Theora was obsolete when it was published and its authors (Monty from Xiph) agreed with this. The encoder implementations are crap, though getting better and, the most annoying noise for me coming from the outside world is that Theora is as good as or better than H.264. Theora is NOT as good as or better than H.264! Specification-wise, Theora cannot compete with H.264. Implementation-wise, in terms of FOSS, Theora (current or Thusnelda) does not compete with x264. There are no non-FOSS Theora implementations and x264 is one of the best H.264 encoders in the world and has few rivals.

I’m all for digital media that is free (in all senses) to create, distribute and consume. I don’t think Theora is the answer.

For what it’s worth, I would probably recommend that any every day desktop user use Mac OS X rather than Windows if you can’t stomach Linux and don’t have some tech savvy person to maintain a Linux machine for you. My parents have been using Linux for a couple of years and my Dad used to get my Mum to set the VCR. He doesn’t have a problem anymore though as I gifted him a DVR the other year and he’s quite happy using the EPG and hitting the record button to schedule a recording. Also, my Aunt and Uncle are using Linux. I’m infecting the world with more Linux users.

Anyway, the new machine and my experiences with it:

• Intel Core i7 920 (quad core 2.66GHz 8MB L3)
• 3x2GB Corsair DDR3 1333MHz CAS9 RAM
• Gigabyte EX58-UD3R motherboard
• 2x1TB Samsung Spinpoint F1 SATA hard drives
• LG DVD-RW
• Antec P183 case
• Corsair HX620W modular PSU
• Noctua NH-U12P SE1366 tower heatpipe CPU cooler

That’s all the new stuff and I’m using an NVIDIA GeForce 7800GT PCI-E graphics card I’ve had for a couple of years.

So, how did it fair in my OSes of choice? The main issue is the on-board NIC. These days, if you don’t have a network connection, your OS is not particularly useful. It’s so limiting to not be able to connect to any other machines outside the one you’re using.

Anyway, I don’t know if it’s just a really awful choice of hardware on Gigabyte’s part for the EX58 series of boards, if the BIOS is doing something wrong, if it’s a bus issue, or if the drivers are just shoddy. For your information, the Gigabyte EX58 series of motherboards seem to use a Realtek RTL8111 with RTL8168 or RTL8169 that uses the PCI-E bus. All I know is that the on-board NIC does not work properly at all. In Windows, I had some difficulty installing the drivers and then, when installed, the interface would not recognise that I had connected a cat5 cable.

I didn’t want to use Windows anyway, I just wanted to see how well GTA IV performed on the Core i7. In Debian Lenny (Linux 2.6.26) and Ubuntu Jaunty (2.6.28), the on-board NIC sometimes appeared during installation and sometimes didn’t. When it had been detected and had the driver loaded, it didn’t seem to indulge any traffic.

Måns Rullgård, a prominent FFmpeg developer, has recently purchased a Core i7 machine too. He bought the Gigabyte EX58 Extreme and experienced the same issues. He gave up and used a spare PCI NIC he had. Thankfully I had an old 100Mbps 3com card lying around unused so I stuck that in and that seems to work.

With what else did I have problems? The usual Xorg ‘nv’ driver issues with my 7800GT. I look forward to that code being binned in all distributions. At least for my card it’s a piece of crap. It displays GDM mostly fine, with a few corrupt pixels, but then when arriving at the desktop, it is unusable. The cursor can be moved around, but clicking on things invokes no response. ctrl-alt-backspace doesn’t work (yes, I know about dontzap and it’s not that) nor switching to some other VT. It’s as good as hard locked, just with a cursor. Hopefully nouveau will be better.

You can see my previous post for my Hauppauge woes. Other than that, I think this machine runs very well. I have my 2x1TB drives set up with a mirrored boot partition (this doesn’t cause boot issues because the partitions can be read separately as if they had no mirror), a 6GB swap partition each (the kernel automagically stripes across the drives if you set them to have the same priority in fstab) and the rest is part of an LVM volume group.

Needless to say, it’s ridiculously fast and I shouldn’t need to upgrade for some years at least. Even one core of this Core i7 is multiple times faster than the Core Duo 1.83GHz I had been using. It’s immense.

I don’t think I managed to get the card working in Debian stable (lenny). However, the card was picked up and the two tuners were assigned devices when using Ubuntu Jaunty.

Unfortunately, it still didn’t pick up the IR device so the remote didn’t work. I spent quite some time trying to figure this out but eventually it was solved by simply compiling and installing new dvb modules from the v4l-dvb mercurial repository as there was some IR-related code missing from the dibcom 0700 source that is now present in the head of the mercurial repository.

I also added a file to block HAL from picking up on the IR device as this supposedly causes problems. I don’t know if it does, but I did it anyway. See here for information on the fdi file that blocks HAL.

Other than that, Ubuntu does a pretty good job of getting the LIRC settings right. The only thing that’s needed is a ~/.lircrc which I created from here.

And finally, to get the MythTV frontend to run without complaints (it has an aversion to pulseaudio at the moment) I had to disable pulseaudio completely.

If MythTV is too difficult to set up for you, I have also used me-tv and a fellow FFmpeg developer also works on a couple of programs with great potential called Showtime and Tvheadend. It functions in a similar way to MythTV in that you run Tvheadend as a DVR backend and then run Showtime as a graphical frontend for actually consuming the media. It does need some polish and some more features, but it’s sooooo easy to set up I will definitely be following it’s progress and maybe contributing to the code myself.

However, there was little progress with getting FFmpeg to compile with XCode Developer Tools 3.0 in the few weeks after Leopard’s release. There are purportedly issues with the new ld as it doesn’t work with code compiled with -mdynamic-no-pic or something like that. At least, I used to have to use that C flag in Tiger to get FFmpeg to compile and it no longer worked in Leopard with Dev Tools 3.

I rapidly felt a bit uninterested and underwhelmed by Leopard, after all the build up. Sure it’s a nice and welcome update and I personally think the operating system is very good. I used Tiger for over a year with few issues. In fact, I think the main quibbles I had were with third-party applications, namely fink (FFmpeg/MPlayer didn’t play too well with it), macports (there seems to be something wrong with some of the image libraries – lots of stuff breaks if you install libungif, libtiff, libpng, etc.) and an ext2 filesystem interface. I really don’t know why Apple don’t include ext2 support natively in OS X.

So, bored and wanting FFmpeg/MPlayer to compile easily, I sought my old friend Ubuntu. I wanted to see how well my MacBook would handle Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy as its sole OS and whether I would miss Mac OS X. In Ubuntu, ‘make fprofiled’ works for x264 which should give a nice speed boost and I don’t have to mess about with the asm code in Xvid, it just works.

However, the battery life is poor (~1.5 hours versus ~3 hours in OS X). The touchpad is set up much better than it used to be but I prefer using meta keys for right-click than having to stick with multi-taps as I often seem to catch the pad with my fingers while typing and end up typing text in some random place that’s not where I want it. I know I can edit xorg.conf to set up the synaptics driver to my taste so I’ll probably do that at some point but a toggle to disable multi-tap (this much exists) and enable meta-key button function alteration instead would be nice.

Also I need to remap some keys. I want my AltGr functionality back to get umlauts and circled ‘a’s (for Måns) and other accents with just a meta + letter press. The top-left +/- / Ss section key on my UK layout MacBook is pretty useless even in OS X. Maybe I can find a good use for that.

The volume control is slightly strange too. I think there must be two sets of speakers in the MacBook, hooked up to two different outputs of the sound chip. The main volume control seems to affect a treble set and the front speaker volume control affects the mid/bass set.

And one more thing… (OMG I’msofunny) the backlight range is a bit limited. I was aware of this before. I think the author of the MacBook backlight altering tool was conservative with the range of allowed values so he didn’t damage anyone’s hardware or something. That’s not too much of a problem as the lowest level is dim enough to use while sitting in the dark. More than a larger range, I would like to be able to manually disable the backlight. I’m sure this is possible as the power management stuff can do it automagically.

Despite these generally more intrusive issues, I don’t really miss OS X and I prefer working in Ubuntu.

I’ve also signed up with the Job Centre. I don’t really want the job seekers allowance but my parents suggested I do it to have a little income while I’m looking for a job and so that I get national insurance contributions paid. My two visits for appointments to date have been less than helpful, possibly even annoying. I found the staff had little intention of helping me to find a job I actually wanted and were more aiming to get me to apply for anyjobunderthesun. One member of staff was almost so insincere it was rude.

My tactic in response: ignore them completely and find jobs on my own because they don’t seem to understand the diversity of the software development field. There are too many different skills that they have no idea about for them to find an appropriate job for me. Trying to find an appropriate software development job just by looking at the job title in the Job Centre database would be a very time consuming task. You’d have to look at almost every entry.