A couple of weeks ago I caved in under my own internal pressure and ordered a 46” LED-backlit LCD TV, Samsung’s UE46D5005PW. I’ve yet to actually hook it up to cable, but after a little calibration I got pretty pictures coming out from XBMC on my laptop over HDMI.
Then today, I ended up poking around some more in the menus and discovered the license section pictured above. The TV is running Linux with BusyBox, GTK, SDL, ffmpeg and several other packages installed. How cool ain’t that? Apparently Samsung has been building Linux firmwares for several years now, I had no idea. It does however seems like Samsung started encrypting their firmwares about a year ago, which is both sad and irritating because it’d be so cool to be able to run software like ScummVM and get PVR functionality on it.
But then again, I wasn’t expecting the TV to be more than a TV to begin with. Plugged in a USB flash drive containing HD x264 video in an MKV container, and it was played back perfectly! This won’t be replacing XBMC any time soon, but it’s nice to see that TV set firmwares are improving and might eventually become useful. Also, I probably get geek bragging rights and super e-penis for owning a Linux TV.
HDTV GET! 40” 1080p is a huge upgrade over the old 4:3 CRT of unknown dimensions. Kinda shitty comparison pics, but still. The improvement is clear as the sky is blue! IIDX plays like shit on it though, so that was kinda sad. :/
At an amazing LAN party, a friend helped me transcode my whole “incoming” music folder. I’d been doing one album at the time manually before this. He modified my simple encoder scripts, and wrote a neat single line of shell code which would recursively search from the current position and find all my FLAC files, and attack them with aoTuV at q5. After that, I can easily delete all the lossless files by modifying the command.
Thank you for helping me batch process this crap. Now I’m gonna run my shitty vorbisgain script over the night, and it’ll all be done.
The folder size has shrunk from about 100 GB to 15 GB. I love Vorbis.
Replay Gaining all the music library’s MP3 files with foobar2000 caused a huge mess; 99% of all the files lost their TDRC (DATE) frame. Why the fuck fb2k removed them is a mystery, but it sure won’t ever be allowed to touch my metadata again. Manually adding all the values to the hundreds of albums would be a ins anely huge pain in the ass, and it can’t simply stay that way, as my preferred way of browsing music is by date, so because of these reasons, almost all the MP3 files were thrown out.
~format=mp3 = 85
~format=vorbis = 492
Sure is a lot cleaner now. Fuck MP3.
