Screen Scraping Amazon Album Art for MythTV

mythtv icon

I wanted to get Album Art for all of my (newly ripped) songs on my MythTV box. 

Thierry has a nice perl script which finds album art on Amazon and automatically downloads it, but unfortunately for me the music plugin for MythTV has upgraded their database schema and the script no longer worked.  I am using the trunk SVN code, so it's a bit more up-to-date than the latest packaged release, but this means that scripts designed for the packaged versions may not work. (This specific script had a problem finding the correct directory to store the album art, so all the album art was stored in the root directory, overwriting itself with each album.)

Luckily, I know just enough SQL and Perl to be dangerous, so I whipped up a few changes to his code that fixed my problem (after exploring the new database format). The updated script is here if anybody needs it.

UPDATE: I also added features that allow you to run the script multiple times (if an albumart.jpg file already exists, it will skip that album) and improved the searching (if "album by artist" is not found, it will try searching by "album" name only).

Updated New File: amazon_album_art_scraper.txt (Thanks to Mike Wilson for updates to Amazon’s HTML!)

OLD FILE: Amazon Album Art Scraper Script

Saving a mms streaming video to a file using mencoder

Copying a streaming video to a file using mencoder.

I wanted to watch Randy Pausch's last lecture on my home media PC as opposed to my laptop. It has MythTV, which can be used to watch any file on the hard disk. Unfortunately, you can't just download the a file, as his lecture is hosted by a streaming server. The specific URL is:

mms://wms.andrew.cmu.edu/001/pausch.wmv  

wget won't work, so I had to use mencoder to download the stream and copy it to a file on my hard disk. The command line I used was:

 mencoder mms://wms.andrew.cmu.edu/001/pausch.wmv -o randy.wmv -oac copy -ovc copy

(The -oac and -ovc are the output audio and video codec specfiers, and I have set it to just copy. If you would prefer the file be transcoded to a different format, you could specify a specific codec (xvid with ogg vorbis sound, for example) and mencoder would transcode the file (possibly losing some quality) at the same time.

 

Encrypted home directory under Ubuntu linux 7.04 & 7.10

Lock on doorUsing directions from Felipe Alfaro Solana, I set up an encrypted home directory in Ubuntu 7.04. I only had one problem, that exhibited an error message as follows:

Command failed: Incompatible libdevmapper 1.02.08 (2006-07-17)(compat) and kernel driver

This was caused by the dm_mod module not being loaded. I fixed it for the session by issuing a  modprobe dm_mod command, and fixed it forever by adding dm_mod to my /etc/modules file.

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Listing of Atlanta/Decatur Digital OTA Channels

transmission tower A list of the channels easily avaliable with a small amplified Radio Shack antenna from the Decatur Area:

  • 2-1 -WSB-DT – ABC
  • 2-2 (Blank, no signal)
  • 5-1 WAGA – Fox HD
  • 5-2 WAGA – Fox SD
  • 11-1 WXIA-D NBC-HD
  • 11-2 WXIA-D (NBC Weather, All the time!)
  • 14-(1,2,3,4) – Ion subchannels.
  • 17 – WTBS-HD – TBS
  • 30-1 – PBS
  • 36- WATL-D -MyATL
  • 43-1 WUPA – CW
  • 46-1 – WGCL-HD CBS

RadioShack HDTV antenna, Catalog #: 15-2186