Except a Gleam Across the Dreamer's Face

I'm a little late on this since I've been exhausting my mana ranting elsewhere, but rest assured I've been thinking about this a lot during the shower in the morning. I mean... wait... there's a less awkward way of saying that...

PC World has declared that the Linux desktop missed its opportunity to gain market share, and that opportunity has passed. To a point this is true... the Linux desktop was a viable alternative when Vista was rejected by the public at large. It didn't matter if users had even tried Vista in their lifetime - public opinion had spoken, and Vista wasn't invited to the consumer PC party. A huge market share vacuum was left behind and Linux tried to fill it as rapidly as possible, but it simply had too much ground to cover. By the time the Linux desktop caught up (and they did catch up in my opinion) it was simply too late for inclusion by OEMs into netbooks - the hardware platform that was absolutely made for Linux.

Gosling ends up agreeing but on a different premise: the economics of OSS don't work for desktop software that "just works" out of the box. This has some truth as well - a pay-per-support model cannot sustain an OSS desktop when the expectation is that the desktop should simply "work" without the need to call for support. By the time the user picks up the phone for help the desktop environment has already failed. Desktops must install and operate without a need for any hand-holding.

PC World did make one important point that shouldn't be glossed over - the traditional, monolithic desktop is dying off. I'm not saying that the desktop is going away by any measure... but people are returning to the time where they see desktops, laptops, mobile phones and TV's as "appliances" and no longer as "computers." Each serves a function of its own and is expected to work in concert with the rest of the electronic family.

I hope these blogs o' doom don't have a chilling effect on writing applications for the Linux desktop. Linux is only going to see greatly increasing deployments in the future, not diminishing ones. The desktop is not simply going to be defined as KDE 4 or Gnome, but instead is going to exist as Hulu Desktop and/or MythTV. The desktop creates and consumes content - the lines between OS' are starting to dissolve.

ALSA Good in MythTV, I do the Hulu!

I'm a very happy puppy. Now at least.

There's a re-occurring mystery that happens with my MythTV boxes. Several versions and several builds of Myth work fantastically when suddenly KAPOW - the recording stops. Oh sure, it says it records crap, but then I try to take a look and nuttin' is on the file system. The only recourse I've been able to find so far is to drop the entire database and re-build it from scratch. Ick.

This happened to me recently and I took the opportunity to take a deeper dive on getting the hardware working correctly. When I first configured my latest Myth box I settled with a non-working ALSA configuration and just piped audio to the OSS compatibility device at /dev/adsp. It worked, even though the DTS or AC3 surround sound pass-thru didn't work. This time I hunkered down and really tried to get the thing to work.

I dug deeper into ALSA's digital out documentation, going through every step they illustrated to find how I could patch MythTV's audio to ALSA. I pointed MythTV directly to spdif by specifying ALSA:plug:spdif for the audio output device. It works fantastically now and feeds pristine audio from the pcHDTV HD-5500.

Once audio worked I wanted to up the ante a bit. I've given up on my cable television service and wanted to see if I could supplant it with Netflix and Hulu. Netflix works great through the Wii and Hulu's Desktop app works amazingly well on Linux. It was a straight-forward process to launch Hulu Desktop right from within MythTV and even bind the same remote commands in Hulu. At first sound did not work: Hulu Desktop uses the default ALSA output instead of letting me explicitly define the spdif channel. No matter - after a little bit of checking I just created a PCM default by feeding the mythtv user account its own, custom ~/.asoundrc containing:
pcm.!default {
type plug
slave.pcm "iec958"
}
This had ALSA make spdif the default output and Hulu Desktop was happy. Woohoo!

One additional problem however... for some reason both Hulu Desktop and MythTV rendered a bigger window than my TV could display. For some odd reason my TV only displays 97% of the content rendered by my video card. For example, if I tried to set my resolution to 1920x1080 (the maximum supported by my television), then MythTV's interface would be slightly too big to fit the screen - 57 pixels would be cut away at the left & right, 32 pixels trimmed from the top & bottom. To get around this I had to tell both Hulu Desktop and MythTV to shrink by 3% and then re-center themselves. For a 1920x1080 resolution this meant having MythTV shrink to 1863x1048 with an x,y offset (a.k.a. window origin) at 29,16. For performance reasons I switch to a 960x540 resolution for Hulu Desktop, which means a 932x524 window size starting at 14,8. Once I made those size & position tweaks everything fit perfectly.

After a ton of trial and error I now have 5.1 channel surround sound for recorded HDTV broadcast streams (when available) and have Hulu Desktop & Netflix running on the living room television. Now I'm happy... no more cable TV, less commercials and tons of stuff on demand. If only Netflix would provide a Linux-friendly player the living room setup would be in pure harmony. Until then, I've got the closest thing to it and a smaller bill every month.