Thursday, October 8, 2009

Back to Ubuntu!

Okay I finally gave up on OpenSolaris and switched back to Ubuntu. I am kind of bummed, back in 1994 I started my career working on SunOs boxes (now Solaris) on a Sparc 10 working at an ISP. I eventually left as the office / systems manager, and really enjoyed working with the OS then. It was one of the most secure and stable OS's at the time for running a shop, although I am sure everyone has their own critique on that and which is the best (BSD, Slackware, et. all). But I had high hopes for OpenSolaris. It's just not "there" yet, hopefully in the coming year or two they will shape up and I can give them a shot again.

Now that I am back on Ubuntu I am so happy, it just works. Everything I wanted to do, I can do again, and without problem. It seems also to run quite a bit faster than OpenSolaris on the X86 hardware I have, I have more headroom it seems to run a few more Virtual boxes, and not only that but I am also able to run 5 desktops, Firefox and Google Chrome Beta for Ubuntu.

Mediatomb just works, Handbrake just works, pyTivo just works. I am once again happy about the OS but unhappy about the software RAID. It's soo slow on copying things compared to ZFS, and very slow when adding drives or building the raid itself. Once I lost a drive, it took nearly 18 hours to rebuild the array thrashing the hard drives the entire time.

I notice they have ZFS for Ubuntu now located here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ZFS and a good little how to do various things here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ZFS/ZPool.

Hopefully this weekend I will finally get my OPML tutorial up and running and on the forums, I haven't been to the playonplugins site in a while, and I have to say I am really happy lately with the latest version of PlayOn as it seems to be working a LOT better with Netflix than in the past for me by far.

Thursday, August 20, 2009

Perhaps I spoke too soon...

To lay the groundwork, because of the issues I had been having I no longer open Firefox or any other terminal windows (as I usually had done in the past) since I wanted to try to narrow down any problems and make sure nothing else could be taking up resources or RAM or causing instability in the system. I have even been considering running the box headless and just a command prompt to rule out Gnome.

As of the last entry I thought I had completely fixed the issues I seemed to have had with VirtualBox and Solaris. Wrong! The other day I had a performance issue with one of my virtual machines, and I noticed the box was using up all it's RAM. I put 1 gig to each of 2 virtual machines and 4 gigs to a 3rd. That should be 6 gigs, and I have 8 gigs in the machine and should have been enough. But whenever logging onto the host, or into one of the VM's the hosts hard drives would thrash and upon looking at the host OS stats (Solaris) I noticed 100% of ram taken up and quite a bit of disk cache as well (don't remember exactly number, but in the many megabytes).

I did the natural thing and that was to shut down the three guests (virtual machines) so that I could reboot and set some of the ram requirements per virtual machine slightly lower. Upon shutting down some of the VMs... OpenSolaris froze, it did not auto reboot as it had done when I was using the VBox shares, but.. I had to manually reboot. Doh.

I think my final solution might be to run VMWare and see if it's actually VirtualBox causing these issues or not. Or at least give it a go to see if it's not just OpenSolaris that's a little flakey. I don't seem to get really good performance either in my VM boxes with 2 CPU's assigned to one of them using VirtualBox. I tend to think the VirtualBox multi-core technology just isn't "there" yet and VMWare has been around a while so I am hoping it will be more performant with VMWare too. Anyone know of some good sites that give you a walk through of installing VMWare on OpenSolaris? Leave a comment if you do. Also if I find a few before next post I will be sure to post them with the update.

Tuesday, August 18, 2009

ZFS and VirtualBox issues

So once I built my ZFS Home File Server box using OpenSolaris and the hardware I have listed, and I put VirtualBox on it. I did this mostly because I wanted to run Ubuntu but I also have a personal web server that I run as well as a personal SQL Server I do a lot of test coding on.

I created my ZFS pool's, shared them using CIFS with some articles I had read on the internet (attached at the bottom of this article). This worked great, seamless even. Then I installed VirtualBox and copied my Ubuntu and Windows machines from my old Ubuntu box which this OpenSolaris server was replacing. I then proceeded to use the VirtualBox feature that allows you to create shares that are visible to the guest machine through the VBox drivers.

I did this so I can run Mediatomb and pyTivo on my Ubuntu Virtual Machine because they don't yet run on OpenSolaris without a lot of compiling, tweaking, and other things I really don't want to do (although have tried, and failed.. OpenSolaris is a bear to get things to compile). You can find plenty of articles that show you how to do these things, but I decided not to until I have an easy way to pull down some software from a repo that's ready to go.

Everything works pretty damn good up until this point, and in a few hours of putting the hardware together my network is back the way it was before with no more physical Ubuntu box, only the OpenSolaris box running Ubuntu in a virtual machine. So I rebuild my old box and it is now my 3 year old sons gaming machine for Disney stuff. :)

Then things started acting weird. Whenever I would shut down / reboot the Ubuntu box (for whatever reason, patching, or I was editing / adding shares, etc.) it would literally freeze the OpenSolaris box and then about 15 seconds later the box would reboot. Also I noticed if I copied large files over the network it would cause the Virtual Machines to fall off the face of the earth (my network).

This is when I found there is an issue with ZFS, CIFS and VirtualBox somehow inter related to each other. After a few days of trouble shooting to find out what was causing it, and rebuilding the OpenSolaris box (thinking I did something wrong) I figured out that if I didn't turn on CIFS everything worked fine... or so I thought. This only solved the problem of rebooting the Ubuntu virtual machine causing my entire system to crash and burn with a reboot.

I installed a fresh OpenSolaris, did NOT configure CIFS, and configured the virtual box with the internal shares to the Ubuntu virtual machine. To share the files on my network this time I put Samba on the Ubuntu as it was just easy for me to do that instead of put it on OpenSolaris at the time, I am much more familiar with Ubuntu. Then every few days the computer would freeze up (but stopped the automatic reboot! :-/) also if I started to copy large files over the network, it brought the Solaris machine to it's knees, making it freeze up again. Although this time there was no reboot, it just froze completely.

The way I solved it was to not use the VirtualBox shares, not use CIFS but configure SAMBA on the OpenSolaris box and then mount those SAMBA shares inside the Ubuntu virtual machine. Now everything is running happily and no more issues. At least haven't had any issues for a few weeks now. :)

The link I promised above for Simon's Comprehensive ZFS Setup Blog:
http://breden.org.uk/2008/03/02/a-home-fileserver-using-zfs/

PlayOn Plugins - Podcast (OPML) Tutorial

I produced another tutorial video on using the Podcast Plugin on http://www.playonplugins.com and how to add additional OPML files into the plugin to get the most content customized to your wants. Check it out below.

Thursday, July 30, 2009

New ZFS Home Fileserver Hardware for OpenSolaris

In posts coming up I will talk about my setup, software, etc. This post I am just dedicating to my hardware and main OpenSolaris setup.

So I finally put together my ZFS OpenSolaris box. The specifications for the main pieces of hardware I have used are below (from Newegg with links):
  1. AMD Phenom II X4 810 2.6GHz Socket AM3 95W Quad-Core Processor Model HDX810WFGIBOX - Retail
  2. Four Western Digital Caviar Green WD10EADS 1TB SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive - OEM
  3. Two G.SKILL 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 1066 (PC2 8500) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory Model F2-8500CL5D-4GBPK - Retail
  4. GIGABYTE GA-MA770T-UD3P AM3 AMD 770 ATX AMD Motherboard - Retail
  5. Antec TPQ-850 850W Continuous Power ATX12V / EPS12V SLI Certified CrossFire Ready 80 PLUS BRONZE Certified Modular Active ... - Retail
  6. SUPERMICRO CSE-M35T-1B Black 5 Bay Hot-Swapable SATA HDD Enclosure - Retail
  7. Antec Nine Hundred Black Steel ATX Mid Tower Computer Case - Retail

Yes the power supply is probably over kill, but it was a really highly rated one on sale lower priced than some of the lower wattage ones that would probably fit my needs. The system has 8 gigs of ram and 4 cores for the OpenSolaris OS to chew on. Reason I did that is I installed VirtualBox and put on an Ubuntu V-Box. I wanted all my virtual boxes to be able to have 1 or more gigs, and a couple CPU's if they needed it. So far it's working out pretty good.

The box also has four 1 terabyte drives in it giving it a full 3 terabytes to it's storage capacity, using Raid-Z (the ZFS raid) with single parity (although dual parity is supported without effort, as well as other configurations). So one drive is the parity drive and effectively I could lose one without any data loss. I have all my media now on this server, and I am putting more of my son's DVD's on the server and putting them in a box and storing them. I love this, as my children now will no longer scratch DVD's beyond use and every TV in the house has "video on demand" if you will with the setup I have.

I use the built on video card at the moment, so nothing fancy there. But this is a server that mostly works headless once I have it setup, so I don't need anything really in this case.

Friday, May 22, 2009

PlayOn Plugin Installation Tutorial

I produced a PlayOn plugin installation tutorial video in April and have it on YouTube, and had not had a chance to post it here yet. You can see it below:



If you like the video, please do comment!

ZFS the Media Storage Panacea!

Okay as I have stated in my blog before, I have an Ubuntu box at the moment running software raid with two 1 terbayte hard drives as the place I store my media.  I also copy over data from all my other PC's (son's desktop, my ubuntu laptop, my desktop) to my Ubuntu server onto this raid set so that I ensure my data is safe.  There are some drawbacks to the software raid (or even hardware for that matter).  The biggest being if I lose a hard drive, it takes me literally all day long to rebuild the raid set.  I cannot touch the drive during this time.

Enter a friend of mine from work who is a Sun maniac.  He tells me about ZFS and I do some research and seriously, this stuff is WAY cool.  If I had lost a drive, he told me basically within a few minutes my drives would have been back in synch and ready to go.  It's completely different than RAID but accomlpishes the same functionality as having a RAID pair.  It's not just RAID but you can tack on additional functionality you can do like taking snapshots, going back to a point in time, creating a clone of your data, lightweight filesystem creation, adding a new drive into the set almost seemlessly, and so much more.

I think I am going to install OpenSorlaris on a new box, and then replace my Ubuntu eventually with that running some kind of hot swappable SATA2 enclosure of some kind.  Here are some links below in case you're interested in doing ZFS for yourself:

The wiki page on ZFS:

Video How To's from Sun:

A Demo of the Time Slider (How to go back in time):

I will document my findings and how it goes as I move forward with this project, as well as what hardware I use for the new box. :)

Tuesday, April 7, 2009

MediaPortal

If you're into HTPC's, this might be something interesting to check out. You could do the Media Center Microsoft version of Vista or XP (soon Windows 7), but there are open sourced alternatives out there that work pretty well and do a bit more than Media Center Editions of Windows.

http://www.team-mediaportal.com/

Some of the major features it does:

TV (Tivo like functionality)
Videos and DVDs
Pictures
Radio
Weather

They do have a large library of plugins for their 1.0 version which includes some streaming from the net (Like CBS for example).

The thing I don't like is it does not support DLNA at the moment (version 1.0), although you could point it to your files on your network, but that won't allow you to use PlayOn or other cool online streaming functions. Their version 2.0 which seems to have been in development since around 2007 still hasn't really got to far as they are fixing version 1.0 and stabalizing it still. It seems their version 2.0 has an alpha or beta out (not sure, was checking forums you might want to look into it more) and that it supports DLNA, but since it's alpha obviously not in the best shape.

It still is a cool project, and with their V2 if it can come out of alpha / beta might really be a great HTPC project to use. I will see about posting a few more HTPC like applications in the coming days for those interested in that kind of tool.

Sunday, April 5, 2009

PS3MediaServer

I just found out about this little gem on the PlayOn Plugins website through a post asking what others are using for software.  Just in case you're interested in trying something new it's Java based, so will run on any platform, and it does say "DLNA" compliant so effectively it should work with any DLNA compliant device (XBox and Media Consuming Devices) but I don't know any of that for sure, and with it being named "ps3mediaserver" it's obviously coded to work on that platform the best, play at your own risk.

The features sound impressive, and are all about high end streaming:
  • Ready to launch and play. No codec packs to install. No folder configuration and pre-parsing or this kind of annoying thing. All your folders are directly browsed by the PS3, there's an automatic refresh also.
  • Real-time video transcoding of MKV/FLV/OGM/AVI, etc.
  • Direct streaming of DTS / DTS-HD core to the receiver
  • Remux H264/MPEG2 video and all audio tracks to AC3/DTS/LPCM in real time with tsMuxer when H264 is PS3/Level4.1 compliant
  • Full seeking support when transcoding
  • DVD ISOs images / VIDEO_TS Folder transcoder
  • OGG/FLAC/MPC/APE audio transcoding
  • Thumbnail generation for Videos
  • You can choose with a virtual folder system your audio/subtitle language on the PS3!
  • Simple streaming of formats PS3 natively supports: MP3/JPG/PNG/GIF/TIFF, all kind of videos (AVI, MP4, TS, M2TS, MPEG)
  • Display camera RAWs thumbnails (Canon / Nikon, etc.)
  • ZIP/RAR files as browsable folders
  • Support for pictures based feeds, such as Flickr and Picasaweb
  • Internet TV / Web Radio support with VLC, MEncoder or MPlayer
  • Podcasts audio/ Video feeds support
  • Basic Xbox360 support
  • FLAC 96kHz/24bits/5.1 support
  • Windows Only: DVR-MS remuxer and AviSynth alternative transcoder support

I am going to give it a shot just for sheets n giggles.

PlayOn!

Okay, I thought I had the perfect setup until just recently a friend of mine from work suggested PlayOn.  He said he had heard about that it can stream Hulu and Youtube and Netflix (three things my setup below is sorely missing).  So I gave it a try, I am on the Netflix and PlayOn trial right now, and I have to say... it's freaking awesome.

First off it streams off the net fairly well, I have better luck with my PS3 than my XBox 360.  On the XBox I have to start a stream 2 or 3 times for it to finally catch, but after it has caught it works pretty good.  It very well could be my ISP rather than PlayOn here but I really don't have this problem with the PS3.  The software is just kicking off the ground, so I am sure it will just get better over time.

But what really put it at the top of my list is the following.  A couple days ago I contacted PlayOn's API Developer support because I was interested in using their API and writing a file aggregator where it would allow me to do what Mediatomb is currently doing, feed video from my Ubuntu box.  Since C# and DotNet is what I use at work, it looked like it was going to be a snap. They sent me to a site http://www.playonplugins.com which is a bunch of like minded media geeks with C# skills, and after a few posts there, it seems one of the moderators named "human" whipped out a fileshare plugin that was perfect using OPML so essentially it could handle multiple file paths or shares.  This saved me a few hours of work and let me get back to killing things in COD4. ;-)  On the page that you downoad the plugin I put instructions for making it work on a UNC share so I could have it read from my Ubuntu box over the network, so you can go check that out.

Now PlayOn with that plugin does everything!  They also have a few other plugins you can grab from the site above that are very interesting.  For the adults it has a plugin for you, which I won't go into depth here  you can go there and check out for yourself. ;-)   There is also an OPML aggregator plugin that you can just drop an OPML feed in a directory and it will stream that content.  People are sharing OPML files and feeds through the site as well, even has it's own section of the board for that.  There is one for the Food Network, HGTV, The Onion and a handful of others that really makes this PlayOn amazing for pulling together all your online video feeds as well as now your own local file share.

I think in a few more days my trial runs out, but this will be the software I purchase as I want to support their development efforts.  I like the idea of something so easy and extendable, and the only issue I have is now I need to upgrade my Ubuntu box with more powerful CPU's so I can run this software on a VirtualBox XP machine instead of my main gaming rig. ;-)


Thursday, March 19, 2009

MediaTomb, pyTivo and Handbrake

I have finally found a solution that works for me (and the wife!)!!! Only took me about a year of trying various software packages, hardware solutions and reading for hours on end.

Honestly your own mileage may vary as it depends on what you need in your own system. I am kind of picky with my media, I want it as small as possible but as close to HD as I possibly can get since I am spoiled watching blue ray movies.

I will include links to anything I use, or any technologies I talk about to help others to configure their systems and also as somewhere I can keep all this info if I ever lose it. ;-)

Here is my current setup:

I have a Unix server in my house running Ubuntu, this server has Mediatomb running on it, and pyTivo. Whenever I buy a DVD (soon will put a BlueRay player in my box so I can rip those too) I place it in the drive, and use Handbrake to convert it to the listed preset "PS3" (MP4) format and put it on my media server. This way when the kids want to watch it, they don't scratch the disk, or the two year old doesn't use it as a flying saucer and destroy the movie. I can pack the movie away in a box, and stick it in the garage. :-) It seems the preset I talk about above is a really good mix of having AC3 full surround audio, with good quality video, for a small footprint on the hard drive.

The media server has two one terabyte drives using Ubuntu's built in Raid mechanisms configured as a mirrored set. So 1 usable terabyte but I wanted redundancy so I won't lose all this hard work. ;-) This has become a central storage of all my media in the house, all kids DVD's are located on this computer, all our DVD's, our home movies made HD video camera, photos and MP3's from iTunes.

I then have 3 regular analog TV's in the house, each one has a Tivo on it (PVR) that allows for network access. I don't have a PVR from Comcast, DirectTV or even my own cable company Advanced Cable Communications because they don't allow the network capabilities. This way I not only share programs recorded on one with the others but it also can download programs from my media server through pyTivo. The Tivo is REALLY easy to use and I have the same problem most guys do, if it's not easy to use.. the wife will complain until I replace it or make it easy, and life will not be pleasant until such time. This setup makes for marriage tranquility. :-) Once I get HD cable, which I haven't cause my cable company has been a PITA on upgrading my line to support it, I will get an HD Tivo for the living room so I can support streaming HD content to it as well.

I then have a big screen 52 inch Sony KDL-52W3000 LCD in the living room that has a PS3 on it. PS3 serves the media from the media server in HD to the TV. It handles the wide aspect ratios and such, and also can handle the higher quality stuff. Not only that but the PS3 does a superb job of upscaling anything that might be of low quality (some of the DVD's I own are rather old and not that great) so playing it through the PS3 actually makes the picture look a lot better.

I also have my 7.1 surround system connected to the 52 inch listed above, although right now it's a 4.0 setup. :-) I don't have the mid channel or the sub yet for it, have to save up since I bought a nice system and I had to buy it in parts. My reciever is a Denon 1909 and I paid a lot less than the listed price on their site. For speakers I am using the Klipsch Reference Series currently with 4 RSX-4 models, next purchase will be an RCX-4 and probably will get an RPW-10 sub. This will bring me to 5.1 and then I can look at picking up a couple more RSX-4 models to fill it out to 7.1. Also noted that I didn't pay anywhere near list for those speakers either, I paid a lot less than half the listed price on some going out of business sales.

Hope this helps someone in their decisions, I am always open for discussions about your system setup, drop a comment and I will be happy to answer you back! Would love to hear about other setups that still facilitate the same functionality.

Thursday, January 15, 2009

Handbrake and Mediatomb

Haven't updated in a while, so figured I would give you the latest and greatest...

Oh man, I have to say the latest upgrade to Handbrake has helped me to replace all the software from before. Now I no longer run a Windows machine in my Virtual Box to be able to DVDShrink and then AutoGK the video into the format I want. I just use one tool, Handbrake.

They now have a Linux GUI as well as presets for "PS3" which is great in quality and has a relatively small file size, usually 1.8 gigs for a normal movie (90 mins). Because of these two things it has made it much easier, and you don't have to be a complete media geek to use it anymore. The PS3 loves it and plays it fine, so I think I have found the magic formula I was looking for, now I just have to figure a way to get the right command line so I can automated the thing, just drop a disk in and crunch away. If anyone has done this or has ideas would love to hear them.

Mediatomb is still doing great for me from a DLNA streaming server although it's really showing its age. I read some of the functionalities of the newer version of say ORB or TVersity, and Mediatomb cannot compare. But I read the next version they are working on for Mediatomb will have these functions and more, we will see when it comes out. It's still a little flaky in that sometimes it will make my PS3 say "Unsupported Data" or some other type of error, and I have to delete the Mediatomb database and recreate it and it seems to fix the issue.

I don't want to run ORB or TVersity on a Windows virtual box, they both require some good amounts of CPU since they transcode most things although I read that Orb has modified their code now to not transcode things that go to devices that support the media it's being sent. Okay rambling now, so I will close it off with I have found something else called Galleon for my Tivo's that looks really promising, I will post more about that next time.