VOB's the evil SOB's.

Well it seems most of the content problems I have are with VOB's. TVersity seems to be the best at streaming the biggest variety of content at the moment, and has the least problems. It's also the lightest weight streamer / transcoder (takes up less CPU and RAM than others I have found). Only problem is it doesn't work all that well with XBox 360. Okay so I can't get it to work AT ALL. :-/

It does work great for a PS3 and instead of buying a slingbox been discussing with co-workers just buying a PS3 for each room instead of a slingbox like equivalent. Divx or Xvid seems to be best. I am thinking about compressing a VOB to see if that works a bit better, just to see if it's the full MPEG2 format of the VOB choking the PS3. I am also going to hopefully get a VOB from a co-worker that works fine on his system. His name is Burt, he's given me great advice and a good person to bounce ideas off.

Reason I know this is the problem is I copied VOB's to the PS3 and they also exhibit the same weird behavior as they do when being streamed to the DLNA, albiet not quite as bad. Upon forwarding and reversing kind of freezes up now and again and during playback it will freeze on a frame for a few seconds. The VOB on the hard drive of the PS3 never freezes completely, but through some of the streamers it will. This is something it does not do with any AVI files with Divx or Xvid. It's almost like the PS3 is made to work better with those two formats than any other formats it supports.

Converting my videos to that format would suck big time though as it takes a better part of an evening to do one DVD. If anyone has some information on this or can shed some light, just comment on this post and I will add it to the main blog at some point.

More homework yet to do! More to come!

DVD Shrink Tutorial

UPDATED 10-12-2008: Made notes on the compression settings in the re-author section.

I am going to talk through how I edit with DVDShrink to make VOB's I use on my PS3. This is a tutorial of sorts, I would love to hear anyone else doing this. I am also posting this to get feedback from one of the guys at work who apparently is having no problems with streaming at all. Hope he can compare notes and then let me know what he's doing differently!

Basically just be sure in “Edit” then “Preferences” then “Output Files” tab the “Split VOB files into 1 GB size chunks (recommended)” is not checked. This way it will VOB everything into one file.
Make sure your stream selections look like this:

I also turn off preview so it goes faster.

I then go into “Re-Author” and pic the Title 1 under “main movie”. Every DVD looks slightly different here.
Drag and drop that into the left side. Then click on “Compression Settings” on the right. I am pretty sure you can unselect all but one of the AC3 audio tracks. I haven’t tested much here, your mileage may vary. I also chose no compression so the video itself is at full resolution.

UPDATE: Please note that by setting "No Compression" the video looks amazing (just as good as the DVD itself) but it seems to cause stuttering issues with my PS3 and others that I have been sharing knowledge with. If you choose "Automatic" it seems to sometimes not change the size of the file, I can tell a slight degradation / pixelation of the video, but it works fine on the PS3 when streaming to it. Your equipment and how you perceive your high end video will probably determine how much of an impact this will have on your video.
Then just click “Backup!” and you’re good to go. Just be sure to click “Create VIDEO_TS BLAH BLAH” checkbox so it will just create one folder. Then you just use the VOB, throw away all the other junk.

Cidero Explained

Okay, when I wrote the post before I didn't know what Cidero really was other than my ability to use it as a "view" into my DLNA servers that are serving my content to the network. Here is the official blurb from their website and URL below:

Cidero
http://www.cidero.com/

It's 3 components, listed below:

1. Media Controller
A growing number of UPnP A/V-compatible MediaServer and MediaRenderer devices are becoming available for the networked home. To date, control of these devices is most commonly accomplished via a UPnP control point embedded within a MediaRenderer device and driven by an infrared remote. In some situations, such as browsing large media collections, the infrared remote control-based UI can be inconvenient, and when a PC is available, a PC-based remote control capability can be preferable. The Cidero UPnP Media Controller is a Java-based, cross-platform solution that addresses this need, providing support for browsing and playback of digital music, photos and movies.

2. Internet Radio Server
This UPnP media server application parses a directory tree of ASCII-based XML radio station meta data files and exports the radio station data to interested UPnP control points. A default radio station database of 60-plus popular (shout cast-only at the moment) Internet radio stations is supplied with the server. Users may stations by simply creating new station files, using existing files as a template. The exported server browse tree reflects the structure of the station database directory tree, allowing users to modify the server's browse tree if desired by simply adding to or modifying the database directory tree on disk.

3. UPnP Bridge
The UPnP bridge software allows non-UPnP devices, to be used in a UPnP network, and extends the UPnP capabilities of others. Support for bridging of the Prismiq Media Player is currently implemented, with support for things like IR-controllable devices planned for the future.


I mostly use number 1 above and it works great for checking your DLNA servers to see if you are getting all the meta data and the files themselves to a generic consumer. Great for debugging!

p.s. For myself I saved a copy of the installer at my main website's root dir.

What I have done to this point.

I am going to start blogging about everything I do, and the tools that I use as well as links to various places that might be of interest. I might also do some tutorials or some other documentation here for anyone interested in media streaming (DLNA specifically) and things of that nature. I will probably just rant about various things here at some point also, thus this thing could have anything on it!

I currently have a couple Ubuntu 8.04 boxes (The Hardy Heron), one of them has VirtualBox on it and I run three MS operating systems on them. Two Windows 2003 servers, one with IIS and the other with SQL 2005 with the full suite of tools. I am a developer and this is my test lab if you will that allows me to program and play in the world I have a career in.

I have tried all the "Major" DLNA streaming software out there from TVersity, Twonky, MediaTomb and ORB (the major 4 if you will) and all of them I have had various problems with. Each having it's own set of idiosyncrasies. I will outline my experiences and what I have done in the coming posts, perhaps I will post one for each streaming software and give you my thoughts on each and also then what kind of hardware and what I have done with the house to facilitate what I have in my house.

I do know one thing, that I believe my PS3 is what my major problem is with. I have moved content directly to the PS3 and it acts almost the same was as the streaming software and servers I have. I have followed TVersities comments (the best documented anywhere, just have to sift through the forums to get the info) and there is a tool there called Cidero which I will also post about just to have some information on that particular piece of software on the blog and in my history so I can refer back to it at some point. That tool lets you connect to a DLNA server and basically "surf it" and create a play list that you can then open I believe with a DLNA player (I think Windows Media would do this? Not sure, haven't gone that far.) But this tool from Cidero can surf every aspect of all the media of all the major DLNA servers listed above without a problem (Pictures, Music and Movies). But on the PS3 on some it works with Movies but not Music or Pictures, and on some it works on Music but not the other.

I tend to think the whole DLNA is still in it's infancy and really things are not done shaking out with having a really solid DLNA server or DLNA consuming device that is easy to use for the whole family and just "works" out of the box if you will. If I can find the right combinations of things, I will be posting that on this blog all my trials and tribulations on this subject.

If anyone has interesting media streaming blogs or anything of that nature, please put them in the comments or e-mail me I would love to hear about them.

Okay enough blabbing for now! More posts to come.