{"id":4405,"date":"2015-07-02T22:17:59","date_gmt":"2015-07-03T05:17:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.graphics-muse.org\/wp\/?p=4405"},"modified":"2015-07-02T22:17:59","modified_gmt":"2015-07-03T05:17:59","slug":"pibox-field-trial-results","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.graphics-muse.org\/wp\/?p=4405","title":{"rendered":"PiBox field trial results"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"mediaserver01-large\"<\/a>This past weekend I took PiBox out in the trailer for a field trial.\u00a0 The box was mounted under a cabinet with power and HDMI wrapped around to a 7″ HDMI-input monitor.\u00a0 Power on worked fine and the system came right up.\u00a0 But not everything worked as expected.\u00a0 Here is the summary.<\/p>\n

SMB playback<\/h3>\n

The first issue was with shared files over SMB.\u00a0 I first tried to watch a movie using my LG Volt phone, which runs Android 4.4.2.\u00a0 I use ES File Explorer on Android to get to the video files.\u00a0 The phone could access the files and start the playback but the network would drop out after a while.\u00a0 I then tried it with a Galaxy Tab 2 tablet running Android 4.2.2.\u00a0 This worked much better and I watched several movies without interruption.\u00a0 The PiBox Media Player also worked perfectly.\u00a0 So I think the problem was with the phone’s wifi.\u00a0 That’s interesting since I often use the phone at the gym when I run on the treadmill to watch Netflix without problem.\u00a0 Apparently it works better with 3G than it does with wifi.<\/p>\n

One thing of interest here:\u00a0 the tablet notified me at one point of “unusual magnetic activity” in the area.\u00a0 I got this when I used an astronomy app (setting up to use my telescope – hey, it wasn’t all work on this field trial, we were camping).\u00a0 I have no idea how it sensed this but wonder, if it was real, if it had any impact on local wifi network performance.<\/p>\n

Cabling<\/h3>\n

The media server was cabled to a 7″ display in the trailer.\u00a0 This required an extra power cable.\u00a0 Then we also had a digital TV box that added additional power and HDMI cables.\u00a0 Finally I had a HDMI switch to go between the TV receiver and the Media Server.\u00a0 That amounts to a boat load of cables that didn’t exist before with the old TV\/DVD player.\u00a0 Fortunately, the digital TV and HDMI switch will go away when I add a digital TV dongle to the Media Server.\u00a0 But I’ll still have a TV cable.\u00a0 Even so, I can see that there are still too many cables.\u00a0 I need to power a display and connect to it with fewer exposed cables.\u00a0 That would leave just the power and digital TV lines exposed, which is much better.\u00a0 I’m not sure how I’ll solve that problem yet.<\/p>\n

Wifi Setup<\/h3>\n

The wifi setup works well when connecting to the local router.\u00a0 Using PiBox Media Server as a wireless access point had some minor problems.\u00a0 First there was a problem with the way I set ccmp vs tkip.\u00a0 There are two ways to configure the network:\u00a0 bui-network-config (the GTK+ app run from the launcher) and the web interface.\u00a0 I fixed the web interface to do the right thing, which is use tkip, in the web backend (piboxd).\u00a0 But bui-network-config uses its own code for the same thing.<\/p>\n

I’ve fixed bui-network-config but the long term solution is to have bui-network-config use the same backend.\u00a0 The problem is that bui-network-config was designed as a standalone tool that can be used outside of PiBox.\u00a0 So the question is how to maintain that capability.\u00a0 I think the solution is going to be to have a shared library that both bui-network-config and piboxd can use for this purpose.<\/p>\n

Multiple USB sticks<\/h3>\n

Something that kind of shocked me was a problem with multiple USB sticks.\u00a0 With one stick plugged in videos were available.\u00a0 With two or three they were not.\u00a0 This may have been a problem with the USB ports.\u00a0 I still need to check on that.\u00a0 Another problem may be with how VideoFE handles the databases created by VideoLib on the sticks.\u00a0 Or it might just be that the sticks were messed up.\u00a0 This simply needs more research.<\/p>\n

Video Browsing<\/h3>\n

Field trials are good to find out just how usable the device really is.\u00a0 In this case I found that the simplistic alphabetical list of videos was slow to move through using the keyboard’s arrow keys.\u00a0 I also found that, for some reason, the poster art was slow to load (or at least appeared that way).\u00a0 This poster issue is new, as I’d not seen this problem at home.\u00a0 Again, it may be due to networking issues at this site.<\/p>\n

The important issue here is that I need a way to fine tune the list of videos.\u00a0 Pressing a few keys should be sufficient to reduce the displayed list.\u00a0 I would need a way to cancel that search (to get the full list back) and\/or a way to timeout the current search.\u00a0 If it does timeout, does the display go back to the full list?\u00a0 How does the user know what the current search state is (as in timeout state, etc.)?<\/p>\n

There’s a bit of work to do here.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This past weekend I took PiBox out in the trailer for a field trial.\u00a0 The box was mounted under a cabinet with power and HDMI wrapped around to a 7″ HDMI-input monitor.\u00a0 Power on worked fine and the system came right up.\u00a0 But not everything worked as expected.\u00a0 Here is the summary. SMB playback The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1,562],"tags":[633,399,351,623,496,602,603,599,600,583,40],"class_list":{"0":"post-4405","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-general","7":"category-pibox","8":"tag-android","9":"tag-bui","10":"tag-digital-tv","11":"tag-gtk","12":"tag-hdmi","13":"tag-hdmi-cables","14":"tag-hdmi-switch","15":"tag-media-player","16":"tag-media-server","17":"tag-pibox","18":"tag-wifi","19":"czr-hentry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pe9t8-193","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.graphics-muse.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4405","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.graphics-muse.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.graphics-muse.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.graphics-muse.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.graphics-muse.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4405"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.graphics-muse.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4405\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4415,"href":"https:\/\/www.graphics-muse.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4405\/revisions\/4415"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.graphics-muse.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4405"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.graphics-muse.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4405"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.graphics-muse.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4405"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}