Tag Archives: xbmc

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I recently had to reinstall Raspbmc for the 4th time in as many days, thanks to an automatic update, sunspot activity, and possibly an intermittently dodgy SD card.

Latest attempt seems to be working (touch wood); the Pi hasn’t bricked itself yet, and the networking is still working. However, fan art is not being downloaded.

This is a note to self, but might be of use to those of you in a similar situation.

The Problem

You’re running XBMC/Raspbmc on a box in your home network. This network sits behind a combined Squid + Privoxy proxy, to provide network level object caching and malware/advert filtering.

You update your library, and while TV season descriptions are loaded, season images and fan art are not.

The Solution

What seems to be happening is that Privoxy is incorrectly identifying fan art images as adverts, which is causing Privoxy to return a 403 error when XBMC attempts to retrieve the resource. This only seems to be happening with the thetvdb scraper, the IMDB scraper for movies seems to have no issue.

The fix is simple, all you need to do is add an exception for thetvdb.com in your /etc/privoxy/user.actions file:

{ allow-ads }
.thetvdb.com

Now you should find that season fan art is accessible once more!

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This Christmas I finally bit the bullet and treated myself to a shiny XBox 360. Ostensibly this was so that I could experiment with console development, but mostly I have used it to play Gears of War.

In a slight departure from what I usually talk about, I thought I’d quickly jot down how I got the wireless controller to work with my Ubuntu XBMC media PC.

The wireless controller provides a slightly more usable remote than my iPhone (which must first be unlocked making quick pauses impossible) or rather flaky wireless keyboard, so hopefully this will be useful to someone.

Getting started

My media PC currently runs Ubuntu Karmic with XBMC. To begin with you will need to install the XBox kernel driver (already installed on Karmic).

Most importantly however, you will need to get yourself a XBox wireless gaming receiver for Windows – which I got included with my second controller. Xbox controllers do not use standard bluetooth, so you can’t just pair in the normal way using your existing hardware.

This howto has some more info…

Configuring XBMC

Assuming you have your module installed and controller paired you will need to tell XBMC about it by configuring a keyfile:

  1. I used this keyfile as a starting point. Download and save it as ~/.xbmc/userdata/keymaps/Keymap.xml (note case).
  2. Find out what your computer thinks the controller is by looking at the output from: cat /proc/bus/input/devices – you want a "Name" that says something like "Xbox 360 Wireless Receiver"
  3. Replace all occurrences of "Microsoft Xbox Controller S" with this value.

At this point if you start XBMC it should respond to the controller. If you are lucky this is all you will have to do, however for me I had to mess around with the key bindings a bit since the example keymap file didn’t match my controller exactly.

If this happens to you there’s not much I can suggest other than to bind one key at a time, restart XBMC and see what button that maps to then repeat until all your keys are mapped. I’m sure there must be an easier way that I’ve overlooked, feel free to comment below!

For what it’s worth, here is my modified (but somewhat incomplete) key file which has largely sensible bindings. Hack away to get it working how you like.

» Modified Keymap

Image “XBMC” by Miskan