IPC channel code  (main-menu and xmms2).  I added a tag in the menu files ("sys:") to bypass NAppChannel and use it for the shoutcast client and have so far found everything to be rock-solid stable and much faster.

* Start playing the station immediately when selecting the station (no need to click again to "Play").

* Added station-menu "play/pause" toggle, and station-menu "stop" (no need to go back up several menus to use this functionality).

* Added generic "play/pause" and "stop" button accelerator support in main-menu.  These are now used in the shoutcast client: on the station menu you can just hit those remote buttons to control playback.

* Moved the station name to a dummy menu item from the menu title (so it'll scroll and you can read the whole thing).

* It'll now pick up the track name from the shoutcast stream, and refresh a dummy menu item which displays the currently playing track.

This now passes the "MyWifeCanUseIt(tm)" usability tests.  I'll start a new thread announcing this to forum readers who won't dig this deep into the thread.