Using XBMC as your Home Media Center

Since we moved to Kawasaki, I’ve been working hard to hook up my PC and TV in such a way that I can watch the videos on my hard drive without moving from the sofa. After a few months of sustained effort, I’ve finally settled on a solution.

Hardware

Hooking up a PC to a modern TV couldn’t be simpler. There are expensive wireless systems available, but I use two cables: one is a VGA-to-D-Sub cable which carries the video (D-Sub is apparently a predominantly Japanese TV alternative to VGA), and a male-male 3.5 jack cable to carry the audio signal. Both are 3-5 metres in length, passing through my sliding door and along the skirting board (held in place with some Heath Robinson adhesive pads and cable-ties). If I had a surround-sound system, my audio would need an alternative solution, but for half-decent stereo – I’m not too fussy – my way is simple and effective – one of the problems, however, is that I have to plug the cable in manually before watching TV as the only slot available is designed for headphones, thus shutting off the PC speakers when plugged in, however, this is a small nuisance.

Software

After a long duel between Boxee and XBMC, XBMC became the most effective media centre application for me. However, the reason is apparently linked to my network or laptop hardware and it will be useful to discuss both here.

As a university student, I bought and chipped an Xbox which became my central means of watching movies on my TV – mainly because I needed a DVD player to replace my previous DIVX/DVD player. The key was the XBMC dashboard. Fast forward to today, and now XBMC is a multi-platform application and as a result is more versatile than its older Xbox-based incarnation.

The basic function of XBMC is creating an accessible media library in a package that can be controlled by remote. Newer features include media scraping, which allows you to browse through your shows more easily.

Boxee takes XBMC to the next level. With XBMC code at its foundation, Boxee incorporates internet based content to allow the user to watch streaming content, search for subtitles, and all other useful features. However, in my case, Boxee overloads my Internet connection with media scraping requests that essentially stops all net-based functions from working properly. This is the primary reason I am using XBMC now.

Both programmes have support for music, but anyone used to using iTunes, Winamp, or MediaMonkey will be disappointed with its lack of advanced playlist features.

In addition to XBMC/Boxee, you might want to get the iPhone remotes for whichever you choose. The Boxee remote is free but is rather limited. If you want a bit more functionality, the XBMC remote is a paid app ($2.99) but for the money you get more buttons, customisation and access to your library directly (making choosing the right film or song easier).

Setup

Hook up your TV and computer using the video and audio cables. You will want to set your TV as a secondary monitor and find a good resolution for it using Windows native Display Manager. Unlike simply switching display modes (standard function on laptops), using your TV as a secondary monitor allows you to use the laptop while your media is playing. This is essential if you are running this as part of a family.

Next you want to make sure that XBMC actually opens on the secondary screen. For this, you need XBMCLaunch.exe. Put XBMCLaunch.exe anywhere you wish, and then create a shortcut to it on your desktop. Right-click on the shortcut and launch Properties.  You need to edit the shortcut so that it looks like this:

[XBMCLaunch.exe location] [XMBC.exe location],[Screen Number]

For example:

C:\Users\JamesinJapan\Documents\xbmcLaunch.exe C:\Program Files\XBMC\XBMC.exe,2

Once you’ve done that and click on the shortcut, XBMC will load in the other window with a blank profile. This means that even if you have already configured it, you will need to do so again. It might be helpful to be able to see the screen from your PC as you set it up – I have a door between me and our tiny TV which made setting it up, at least to the point where I could use the iPhone, was a little difficult.

File Management

The next step, if you’re will to make the effort, is to make your media scrape-friendly.

I have separated my files into type of media. In the movies folder you will want to have each movie in a subfolder with consistent names including the year of release. My system works like this:

\Movies\Title (Year)\

Within each folder, name each file ‘Title (Year)’ plus ‘.cd1′ or other information where needed.

Likewise, with TV shows, proper file names are essential.

\TV Shows\Title (Year)\Season #\

Each episode is named ‘Title – S##E## – EpisodeName’.

To help with the scraping and renaming, I recommend Ember Media Manager (for your movies; it’s designed for XBMC specifically but generally applicable) and TV Rename (for your TV shows).

Final Comments

This system is not perfect, and there are many alternatives. I’m interested in hearing your suggestions in the comments below!

Priorities – Swine Flu and North Korea

It never fails to surprise me just how short-sighted public attitudes can be. In May, the world fell around our heads on several occasions, but none more notably than when swine flu started to rattle its way through Kansai, or when North Korea pulled out the big guns.

Swine Flu

The WHO reports that as of June 3rd, Japan has had 385 cases of Influenza A (H1N1) – better known as swine flu. For all those cases, just higher than Britain’s 339, Japan has suffered no fatalities. Not one. Given the hysteria that swept the country, you should not be surprised . It is difficult to separate cause from effect, but face masks (a constant feature of Japanese commuting life) and anti-bacterial handwash flew off the shelves. In Golden Week, Keiko received a call from her mother, who was trying to buy face masks for her father’s trip to Tokyo. They were all sold out, in the ass-end of nowhere in Hokkaido, where everyone drives everywhere. It was ridiculous, and there hadn’t been any cases at that time.

People freaked out when the first possible cases came in. Everyone began to worry because they rode the same train lines as these suspected sufferers.  Wear masks, gargle, sterilise you hands… The mantra was behind the panic buying, ignoring WHO advice as to the possibility of harm in using masks (which provide peace of mind more than actual preventative benefit). Eventually, the cases began rolling in exponentially among high school students in Hyogo and Osaka causing schools to be shut down. The world’s press had already been reporting the disease’s low mortality rate (outside Mexico, only the US, Canada, and China have suffered deaths – a total of 20 among the four countries, Mexico had 97), but it took another week for the Japanese government to loosen restrictions. In the meantime, PM Taro Aso urged for calm in a very short TV message shown in commerical breaks, and JR stations and schools continued to urge people to wear masks for a further week.

North Korea

As the swine flu panic has begun to subside, North Korea has made dozens of severe threats, launched a few missiles and tested a nuclear warhead. The public hasn’t batted an eyelid. No-one discusses it: it’s an abstraction. It’s plastered across the news, but people don’t believe it affects them so they don’t worry. I believe in an underlying anger held by the Japanese public towads North Korea as a result of the abduction issue and missile threats, even if it is not expressed frequently, but I am surprised that people are quite so unfazed by it all.

June 3rd’s International Herald Tribune contained an op-ed piece which, although not taken from the Japanese perspective (instead that of the ASEAN members), addresses the issue quite well:

As for nonproliferation, the Asian attitude is why worry about North Korea when Pakistan’s bomb met no such reaction? Like Israel’s bomb, North Korea’s is seen a means of deterrence and a symbol of isolation. The regime may be appalling, but its only goal is survival.

These views may be a bit naïve, but they are understandable, given so many cries of “wolf” over North Korean arms and so little ability in the West to stop them. Why not ignore the attention-seeking Kim, goes the Asian thinking?

The Japanese government, unlike its people, are fuming, but are also no doubt quietly relieved: North Korea’s growing intransigence is bringing the other four parties to the Six-Party Talks closer to Japan’s hardline stance. They understand the pressing need to address the regime, but they lack the capability to deal with the situation after marginalising their position so thoroughly for the past few years.

A Matter of Perspective

“Why is he ranting?”, you might ask. Swine flu was an unknown variable, if we had been unlucky it could have meant a global plague, but it didn’t. As a Master’s student, I looked at SARS and what it suggested about society’s approach to risk, the similarities are unsurprisingly striking: experts are as clueless as you and I, the risk is transnational, and is entirely reflexive (that is derived from our way of life, i.e. intimate proximity to swine).

One of the main features of sociological risk theory is that the role of experts becomes one of the talking-head, eroding public trust and ultimately adding to the public’s inability to assess the future (the corner stone of the theory). It makes it impossible to judge the severity of a threat: swine flu was quick to spread but relatively harmless if treated early on, yet the people mobilised with the SARS and avian flu scares weighing heavy in their mind. Experts had no good advice, reporting was frenetic, and that led to panic buying and a paranoia which has yet to really subside. In this case, the future was unknowable but increasingly revealing itself with each passing day: we have nothing to fear from H1N1 (yet).

By contrast, no-one can assess the North Korea’s future because no-one has access to the regime’s decision-making. There is very little triangulation in the reporting, and we, the interested reader, are left with rumour and speculation. We cannot know what the nuclear test signals, but I am not happy to know that they have seemingly improved on their feeble first test, nor that they have a missile that is within striking distance of my home. Who cares if it’s a threat to me now or in 10 years, or perhaps never; for a country that likes to talk about peace and disarmament, the experts are still clueless (the good ones can admit it) and the Japanese public are resoundingly mute.

Logos vs Pathos: Emotion and Reason in Japan’s Abduction Issue

I really enjoyed a (not so) recent post by Ampontan: Logos, pathos, and Japanese politics. I would really like to get my hands on a copy of Koizumi Seiken—Patosu no Shusho wa Nani wo Kaeta no ka? (the subject of the book review which sparked Ampontan’s post), although at this stage it would be little more than extra weight on my shelf.

My research area came from my understanding of the abduction issue as emotion overcoming reason, and thus it was with a happy sigh that I managed to read something addressing these two aspects of politics in the context of Japan… a sigh because I wish I had been able to read something like this sooner.

He quotes from the review:

(Professor Uchiyama) discusses the advantages and disadvantages of a strong prime minister who frequently resorted to pathos (passions, sentiment) and top-down methods of governing. [...] But the author points out the dangers of Koizumi’s incorporation of pathos into politics, which was symbolic of his approach of stripping logos (reason and language) from politics, thereby weakening the logic of responsibility.

Ampontan then suggests that logos has been the preferred political mode in postwar Japan. It is also my preferred mode of politics and the very reason I wanted to take the Japanese government to task for its handling of the abduction issue in light of the very real nuclear threat posed by North Korea. He writes:

After their defeat in the war, perhaps the Japanese developed an antipathy to the use of emotional political appeals as they applied themselves to studying and incorporating the principles of liberal democracy.

This didn’t sit very well with my gut feelings about the abduction issue, although Ampontan’s later comments settle that impression somewhat:

That is not to say that Japanese are not susceptible to pathos; the public were enthusiastic patrons of the Koizumi Theater. It’s just that pathos does not always mix well with politics here.

I had held the view that Koizumi’s conduct regarding the abduction issue was calculated, controlled, and ultimately correct. If he pandered to the Kazokukai and Suukukai, it was in a fashion that kept the politicians largely in control. Certainly when contrasted with the handling by Abe Shinzo which was an absolute barrage on the public sensibilities, arguably stretching their energy in the issue past its point of elasticity. We all know of ‘aid fatigue’, the public’s over-exposure to aid campaigns (particularly in the age of LiveAid); well, I would argue that the Japanese public has suffered ‘abduction fatigue’.

Ampontan sums up my feelings quite well:

Mr. Koizumi used emotional appeals to sway the electorate, but he was an adroit, skillful politician with an engaging personality. In contrast, Mr. Abe lacked political skills, and his personality, while not unpleasant, tended toward the bland businesslike demeanor Japanese expect from men at work.

Every society suffers from hot-button issues, the kind of issues that are used to rally the electorate and identify opponents. The abduction issue, perhaps similarly with its public anti-nuclear principles, are one of Japan’s.

Koizumi used the abduction issue to bring the electorate behind him in 2002 and 2004 (in the latter case so successfully that even the victims’ families could not stand against him). He showed a calculation that Abe just couldn’t wield as a result of being the issue’s champion. Whereas Koizumi could reel the abduction issue’s advocates, Abe simply allowed them to run rampant. It is my feeling that Abe did more for the abduction issue as Koizumi’s Chief Cabinet Secretary than he could have ever had done as Prime Minister.

Finally, the media were a crucial part of the abduction issue’s growth and strength. They helped popularise the issue through the broadcasting of a ‘vicarious trauma’, as Hyung-gu Lynn wrote in ‘Vicarious traumas: television and public opinion in Japan’s North Korea policy’. Ampontan’s comments on the role of pathos in the media are spot on:

Ideals as these, however, must confront the reality that people consume politics through television, and that the demands of television are intrinsically pathos-based and seek the dramatic rather than the sober and the serious.

From this he concludes that pathos is with Japanese politics until the end. I quite agree, although Fukuda’s stance on the issue appears to have brought back some much needed logos. Time will tell how much of that sticks.

Myth and the Abduction Issue

The Fortean Times has been a guilty pleasure of mine for some time, although during my Masters I stopped reading magazines and concentrated on my security reading. As a result, since I finished my course I’ve been playing catch up.

While reading about the links between conspiracy theories and Fortean thinking (FT223), or rather the epistemological considerations of appreciating conspiracy theories, I came across the following passage that made me stop and think:

Conspiracy thinking is mythological (or ‘magical’) thinking. Martin S Day has observed that “scientifically, [a myth] cannot be proved” and neither can it be “properly reconciled with phenomenological facts”, elaborating on Hans Georg Gadamer’s judgement that “the only good definition of myth is that myth neither requires nor includes any possible verification outside of itself”.

This struck a minor chord with my own research.

I have always considered the Japanese response to the abduction issue, in its 2004-6 form (at the height of the Yokota Megumi story), to be somewhat irrational, emotionally governed, and to some extent dogmatic.

During the course of my research, I came to see the Yokota Megumi story as a national narrative. Every nation has such stories to some extent. I daresay that the Madeline McCann story in my own country, plus the Soham murders among others, are such a narrative. They appear to bind the nation together in condemnation of a state or group, taking over the headlines: bad news coming good. Indeed, 9/11 ultimately falls into this category.

However, with the Yokota story, we are unlikely to find her alive, or find her real remains (if indeed the tests performed on the ashes provided by North Korea are correct). The story is unlikely to be resolved.

I am beginning to believe that the abduction issue might be penetrating Japanese national mythology, much like how the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is now an inherent part of the Japanese nation, or how constant victimisation figures in Korean and Chinese self-image.

This current mode of thought suggests to me that an effective way of studying the abduction issue would be to examine it as a narrative. This is something that I wish to do but cannot at this moment as a result of a lack of language skills and opportunity. However, it is a thought that I will ruminate on.

The Nature of Political Fear

The subtitle of this blog is: “North Korea, Japan and the Politics of Fear’ but what is the politics of fear?

Fear penetrates society. I may seem dramatic and unnecessarily general to say so, but fear is a, if not the, major moderator of social life. It keeps people in check. It moderates your driving, it conditions your social interactions, and it keeps you alive. Fear, in tandem with an appreciation of risk, is a social force unlike any other. Thus it is unsurprising that we find it thriving in politics.

Political fear fosters subservience. It is polarising, removing the middle ground from debate. Like a stampede of wildebeest, it brings a population’s thoughts into line. The palpable fear (or should that be anger?) of terrorism post-9/11 has created a climate in which, at least initially, populations were willing to cut back their civil liberties in order to make it more difficult for a handful of terrorists to infiltrate and operate within a country. No one would dare risk being a terrorist sympathiser.

Fear, to paraphrase, is the opiate of the masses. Those that can manipulate, or even generate, political fear stand to benefit enormously. A successful attempt to manipulate fear can generate wide-ranging political support that can allow a break from the traditional rules of political action (conceptually similar to Ole Waever’s securitisation theory). The identification of a convincing threat is all that is needed.

The benefits of political fear, to policymakers, can be seen in the rallying effect of war. During wartime, criticism of the broad political project of the war itself (although not necessarily its conduct) becomes taboo. The needs of the state supersede those of the citizenry and opposition is placed within a discourse of internal threat or fifth columnism . War elucidates the ‘other’ in sharp contrast to the ‘self’.

The war rally effect has long been recognised, just look at the Russo-Japanese War, initiated, in part at least, in order to placate and consolidate an uppity populace. Of course, when things go wrong the equation changes, cynicism and resistance take over. See, for instance, the Russian revolution and the anti-war protests of the 1960s/70s.

Cynicism, one might argue, is becoming more prevalent in our own age. We are strained with fear fatigue: the constant fluctuations of the terror alert systems once piqued our emotions, but now, having gone on for 6 years with no sign of reaching lower thresholds, we are comfortably numb.

The modern political party is tailored to the manipulation of fear: PR spin-doctoring makes the best (worst?) use of that most potent instrument of fear, the media, who propagate and editorialise their messages, openly or by stealth, by means designed to grab the attention of the average guy on the street. The days of a discreetly wheelchair-bound Roosevelt communicating by radio are long gone, ever since Nixon got sweaty while debating with Kennedy, the power of the media to make or break a politician has been clear. Today’s politician must have the image-consciousness of a supermodel, a far cry from the days of Churchill (“Madam, you are ugly. In the morning, I shall be sober.”)

Why is this worrying? Fear gives democracy the trappings of autocracy. However, unlike autocracy, the government of a fear-ridden democracy have far less control than the leadership of an autocratic state. A wannabe democratic-despot has to expend a lot of political energy and rhetoric in order to have their way. They must prey on our insecurities and manipulate our psychologies.

This, I argue, is what is under way in Japan. Issues regarding its relations with North Korea are surrounded by an atmosphere of fear (atmosfear?) that conditions political action. With the abduction issue in particular, no-one can seem be against efforts to return the Japanese citizens taken to North Korea (even if the remainder are probably dead), no less that no-one can seem to be for the rights of terrorists. Debate is weakened, and without debate, democracy is weakened allowing ideologies in. Under Abe Shinzo, who was pulling strings behind the issue from 2002, the issue was tacked onto an agenda of new conservatism, the ideology of the LDP’s Young (and not so young) Turks. His fever pitch approach was an abuse of the abduction issue and one of many examples of the (ab)use of fear in the issue that I will endeavour to explore within this forum.