Random file-names using bash/perl

A couple of times I've wanted to sort files in a random fashion, and allways worked around it someway sorting for size, dates or other things.

I needed a random sorting of pictures when making a slide-show for my mother.

run the following command to give the files a unique "random" 10-digit number.
ls | perl -ne 'if (/.jpg$/i) {chomp;while(-e ($n = (int(rand(10**10-1)).".jpg")) || length($n) < 14) {print "Too short: $n (" . length($n) . ")\n";} rename $_, "$n";'}
(it prints out names being to short just as info)

I also needed to group these files into some subdirectories. Run the following command to create a number of sub-directories:
for i in `seq 1 8`; do echo "creating $i"; mkdir $i; done
(it prints out the directory-names)

run this command to move the files into the sub-directories:
ls | perl -ne 'if (/.jpg$/i) {chomp; $dir = ($dir++ % 8 + 1); print "$dir\n"; rename $_, "$dir\/$_"; }' | sort -n | uniq -c
(it prints out the number of files and the name of the directories)

Getting Canal Digital DVB-C up & running on my MAC mini

I've tried to search for info on this the last couple of months, but haven't really found any good info on my setup with the components I'm trying to get up & running:

How to set up Canal Digital Cable TV (DVB-C⁴) in Norway on a Mac Mini

New TV

I bought a new television (Sony KDL-40WE5B) set a few weeks ago, and because it an IDTV³ and has an integrated CAM-reader and digital HD-tuner, I also bought a CAM² (of type Conax) and after a couple of days I got my brand new card from Canal Digital (CD). Plugged it into the TV-set, and after 15 minutes I everything worked fine, with EPG⁵ and everything.

Getting this to work on my MAC

Great! then I started thinking I wanted to extend my MAC mini in the living room to also have all these digital channel, and preferably also the 5-or-so HD-channels CD includes in their basic package.

Trying with the Elgato Hybrid

I started out trying to configure my Elgato Hybrid with an external CI¹-CAM²-reader. However I found out that the DVB-C⁴ support on the hybrid stick is not supported for my version (which is about one year old). Elgato has since added support for DVB-C⁴ on the hybrid, but I suspect this is only for unencrypted channels. My hybrid actually broke (for the second time) - http://forums.elgato.com/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=527 - and I expect to get a new one within a couple of weeks, so I'll test it's capabilities when I get a new one back.

On to Terratec

So I went and bought a Terratec's H7 from Komplett.no which is both a DVB-C⁴-tuner and a CAM²-reader. Plugged it in and started a channel-search specifying DVB-C⁴ in Elgato EyeTV. Luckily it found (most of) the channels right away (took about 20 min). But for an unknown reason there are a few channels missing - most notably National Geographic HD, Rush HD, and Silver HD. At first I thought it might have been a problem with finding HD-channels, but both TVNorge HD and Discovery HD, as well as a couple of others are present. I haven't figured this out yet, so I'd be very grateful for any tips on how find these.

EPG

I had a suspicion EPG⁵ would become a problem, both because I've used a lot of time dealing with it when having analog cable, and because of tips from twitter⁷. It just didn't work, even though the EPG on the TV-set worked flawlessly. EyeTV actually found program-data from one channel (I think it was Swedish TV4), but for none other. Supposedly this is due to the way EPG-data is sent (multiplexed) across the cable (Elgato forum, Elgato forum).

When running my Elgato Hybrid with analog cable I set up an external EyeTV-EPG Proxy which fetched XMLTV⁶-data from http://epg.mspc.no/xmltv/ running tv_grab_no_gfeed. However I couldn't get this to link up with the new set-up because I couldn't find the type of connection needed for EyeTV to link the type of connection to the XML-response from the server (see 5a. on this page). (tried a lot of different types and also tried to grep/search the EyeTV-execuatble without any luck). big :-(

XMLTV

However EyeTV now support XML - it didn't when I set up the proxy a few years ago. For some reason the xml-file from xmltv has to be manually transfered to EyeTv for some reason. I wished it could be set up to poll the EPG as the other services. Anyway, this can be automated by calling the script:
open -ga EyeTV.app xmltv.xml
This could even be set up as a cron-job, which actually seems to work ok. I trig this after downloading the xml-file from xmltv.

The Norwegian channel-list on http://epg.mspc.no/xmltv/00index.html is unfortunately both incomplete and somewhat buggy. After importing it with tv_grab_no_gfeed, I run the result through the following script to clean it, and merge programs from nrk3 and nrksuper, which is actually the same channel:

#!/bin/bash
# Clean xmltv-file from http://epg.mspc.no/xmltv/00index.html
DIR="/tmp"
FILE="$DIR/xmltv-A_00001.xml"
BAK="$DIR/xmltv-A_00001.bak"
TMP="/tmp/hei"
TMP2="/tmp/hei2"
TMP3="/tmp/hei3"

# take a backup
cp $FILE $BAK

# replace some chars
sed 's/<br>//g' < $FILE > $TMP
# fix stop-time for nrk3-programs
sed -e "s/\(.*stop.*\)193000 \(.*nrk3.*\)/\1063000 \2/" $TMP > $TMP2
# fix stop-time for nrksuper-programs
sed -e "s/\(.*start=\"\)\([0-9]\{8\}\)\(.*stop=\"\).*063000 \(.*nrksuper.*\)/\1\2\3\2193000 \4/" $TMP2 > $TMP3
# merge nrksuper with nrk3
/usr/bin/replace -s "channel=\"nrksuper.nrk.no\"" "channel=\"nrk3.nrk.no\"" -- $TMP3
mv -f $TMP3 $FILE
chmod 644 $FILE 

Remaining problems

Some channels are still not recognized by EyeTv (even though they work on the TV); most notably National Geographic HD, Rush HD, Silver HD

Lots of channels missing in Norwegian xmltv-feed on http://epg.mspc.no/xmltv/00index.html

If you have any more tips on how to stream-line this or how to fix this otherwise or with other components, please feel free to add a comment. Ditto if you have any questions.

Thanks for help and tips along the way to @nilsga and @meerblickzimmer, both from Twitter, and from a lot of postings both on avforum.no and forums.elgato.com.

Overview of components

MAC mini, 2 GHz, w/ 2GB RAM, OSX 10.6.2

Elagto EyeTv 3.3

Terratec H7

Conax CAM-reader, Bought at elkjøp Jan 2010

Canal Digital subscription, Basic package

Canal Digital Card

¹ CI: Common Interface http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Interface

² CAM: Conditional Access Module http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conditional-access_module

³ IDTV: Integrated digital television http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_Digital_Television

⁴ DVB-C: Digital Video Broadcasting - Cable http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVB-C

⁵ EPG: Electronic program guide http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_program_guide

⁶ XMLTV: http://wiki.xmltv.org/index.php/Main_Page

⁷ nilsga@twitter: http://twitter.com/nilsga/status/7704889099