Enter the BIOS, Part 3

 I keep using this title because it reminds me of Bruce Lee's "Enter The Dragon", not that his movies were any good, but because of the attitude he brought to his fights: Intense.

The more I play with the Zbox, the more problems I run into:

• the DVD player won't play movies,
• I can't get audio over the HDMI cable,
• the Linux desktop is just slightly too large for the screen,
• the screen saver turns off the TV (or maybe the TV turns itself off), which is good, but it won't turn it back on,
• some of the video you get over the net is not very good, but whose problem is that?

I don't know, every time I turn around it seems like something else is either broken or just not working.

For instance, in the course of trying to figure out why the DVD won't play, I try to play a music CD. It works fine (of course it would, I used the same optical drive to install Linux off of a CD-ROM), but the player program does not show the names of the tunes, it only shows the track number. Oh, yes, I remember running into this a long time ago on Windows. To find the names of the songs, you need to go to a database on the net, and using the playing times of all the songs, you can find out the name of the album and therefor the names of the various tracks. I think there was one check box or something that had to be enabled to turn this on.

Linux is not quite so wonderful (Linux is Lovely, Windows is Wonderful), you have to jump through a couple of hoops to find the names of the songs, and even then not everybody wants to play nice.

Banshee is name of the music player that comes with the current version (11) of Linux, but it has no capability of naming that tune. For that you need another program. To install the latest one (Picard) requires that you install a whole bunch of other stuff, and while it would be done automatically, I am just a little suspicious. I mean, this is a fairly straight forward proposition, why do you need to install 489 other pieces of stuff (stuff being a euphemism for a more vulgar term which I am refraining from using because I am trying to be civilized about this)?

So I look a little more and I find EasyTag, which doesn't require much of anything. I install it, and ask it to look up the names for the tunes on this CD, and it can't find anything. Grump. Why not? So I do a little exploring using the name of the artist (Leonard Cohen) and the name of the album (I'm Your Man) and I get back literally thousand's of matches. Okay, there's something funny going on here that I don't quite understand. I finally pick one and it seems to work, and now all the tracks I copied onto the hard disk have names that mean something.

And that is basically how it has been going. On the plus side, we were able to watch an episode of "The Good Wife" over the internet last night. I don't think the video was as clear as we used to get using the Frontier DVR, but it wasn't too bad.