Month: September 2008

DD-WRT

I went ahead and installed DD-WRT on my router today. I want to give it a few days before I say this for certain, but I think it’s solved all the problems I had with the Apple TV. I tried streaming stuff wirelessly from my MacBook to the Apple TV, and that worked. I watched a podcast and a couple of YouTube videos over the Internet, no problem. And I synced a few TV shows from my desktop PC down to the Apple TV without the sync getting interrupted and restarting every few minutes.

The install was fairly straightforward. For a v8 WRT54G like mine, it’s detailed here. It turns out that the v8 WRT54G isn’t the best router to user for DD-WRT (that would probably be a WRT54GL, as explained here), but it works with with the “micro” distribution of DD-WRT, which is all I really need.

The installation write-up doesn’t bother to mention the default user name and password for DD-WRT. You can find them in the FAQ, but if you haven’t looked that up and written it down before installing, you might have to do what I did, which was to call a friend and have him look it up for me.

Aside from the usual setup, I didn’t have to mess with any of the parameters in DD-WRT to get things working well, except to turn off “filter multicast”, which I had to do under the original firmware also. (That setting is under security / firewall in the DD-WRT config.)

Overall, DD-WRT is pretty cool. You can see a lot of stuff in the status screens that you can’t see under the default firmware. And there’s lot of stuff you can tweak, though I doubt I’ll mess with it much, assuming it keeps working OK.

more Apple TV fun

I’m still struggling with my Apple TV. I got an initial sync (with my desktop PC) done only by hooking up the Apple TV to my network with an Ethernet cable. I couldn’t get it to work over wireless, no matter what I tried. I came across a good article on the way Apple TV tends to behave more like a computer (with all the usual problems) rather than a consumer electronics device. Good quote: “Whereas most CE A/V products just sit there and work, Apple TV is high-maintenance, demanding too much attention, updating, troubleshooting and overall spoon-feeding.”

After the initial sync, I switched back to wireless, and I have been able to sync a few things down to it, though it hasn’t been trouble-free. I’ve also been experimenting with streaming stuff from my MacBook to the Apple TV. I managed to watch an hour-long video podcast with no problems, but then I started experiencing problems with much smaller files. Weird. I played around today some more, and I’ve discovered that I can stream stuff from the MacBook fine, if it’s connected to my network via Ethernet cable. (The Apple TV doesn’t need to be wired, just the MacBook.) Again, kind of weird.

On the Apple discussion boards, I’ve seen three solutions to the Apple TV wireless problems that would probably work:
(1) Leave it hooked up via an Ethernet cable, and forget about using it wirelessly.
(2) Throw your WRT54G router away and get a new one.
(3) Load an alternate firmware on your router, such as DD-WRT.

I’m not real keen on any of those, though I wouldn’t mind having an excuse to try out DD-WRT. I’m a little worried that I might brick my router if I do that, but it’s only a $50 router, so it wouldn’t be the end of the world if it happened. Maybe I’ll be doing that later this week.

Apple TV

I got an Apple TV today. I got it largely so I can watch Battlestar Galactica, season 4, in HD. And so I can watch Torchwood, season 2, which I downloaded back in July but haven’t gotten around to watching yet.

It was relatively easy to set up, but I’ve hit a few snags. The biggest one involves syncing my videos from my PC to the Apple TV. I fully expected that an initial sync between the PC and the Apple TV would take a long time. However, I didn’t expect that the sync would hit some kind of snag and abort after 5 minutes, every time I try to run it. Looking at the forums at Apple’s web site, it seems like this is a fairly common problem. Reading through a few threads, it seems like the only foolproof way to do an initial sync is to use an Ethernet cable. Unfortunately, I don’t have an Ethernet cable long enough to reach from my router to my TV here in the apartment. I’ll have to borrow one from work tomorrow. I think that this is a pretty big problem — syncing with a PC is pretty fundamental to the operation of this thing, and it should really be able to do it wirelessly. I don’t need it to happen fast, but it should *happen*. I can download pretty big files to my PS3 and my Tivo over the wireless network, no problem, so I know it’s not a problem with my network.

iTunes 8, continued

Well, my desktop Vista machine finally finished chugging through its “Genius” stuff. Just for yuks, I hit the Genius button on “Why Henry Drinks”, by Drive-By Truckers, and iTunes gave me a pretty awesome playlist, which I’d like to paste here, but I’m having trouble exporting the playlist to a format that I can easily paste into Blogger’s editor. The best I can do right now is a screenshot:

iTunes 8

I’ve upgraded all of my home computers to iTunes 8 today. My desktop Vista machine is still running through the “Genius” setup, which apparently takes a long time when you run it on a large library. My one pet peeve with iTunes 8 is that there is no longer a preference pane setting to turn off the Genre column in the browser. It can still be turned off though, using this hint. That worked fine on the Mac, but I’m not sure how to translate that to the PC. It’s probably a registry setting or something. I’ll have to play around with it later.

Meanwhile, I can’t seem to download app updates for my iPod Touch from iTunes right now. I’m hoping that’s a temporary glitch related to the iTunes 8 rollout. I’ve got two apps that need to be updated. I’ll have to take a look at that again tomorrow.

One more Apple-related note: I ordered a refurbished Apple TV unit today. I was motivated by the availability of Battlestar Galactica in HD on the iTunes store. I never got around to watching any of BSG season 4 off my Tivo, and now the first few episodes have disappeared. (Apparently, I ran out of room at some point, and they were dropped.) The quality on my Tivo Series 2 isn’t great anyway. I don’t mind paying $30 or so to get the whole season in HD, and without commercials or those annoying crawls for Ghost Hunters or whatever else SciFi is plugging. Oh, and with the Apple TV, I’ll finally be able to watch Torchwood season 2 on my TV. I downloaded that from iTunes while I was in San Diego, and I watched the first episode on my laptop, but I haven’t gotten around to watching any more of them.

Vista – Aero problems?

I’m still trying to get Vista up and running on my desktop PC. I haven’t lost access to the network lately, so that’s a good sign. However, I’m now getting occasional messages saying that the “desktop window manager has stopped working”. This doesn’t cause any serious problems; the screen just blanks for a second, then everything’s fine again. This seems to be happening right after I access my USB Zip drive, which is a little weird. A Google search isn’t turning up much useful. Most reasonable suggestions related to this error point towards the video driver. I’ve got a fairly old, pre-Vista, video card, so maybe I should upgrade to a card that came out post-Vista, and that’s likelier to have good Vista drivers.

Vista – networking, development, etc.

I didn’t touch my home desktop PC at all over the Labor Day weekend, so I didn’t make any more progress on moving to Vista. I’m working on it now, though.

I just installed FolderShare, so I could have access to the shared library that I keep on all my computers. FolderShare works fine under Vista, as far as I can tell.

I’ve been having occasional problems with my network adapter not working under Vista. It started right after I installed Virtual PC. That may have something to do with it, or that may just be a coincidence. If I reboot the machine, that fixes the problem. It’s only happened a couple of times so far, so I’ll have to see if it becomes a real problem or not.

I’m trying to get started porting my Delphi comic book database application to C#. I mentioned this in a previous post. The Delphi app requires BDE, which I’m not keen on trying to install under Vista, though apparently, it’s possible. I’m thinking about using SQL Server Compact for my database. I don’t need anything fancy for this, nor do I need multi-user access to the data. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with SQL Express either.