I have also taken into consideration of suggestions for donations from a few people. Given the personal time and effort put in the maintenance of this plugin, if you enjoy using it, please consider supporting the development by donating via PayPal to b_at_zecoj_dot_com. That being said, my software will always remain free and open source.

• All channels will now have (optional) descriptions next to them in the list. This can be disabled in “Add-on Settings”. All descriptions are in Vietnamese and UTF-8 encoded. To display them properly, you need Unicode-supported skins.
• Fixed the issue where streams from tv24.vn just didn’t work. Had to use network sniffer to find out why server was rejecting requests coming from XBMC.
• ANTV and 11 local channels have been added, including TRT1 from TT-Huế :)
• Fix playback issue with Windows builds
• Code cleanup and minor fixes.

This version is available in the repo now, xbmc should automatically update. If not, do a “Force Refresh” or “Check for Updates” on the official repo. Enjoy and keep the bug reports & suggestions coming.

Go to Settings > Add-ons > Get Add-ons > XBMC.org Add-ons > Video Add-ons > TV Viet Nam.

That’s it! Since there’s no longer a need for a separate repository, I am terminating my personal repository. Please remove it from your xbmc installation.

In response to a couple feedback regarding the ease of installation, I’ve also setup an add-on repository. This will mean that all future updates of tvvn will be checked and updated automatically by xbmc. To get version 0.5 and later, you need to do the following:

1. Download this file.
2. In xbmc go to: Settings > Add-ons > Install from zip file > Point to repository.zecoj.zip > xbmc will tell you that “Add-on enabled”.
3. Go to: Get add-ons > zecoj box > Videos add-ons > TV Viet Nam.

UPDATE: This plugin is now available from the official repository. Please see this post.

That should be it. Have fun.

Ban đầu tôi viết TVVN cho mục đích cá nhân nhưng nay bỏ lên đây, hy vọng ai đó có nhu cầu sẽ không mất thời gian tìm tòi hay tự viết nữa. TVVN được phát triển cho XBMC 11.0 chạy trên nền Ubuntu 10.04; chưa được thử nghiệm trên các hệ điều hành khác (nhưng chắc cũng sẽ không gặp vấn đề gì :)

Download: tvvn_v0.3.zip (02/12/2011).

Installation: Via add-on installation menu or manually by extracting the zip file to:

• Linux: ~/.xbmc/addons/
• Mac OSX: ~/Library/Application Support/XBMC/addons/

UPDATE: this version is out of date, please use this one instead.

Một chút demo và giới thiệu qua về XBMC:

Once you have the USB stick mounted and Optware up and running, you can do lots of nifty things. For example, I installed zsh, screen, vim and a whole bunch of other essential stuff. A few examples can be found here.

One particular interest I had when found out about optware was the extension of tomato’s visual bandwidth log graphs. I said extension because the original one comes with tomato has a max 24 hour window. However, occasionally I want to see what happened in the previous week or even month. So first, I thought of rrdtool and rrdgraph. Now rrdtool is a good database for this purpose, however rrdgraph proved to be too resource intensive for the little cpu.

So I searched around and found dygraphs. This is a perfect solution as all you need is to feed the data in csv format and the graphing would be done on the client’s browser. Have a look at my example here (1 week window), you can click&drag the cursor to zoom in and double click to zoom out.

Cool? If you’re interested, let’s start. Assuming you already have a persistent storage (jffs,usb/sd card, etc.) setup at /opt, first, ssh to your router, then:

# ipkg update
# ipkg install perl rrdtool
# wget http://zecoj.com/files/bwg/rrdtool.txt -O /opt/bin/rrdtool.sh
# chmod +x /opt/bin/rrdtool.sh
# cru a bwlog "*/1 * * * * /opt/bin/rrdtool.sh"


That will install rrdtool, perl and download my rrdtool collector script, put it in the crontab to be executed every 1 minute. Now, create a directory somewhere in your /opt to store the necessary files, mine is at /opt/share/www/cgi-bin.

# pwd
/opt/share/www/cgi-bin
# wget http://zecoj.com/files/bwg/bandwidth.txt -O bandwidth.cgi
# chmod 755 bandwidth.cgi
# wget http://zecoj.com/files/bwg/dygraph-combined.js
# chmod 644 dygraph-combined.js
# rm -rf /tmp/var/wwwext/cgi-bin
# ln -s /opt/share/www/cgi-bin /tmp/var/wwwext/.

You should also append the these into /opt/.autorun. This will tell tomato to run these command right after mounting my usb stick.

# echo 'cru a bwlog "*/1 * * * * /opt/bin/rrdtool.sh"' >> /opt/.autorun.
# echo 'rm -rf /tmp/var/wwwext/cgi-bin' >> /opt/.autorun
# echo 'ln -s /opt/share/www/cgi-bin /tmp/var/wwwext/.' >> /opt/.autorun

What just happened is we got the files we need, save them somewhere that will not disappear as the router restart, link them to the router’s cgi-bin directory. Now, assuming the router’s ip is 192.168.0.1, you can test everything by going to: http://192.168.0.1/ext/cgi-bin/bandwidth.cgi there you should already see a few data points collected by rrdtool.sh earlier. Download some big files, leave it running for a while (the page will auto refresh every minute) and you should see more pretty data come up :)

-$ ./mnfquota
Peak: 9975 MB
Off Peak: 14435 MB
Days left: 20


First thing was to load tomato (I got tired of dd-wrt’s QoS and wanted something different). Soon later I found out what this baby really wants is openwrt. So I gave her the WhiteRussian ;) Yesterday, I bought a 1GB MicroSD card (with an SD adapter) and bring the router into operation room. I’m not going through the process for it’s been described a lot on the web (dd-wrt’s wiki and openwrt’s wiki). This page shows you how to open the router, however you won’t have to slice and poke holes through the label, just peel it off and stick it back in afterward ;)

Here’s my pin layout:

SD#      GPIO#
--------------
1 CS       7
2 DI       6
3 VSS      - ground
4 VDD      - power
5 CLK      3
6 VSS2     - ground
7 DO       5

1st try: I decided to hardwire the cables into the MicroSD-to-SD adapter but it didn’t work. Probably the problem was with the soldering. Loading the mmc module gives this error in dmesg.

[INFO] mmc_hardware_init: initializing GPIOs
[INFO] mmc_card_init: the period of a 380KHz frequency lasts 524 CPU cycles
[INFO] mmc_card_init: powering card on. sending 80 CLK
[INFO] mmc_card_init: 80 CLK sent in 44136 CPU cycles
[INFO] mmc_card_init: resetting card (CMD0)
[FATAL] mmc_card_init: invalid response from card: ff found, waiting for 01
[INFO] mmc_card_init: the period of a 380KHz frequency lasts 524 CPU cycles
[INFO] mmc_card_init: powering card on. sending 80 CLK
[INFO] mmc_card_init: 80 CLK sent in 43306 CPU cycles
[INFO] mmc_card_init: resetting card (CMD0)
[FATAL] mmc_card_init: invalid response from card: ff found, waiting for 01
[ERROR] mmc_init: got an error calling mmc_card_init: 01
[ERROR] mmc_check_media: change detected but was not able to initialize new card: ffffffff

2nd try: The damn thing got short circuited, it won’t even power on! The problem was again from bad soldering on the MicroSD adapter (when will I learn?). Removed all the wires though, it powered on OK. Some discouraging comments from my wife made me give it up and went to bed.

3rd try: I searched and found an old USB SD reader from the closet. Used the soldering iron to remove the SD socket from the poor reader and restart my wiring and soldering. To my surprise it worked on the first attempt.

root@zrouter:~# dmesg |grep mmc
mmc: starting module with: SD_DI=0x40, SD_DO=0x20, SD_CLK=0x8, SD_CS=0x80
mmca: p1

…and tahdah

root@zrouter:~# df -h
Filesystem              Size Used Available Use% Mounted on
rootfs                  2.8M 2.8M        0  100% /
/dev/root               2.8M 2.8M        0  100% /
/dev/mmc/disc0/part1  955.7M 4.8M   902.3M    1% /mmc

Now I have a router with Cisco-grade firmware and 1GB of storage! If you ever want to try this mod then consider the following:

• A good night sleep, you need it, I learned it the hard way
• An SD reader socket. Don’t try hard-wiring, doesn’t worth it and it may ruin your card (that’s why I got a MicroSD and an adapter but still…)
• Wires (6 of ‘em), you can strip the network cable but I found that they’re too hard, so I used ones inside an old PC.
• A fine temperature-controlled precision soldering iron is highly recommended. I was such a cheap ass to get one so I used an old one from this. The thing was too hot (60W), too long, and the handle is not even heat-insulated (well it is but not that good). I almost lost a tiny resister because the solder was too hot. It worked but not without a fight.
• Also, you should glue the wire (the tip that comes out from the solder point) to the board. The solder points are tiny and it won’t survive some gentle yankings :p

Oh, I almost forgot, here’s the final product (it’s not that well lit, I had to use a desk lamp):

So I googled a little, found out a great replacement from the GNOME Network Monitor Applet. Downloaded the source code, extracted the icons, added an extra bar for xfce4-wavelan-plugin has a “5-step increment”. And tah-dah!

Grab the icons here. Extract to xfce4-wavelan-plugin-*/panel-plugin/. and do the usual steps.

Cheers.