Geek Ramblings

Back to Ubuntu!

2009-10-08T20:13:00.002-04:00

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.

Perhaps I spoke too soon...

2009-08-20T21:00:00.000-04:00

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.

ZFS and VirtualBox issues

2009-08-18T17:00:00.000-04:00

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

2009-08-18T16:55:00.001-04:00

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.

New ZFS Home Fileserver Hardware for OpenSolaris

2009-07-30T12:06:00.010-04:00

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):

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.

PlayOn Plugin Installation Tutorial

2009-05-22T22:49:00.003-04:00

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!

2009-05-22T20:39:00.002-04:00

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:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zfs

Video How To's from Sun:

http://opensolaris.org/os/community/zfs/demos/

http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/zfs_learning_center.jsp

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

http://channelsun.sun.com/video/opensolaris+demo:+time+slider+in+opensolaris+2008.11/2972356001

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. :)

MediaPortal

2009-04-07T13:31:00.002-04:00

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.

PS3MediaServer

2009-04-05T11:37:00.004-04:00

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.

http://code.google.com/p/ps3mediaserver/

PlayOn!

2009-04-05T11:06:00.003-04:00

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. ;-)

MediaTomb, pyTivo and Handbrake

2009-03-19T15:12:00.000-04:00

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.

Handbrake and Mediatomb

2009-01-15T16:26:00.000-05:00

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.

AutoGK - Xvid - DivX - Matroska - Conversion fun!

2008-10-29T13:07:00.000-04:00

So I been working away slowly trying various things, and I have found that after using a handful of tools for converting my videos so that they work 100% on my PS3 I use the Auto Gordian Knot (AutoGK). It seems this tool is rather old at least the main application is, being that the latest stable release was on December 2005 and there is a beta that was worked on apparently November 2007.

The location of this nifty little tool is here: http://www.autogk.me.uk/

It's by far the easiest to use and the most straight forward, not to mention the only one I can get to work 100% on everything that's not corrupted that I throw at it. I have tried the tool from DivX and a few other various free conversion tools out there and none of them compare so far.

Only problem I have so far is that I have to convert the DVD first using DVDShrink (so as to create one VOB file) then after doing that based on the tutorial I have in this blog, I use this tool AutoGK to convert the VOBs to Xvid AVIs.

I set the AutoGK to use 100% quality, use source audio (AC3) and use Xvid codec with AVI as the container. The quality is not quite as good as the VOB's themselves, but it's nearly half the size even at 100% quality and it fast forwards, scene jumps and even works with the new "Scene Search" feature that was added in the 2.50 system update on the PS3.

If anyone has any other tools that just work out of the box, and aren't that expensive please add those to the post and I will post them later with my findings after playing with them for a while. I would really like to get a good HD conversion software to create really nice high def content perhaps in the Matroska (MKV/MKA) container.

Note: I do see that on the Matroska web page there is listed as the "best" Matroska editing software listed as AVI-Mux GUI but I notice all it does is combine files and does not do any converting which sucks.

More info on the Streaming Stuff!

2008-10-12T22:03:00.000-04:00

More woes on the streaming front!!

No matter what I do VOBs are definitely a problem with the PS3. The Xbox 360 won’t play them unless they are transcoded as they are streamed, but I haven’t been able to get TVersity to do this properly either.

I have also tested various codecs, re-encoding my videos and doing just about anything and everything I can to find the best setting or codec and what's the worst. It takes a rather long time to do this and I have still not come to a conclusion that I can be comfortable with yet, I only have a few hours here and there every night to devote so I think this hunt will take me a little longer yet.

I can say I have re-encoded my videos to Divx and XVid AVI's and the PS3 loves those, eats them for breakfast. It will fast forward, play, pause and play later (days later) at the same spot I had them paused. All of this while never once skipping a beat, pausing forever (locked video) or jumping a bit and audio getting out of sync. There is a loss of quality here though (I could probably squeeze more out if I tweaked the encoding options on the software I have), but I can perceive the loss of quality and it bugs the crap out of me. Not only that but re-encoding these videos takes many hours.

A few people I know have the same problem. It seems uncompressed VOBs are really the issue. If I compress the VOBs, even if I just say "Automatic" but don't set a limit, there are absolutely no problems with those VOBs.

I have heard talk about the Apple TV device being pretty decent after you mod it. I will get details and post here on both the Apple TV and the mod package to apply. I understand the modded device apparently will play formats directly over the network, no need for a DLNA streaming server or to transcode.

I am thinking about the same, but for nearly $200 for the device, I could put another $100 and get a PS3 if only it would handle everything.

I also really want to keep my VOBs uncompressed; they look the BEST this way. I have tested compressed and uncompressed VOBs and I can tell the difference, at least in my setup. I have a KDL-52W3000 52” Sony Bravia which I love. Some of the people I know cannot tell the difference or it does not matter to them, or perhaps their setup hides it better, but for me I really can tell the difference. Not only this but in the future I want to be able to stream high def content and if my setup cannot even handle normal DVD uncompressed VOBs I think I am in trouble when I go to HD content. Note: Everything I have tried so far is does not include any HD or Blue Ray content.

Back to the grind of trying to find a good solution for me.. any comments are appreciated.

VOB's the evil SOB's.

2008-09-22T21:47:00.000-04:00

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

2008-09-21T23:56:00.000-04:00

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

2008-09-20T15:14:00.000-04:00

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.

2008-09-20T14:54:00.000-04:00

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.