Many sites say v8 of the WRT-54G routers cannot be flashed with DD-WRT. I have now done this twice and here are simple instructions - these are re-worked from bauer-power who’s post I came across when fearing my first attempt bricked the router. First try on a v8 took me over two hours mostly in Google/ Forums, second time about ten minutes with these steps:
- Go to http://192.168.1.1 (default user/pass is admin/admin)
- Click on Administration tab, then click on Firmware Upgrade. Upload vxworkskillerGv8-v3.bin
- When you see ‘Update is successful, Rebooting….’ unplug the router for 120 seconds
- Plug in router, ping 192.168.1.1 to verify it is still alive
- Run the Linksys Tftp Utility, uploading dd-wrt.v24_micro_wrt54gv8.bin with these settings:
- Press Ugrade. When the green dot appears press the router reset button
- Browse to 192.168.1.1 and see the new firmware (default user/pass is root/admin)
Use IE as Firefox does well with DD-WRT
If you are looking to flash another a non v8 router with DD-WRT I found these links to be the most helpful:
DD-WRT Installation wiki
Client Bridge Example (this is almost 100% correct for V24 firmware - you should have no problems following it)
Also be aware there are version specific firmwares on the dd-wrt website, but it may take you while to find them: Linksys is under the Broadcom (chipset) folder. More than likely a newer builder than I linked to will work with the v8, but I simply wanted another client bridge and have had one running with v24 for two months now.
Afraid to do this ‘hack’? Of the three Linksys routers I’ve flashed none became bricks. Heck they are only $40 now anyway, but if you do brick one it looks they are not too impossible to recover:
Recover from a bad-flash (unbrick a dead router) wiki
So Why did I do this?
This was left to last as the news that we can flash Linksys routers is years old. Still even me -a tech blog addict- was still not 100% sure what a wireless bridge is, and how to link to wireless networks into one seamless network. We need access points in many locations, but are renting so cannot run cat5 everywhere. Yes I could buy custom wireless adapters for the xbox (xbmc), HTPC, NAS drives, PCs and printers but they normally cost $80 or more each and are no where nearly as flexible as a DD-WRT flashed router which has 5 ports. Also the new V8 WRT54G router I bought for my theater room was losing the plot when the PS3 was turned on - I have no idea why but the voip phone etc would all lose their connection. Since being flashed it has been 100% stable.
This is a sample wireless bridge, to the machines it looks like one seamless network:
We now have three WRT54 routers with DD-WRT. One is a primary and two more are client bridges.. one for the xbmc and for my main PC in an office room. They seem to play fine together. The two client bridges have five Ethernet sockets as the wan port was reconfigured by DD-WRT. This is fantastic for many reasons, e.g. when moving large files I can plug a laptop or NAS drives into the same wired network. WiFi is fine for streaming media, but you trying moving a 10GB VirtualPC image or 4GB TV recording over WiFi and you’ll see how much faster/ reliable wired networks are.
Posted by Paul Lockwood as IPTV, Technology at 9:07 AM MST
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Bright people surround my life, but I am often surprised when conversation steers to HDTV. Many of these otherwise intelligent and technical savvy people make basic mistakes. HDTV is not a ‘core-comptency’ of mine, but I am confident that this is a list of some basics many people get wrong all the time:
Video Cables:
DVI/ HDMI are the best - these carry purely digital signals. HDMI is an upgrade on DVI, you can buy converters between them both, but DVI cannot carry audio signals or handle HDCP.
Component video is the second best choice. It is (generally) analog and can carry any resolution up to 1080p; I have no experience, but would worry about picture quality at 1080 with a long cheap cable.
S-Video, composite. Look at a calendar, it is 2007 in a few days time!!!
VGA - not a bad choice if you must, but it is the equivalent of coding in Pascal because that’s the only compiler you have handy.
Monster HDMI/ DVI cables:
No, no, no! You just do not need high-end cables for digital signals traveling short distances. In the analogue days we were always struggling for ‘the clearest sound or color’ - with digital if the signal is not working you know immediately. Have you ever heard of $100 premium monster IDE cables for a hard disk? Did not think so, but I could start a new business PremiumCablesForSuckers.com :) I happily ran a 480p Plasma on a fifteen foot DVI cable from froogle that cost under twenty bucks. Mileage may vary with the higher frequency of 1080p, but I’d try the cheap cable before splashing the cash on a premium brand.
Sound Cables:
Yes monster cables ‘may’ help when joining an amp to speakers, but 99% of the audio quality is a function of the wire’s gauge. 12 gauge mains cable from the Home Depot will kick the pants off 16 gauge Monster cable - trying to route 12 gauge solid core through your walls is not that easy though, ask me how I know :) I settled for an off brand 14 gauge multi-core for surround speakers and short runs of expensive cable for only the front speakers.
Of course all your digital cables should be optical. These no longer need to be special ordered from NASA, and can be found on Froogle for under a dollar if you look hard enough. I have a box full of different lengths + optical splitters/joiners - they cost peanuts and work fine. Coax digital cables also work fine, but would you rather be Buck Rodgers or MacGyver? Buy the optical :)
Resolution:
HDCP is beginning to matter. People with real lives (mortgages, kids and everything!) are starting to buy 1080p projectors/ LCDs…. before you do make sure you read up on HDCP (High Definition Content Protection). All new HD players will have HDCP, and consequently to play content at 1080p, your HD Monitor must also support HDCP. If your monitor does not support HDCP then the player will revert to a lower resolution :( Note: Wikipedia says HDCP will work over DVI, but I would play it safe and use a HDMI cable.
In all likelihood HD DVD movies CSS-equivalent will soon be cracked [are you there DVDJon?]. Many people in the know will play 1080p content by means other than HDCP enabled boxes, a hacked xbox 360 or PS3 perhaps? HDCP like DRM will only harm the masses who are not even aware of the acronyms. Pirates and the tech-savvy will simply steer around them.
Screen Type:
Linux or Windows, Optimus Prime or Magneto? Yes this is religious territory, but here goes:
Plasma: Now start at $700 for 42″, great picture in brightly lit rooms, some screen fade/burn over time, bad dark levels, will soon be pushed aside by LCD + eventually SED
Projectors: Really big screens for not much money. Front or rear projection. Your own screen and projector in a basement is the ultimate in Home Theater but it had better be pretty dark in the room. Probably not suitable for a main TV, though many people choose the rear project units and seem to love them
LCD: 40″ 1080p is currently $1500. Prices continually falling - in raw materials terms these must be cheap to produce and will surely cost next to nothing soon. Their refresh rates and viewing angles have massively improved recently
SED (Surface-conduction Electron-emitter Display) looks promising but don’t expect to be affordable until 2008 at the earliest
CRT: Forget it, large flat screens are now so cheap it is not worth considering a CRT, although CRT has the best picture quality of any technology. They simply become to large and heavy to make a screen to rival the benchmark 42″ Plasma.
Sound:
The AV community seems to be agreeing that 5.1 sound is perfect for home theater system. 6.1 and 7.1 (SDDS?) have not made much impact. Make sure your receiver/ amplifier can handle DTS. DTS is ‘premium’ 5.1 sound and I believe is compressed less than most 5.1 sounds tracks. I like to think it sounds better, but my ears have witness too many loud clubs and rock concerts for me to be sure. If you live in a detached house and like action movies then buy a big sub - you’ll thank me later.
1080i, NTSC, PAL:
People almost never get this without 20+ minutes of explanation. Summary: all modern display technologies are progressive. If a LCD or Plasma says it is 1080i then it means that it will scale a 1080i image to its native resolution. Check the native resolution when buying a screen, telling a home theater buff that you just bought a 1080i LCD screen is like telling a web developer that Java coding will be easy because you did some JavaScript on your myspace page. He’ll probably pat you on the head before returning to his online dispute on whether Gredo or Han Solo fired first.
PAL, NTSC, SECAM etc also confuse most people. These days the conversion is done very well for you so don’t worry about this too much.
Resolution
Everyone understands the basics, if you want to recap then I suggest starting with the illustration at the bottom of this Wikipedia page on 1080p.
To summarise resolution: I have a 480p plasma which looks great playing DVDs compared to an old plain-Jane CRT 32″ TV. Most people consider 720p to be the start of real High Definition. Personally I bought the cheaper 480p as a stop gap to buying an 50″ 1080p screen when they become affordable. At this moment in time a 1080p screen with HDCP and at least two HDMI inputs looks pretty future proof - if you plan on keeping a screen for the next ten+ years, seriously think about spending the extra cash or waiting for prices to drop a little more.
As stated earlier I do not consider myself an expert in this area, but through Podcast Osmosis seem to have picked up some basics. Wikipedia had great coverage on HDTV acronyms, expect to lose a few evenings of your life there before buying that new HDTV. Buyers regret will happen anyway, whatever you buy will appear overpriced outdated junk by the time January 2009 rolls around.
Posted by Paul Lockwood as HDTV, IPTV at 6:46 PM MST
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NAS, or Network Attached Storage is finally affordable to use at home. For a few weeks I have been running two $70 Coolmax
CN-550 devices:
This is an external USB drive with an RJ-45 ethernet
port. My devices both have 320GB hard discs and allowed me to dismantle a dedicate
file server PC :) Now we only have one desktop PC
in the house!!, which is a far-cry from the five PC two years ago!! Simplicity
means more time for other hobbies, and this device has a very simple to use web interface.
So what are the pros and cons of the CN-550 which right now is the pick of the affordable
NAS:
Good:
Works seamlessly with final build of XMBC v1.0
Works seamlessly with Windows 2000, XP, and Vista
Can access files via a windows ‘machine name’, e.g. \\MP3s\Radiohead\
Maintainable via a simple web interface
Simple to user Folder security (SMB username/ paswords)
Can easily become an FTP server
Stackable
Mild Annoyances:
XMBC 2.0 does not recognize these devices (yet)
Only uses IDE drives, not SATA
Discs must be formatted FAT32
Very slow for large data transfers over RJ45 (use USB 2.0 instead)
One of my 320GB Hard Discs does not work with power saving - I simply turned off sleep
for that NAS device
Bad:
Reported not to work with some very large hard discs (750GB)
Posted by Paul Lockwood as HDTV, IPTV at 4:51 AM MST
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Just for the record: if anyone is considering a Plasma TV bear in mind that screen
burn does happen. When buying mine early this year almost all the press were
saying that it barely happened with old models, and is the same a CRT for the latest
generation of Plasmas. Well with pretty light use (we don’t even have cable!) my Plasma
is already showing a faint impression of the xbmc menu + pause/ progress box
during power-off.
This is no big deal for me it was caught in time and I set the xbmc screensaver
to stars with a one minute delay. The default is dim (to 20%) after
three minutes which obviously was not doing the trick.
Posted by Paul Lockwood as HDTV, IPTV at 3:50 PM MST
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Asus are the first out of the gate with one:
http://usa.asus.com/products4.aspx?modelmenu=1&model=979&l1=12&l2=43&l3=0
A big sell to me is: Hide one in your attic or coal house and
you have a theft proof network drive.
This device also comes with Bitorrent, ftp etc capable client and servers, although no podcatcher support which
would make it a done deal for me. Bitorrent support may help marketing,
but I the main appeal for many is an always on Samba Share - right now I need
a (noisy) PC running to share media between my xbmcs (the xbox’s SMB server implementation
is single threaded and cannot run in parallel with xbmc). Podcast support + SMB
server would allow me to part another PC for eBay (I am down to three
today); but without both those options I am skipping the ~$270 device for now. By
Xmas I predict similar devices will also pull down podcasts and IPTV via RSS.
Before this router appeared I was close to buying another used xbox (~$90 on
Craig’s list [Aug 2006]) and running a SMB share via linux on one. In case you
have not heard; it is now child’s place to hack an (original) xbox without a chip/
special game/ memory card etc. A used xbox makes a very cheap linux server
or 1080i capable media center. That reminds me I have some used
xbox games to sell on eBay… who has time for games anyway?
Posted by Paul Lockwood as IPTV at 9:02 PM MST
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Update (2nd July): Since this post I have reverted back to using Juice
Receiver which although not designed for video has fewer glitches. If anyone knows
of a more reliable solution please let me know.
IPTV is about where podcasting was when I started manually downloading podcasts in
the summer of 2004 [i.e. in its infancy]. Within only two years podcasting has made
a small dent in the nation’s listening habits, with high awareness in the high spending
demographics that advertisers salivate over. Will IPTV do the same?Already we have several aggregators; the one I recommend trying is Democracy Player.
It is open source and runs on all popular operating systems, but did not work with
on my install of Vista Beta 2.
Like iPodder Lemon before it Democracy Player installs
with several pre-selected channels, which just like iPodder downloaded large quantities
of utter garbage to my hard disk. I suggest deleting the pre-selected channels, clicking
on Channel Guide and using the iTunes like interface to select from popular listings.
As the following screenshot shows I am trying out ABC news, Ricky Gervis, and TWIT’s
h.264 feed:
This is early days for the software and this player does work perfectly as a media
server. I view the content from xbmc over a SMB share, which works fairly well but
all the media is deposited into one folder with often cryptic filenames. Hopefully
a future build will create a directory for each feed like Juice Receiver does for
podcasts. Finally it is worth noting that Democracy Player uses Bittorrent under the
hood so downloads should be fast – there are no custom port settings yet so I have
temporarily enabled UPnP on my NAT Router.
Posted by Paul Lockwood as IPTV, Podcasts at 8:41 PM MST
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For about two months I have been really looking forward to the 4.9 version of iTunes
- I expected seamless podcast support and most importantly auto conversion to bookmarkable
aac files. When you listen to number of podcasts I do you want a good podcast receiver.
So what did I find:
- Intergration with iTunes is OK - a true GUI directory is sweet although it is
more basic than corporate GUIs I churned out in 1994 on 16 bit 386 machines
- No bittorrent support - this means podcast providers hosting bills will skyrocket if
many users move away from iPodder
- We cannot paste custom urls when a podcast is not in Apple’s directory, like My’lanta for
instance
- There is no Auto conversion to bookmarked files (aac) -aargh, bookmarks
are why I bought an iPod in the first place
- No playlist per podcast - all podcasts are dumped into the same playlist. Do Apple
not realize many people use their iPods solely for podcasts and don’t want to be scrolling
through 100+ files at 90mph on the highway while simultaneously riding the bumper
of a 911 and flipping off the SUV that they just cut up?
Ok enough of a rant already. I tried the Primetime
Podcast Receiver a month ago which looked promising but turned out to be
a little buggy with no bittorrent support either. Hopefully it will improve or iPodder
will add auto bookmarkable aac conversion. It is quite tempting to write something
myself building on my two week hack of my MP3
Jukebox (it looks rubbish but functionally was better than any commercial
MP3 Jukebox in 2001) .
Posted by Paul Lockwood as IPTV, Podcasts at 8:36 PM MST
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Update: Installation of Aureus from SourceForge and
waiting a little over a day left Revelations.iso on my HD. Minutes later a DVD-RW
was burned and placed in my DVD player. If you are downloading Revelations wait
for the DVD download. The effects are still impressive but at DVD quality
they do look like effects since they are too clean.
Bittorent coupled with non commercial content like this movie and the twenty plus
podcasts I listen to each week must surely have media companies rethinking their future.
How long until even my basic cable subscription is not necessary? Already cable TV
would be redundant if I (illegally) download the Simpsons etc - I know more than one
person with a modded Xbox who is doing this. Personally I prefer to stay on the right
side of the law for $40/ month, but is it really worth $40/month for a handful of
shows? Micro-payments for legal downloads of ABC News and the Simpsons would have
me calling Comcast tomorrow. I know first hand that Atlanta based cable companies
hire smart developers. I hope their strategic planners are just as smart. It interesting
to note that the BBC is already
producing podcasts - doubt I’ll listen to live radio ever again.
News of
Star
Wars Revelations is exploding. Yesterday I finally got around to downloading it
and was pleasantly surprised.
Apparently Mr. Lucas is fine with fans making Star Wars films, so long as they are
not for profit. Take a look at the screen captures below (darn Media Player got me
for a while with overlay mode so I swiftly installed BS
Player on the laptop + switched to RGB mode).
Any more questions on why, how much and how did you achieve this for little cash etc
are answered on the creator’s faq:
www.panicstruckpro.com/revelations/revelations_faq.html
The film is free - you will soon find torrents and direct downloads all over the web.
My mini review: sets are stellar, spacecraft are better than any of the original three
films and you will see some familiar faces like storm troopers, R2D2, regulars of
the cantina bar etc. The plots was a little weak, but if you like Star Wars you must
take a look - good luck downloading it though, my torrent did not even start whereas
podcasts often come down at up to 800k/s.
Posted by Paul Lockwood as IPTV at 8:43 PM MST
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