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.
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
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):
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.
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):
- AMD Phenom II X4 810 2.6GHz Socket AM3 95W Quad-Core Processor Model HDX810WFGIBOX - Retail
- Four Western Digital Caviar Green WD10EADS 1TB SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive - OEM
- 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
- GIGABYTE GA-MA770T-UD3P AM3 AMD 770 ATX AMD Motherboard - Retail
- Antec TPQ-850 850W Continuous Power ATX12V / EPS12V SLI Certified CrossFire Ready 80 PLUS BRONZE Certified Modular Active ... - Retail
- SUPERMICRO CSE-M35T-1B Black 5 Bay Hot-Swapable SATA HDD Enclosure - Retail
- Antec Nine Hundred Black Steel ATX Mid Tower Computer Case - Retail
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!
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.
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.
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. ;-)
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