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Mac Mini - Mythbuntu or Ubuntu

SKG — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 04:55:21 GMT

Just a quick post to mention that I've been successful lately running Mythbuntu on a Mac Mini Intel. I'm actually driving my 1080p projector at full resolution via a DVI->HDMI cable, and utilizing the fiber-optic audio output (built into the normal audio jack) to output DTS/Dolby passthrough from MPlayer. My Mac Mini is running a dual core 1.66mhz cpu, with 2gb of RAM. Currently I am about 95% successful. The only content I have trouble with is direct ripped blu-ray content in MKV format...(read more)

Use Subtitles with DSM-520 and DSM-320 with MediaTomb

SKG — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 08:54:54 GMT

If you hang out in our forums at all, you know I'm a huge fan of MediaTomb . Something you may not know is that I'm a fan of foreign films, so being able to display subtitles with my divx files is very important to me. One of the most common subtitle formats in use today is SRT. This is a format created by a tool which performs Optical Character Recognition on a video source, and creates a text based subtitle file based on what it sees. This is often used when converting dvd's to divx...(read more)

Price Drop on PT-AE2000U

SKG — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 08:47:14 GMT

Some of you may have taken advantage of the Panasonic $1000 mail in rebate for this projector a few months ago (I certainly did). Now the price has officially dropped, without a mail in rebate, and you can get the AE2000 over at Projector People for $2,699. In my opinion this is one of the best projectors on the market, and they are now offering a free 2nd year warranty. Now no one has an excuse for a small screen!...(read more)

Convert Videos for your iPhone

SKG — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 03:04:59 GMT

1. Download ImTOO iPhone Video Converter and install it on your computer. You can use the trial, but if you want to keep it, please pay the $29 and don't go over to http://serials.ws to find the serial code. 2. Load files to be converted Run ImTOO iPhone Video Converter. Click ‘Add’ button or ‘File’->’Add’ to add the video or audio files that you wish to convert. 3. Set the output profile Choose a format you want to set in the 'Profile' combobox. Tip: Apart from the output profiles...(read more)

Rumors of Microsoft IPTV?

J-Man — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 02:44:43 GMT

A friend of mine passed on the Rumor of Microsoft IPTV again today. It seems that the topic keeps coming up and various evidence all points in the direction of an offering from MS sometime in the near future. Check out these screen shots posted by an Xbox fan out there: http://www.xbox360fanboy.com/2007/10/26/rumor-leaked-screens-show-iptv-and-fall-update/.

I say bring it on Bill, IPTV for the masses! Mostly I'm just continually irritated that the cable companies keep block us out from getting full HDTV over cable without having to purchase "OEM" machines. OEM is just another name for proprietary lock down without any ability to upgrade. Give your customers freedom and they will certainly appreciate you.

Well, make your own decision and let me know if you have any information to add by commenting below.

RockBox Rocks my iBox!

SKG — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 21:06:09 GMT

So guess what that picture is of? It's of my iPod Video running Linux, skinned to match Vista Media Player :) Not only can I play MP3 and videos, I can pl ay OGG Vorbis and FLAC on my ipod now. Rockbox is a SUPER easy install on a huge variety of media players. It's best supported on this iPod video, but also works on other ipods, sansa devices, archos, etc. http://www.rockbox.org/ What does this have to do with Sharepoint? Well, at least when clients ask why I'm carrying an iPod instead...(read more)

Home Networking: Structured Wiring

J-Man — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 20:45:43 GMT

I recently decided to wire up strategic locations in my house for Cat 5e 1GB Ethernet. I've been streaming a lot of videos to my Vista Media Center box and my DSM-520 Media player. Wireless worked for a while but the DSM-520 would have issues because of the 802.11g limitations. Running Structure Wiring provides up to a 1GB network and is probably the best thing you can do if you want to stream media.

Project Steps

Planning: The first step is deciding wall box placement and central wiring panel placement. In my case, I had an existing smart box or central wiring panel that I used. Also, I wanted multiple lines to each wall box and I decided that I wanted wall jacks in the living room, office, and master bedroom. I have additional ports on my router for future expansion as well.
Running Cables: This is the difficult part. I chose to only run cable on interior walls. I did this so that I wouldn't have to deal with insulation when fishing cabling through the walls. Also, if you can reuse existing boxes and just add additional insert the process in much simpler as well. In my case, I reused boxes for cable and phone connections. You'll need to get a fish tape from Lowe's or Home Depot that you can attach cabling to and feed it down from the attic into the wiring boxes. Run multiple cables at the same time by looping the Cat 5e cable at the end of your fish tape. This way you can get two cables run at once. Run the other end into your central wiring panel for termination. I found that the punch down wall inserts were the way to go for termination at each wall jack.
Setup and Configure Network Appliances: At a minimum you will probably need at least three network appliances: Cable modem, router, and switch. In my case I used a Cable Modem, Firewall Appliance, Unmanaged Switch, and Wireless Access Point. This gives me a lot of flexibility in my configuration. Comment below if you have any questions why I went with this configuration. I also added a UPS in my wiring closet that all appliances use for power. This gave me the extra outlets that I needed as well as providing temporary battery backups for short power interruptions. Splice into a cable in the central wiring panel and add a splitter to provide a source for the cable modem. Next, run a cable from the cable modem to the WAN port on your Firewall Appliance or Router. This appliance will act as the DHCP server for the internal LAN as well as control access between the WAN/LAN. Next go from a port on the Router/Firewall to the Unmanaged Switch. Attach each cable for the wall plates to the Network Switch. Finally you can add a Wireless access point by attaching a cable from the main Firewall Router to a LAN port on the Wireless Access Point/Wireless Router. Turn off DHCP on this unit as the Firewall/Router will act as the DHCP server for the network.

Supplies and Tools

In order to complete your project you will need a number of tools as well as networking supplies such as wall covers, RJ45 Inserts, RJ45 plugs, Cat 5e Cable, etc. I've included a full list of tools and possible supplies below:

Tools

Wall Fish Tape
Scissors or Cable Cutter
Cable Stripper
Screwdriver with Bits
Punch Down Tool (110/88)
Ratchet Crimper
Cable Tester

The tools are all available as kits by various manufacturers. A basic Network Toolkit can be found by clicking this link.

Supplies and Networking Appliances

Cat 5e Cable
RJ45 Cat 5e Plug Terminators
Cat 5e Snap-In Inserts
Wall Plates
Firewall Appliance: ZyXEL ZyWALL 5
Unmanaged Switch: NetGear 16-port Gigabit Switch
Wireless Router/Access Point: DLINK Extreme N

Final Product

Depending on your networking appliances you will end up with a 10/100/1000 Mbps network. I was able to successfully get 1GB connections working through the house. Your final product will look professionally installed and no one will know the difference. Here are a few pictures of my wall jacks and central wiring closet:

Useful Links

http://www.swhowto.com/

http://www.lanshack.com/make-cat5e.aspx

Feel free to contact me in our Networking forum with any questions that you may have. It can be found at http://xmilk.com/forums/10.aspx.

ATT UVerse Coverage Map

SKG — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 04:48:45 GMT

ATT UVerse is an IPTV service available in a few places throughout the US over ATT DSL lines. Take a look at the map to get an idea of the coverage areas. With UVerse ATT is struggling with the same problems they've had with DSL for years.... The fact is they just have very little bandwidth to work with, and this sort of thing is difficult for them. They clearly have some long term plans to disband DSL, most likely going with all fiber. If you want to drill into the map you'll have to go...(read more)

Lifextender: Easy Commercial Skip for Media Center

J-Man — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 07:57:00 GMT

I've been trying to successfully get DVRMS Toolbox setup for quite some time with the purpose of automating commercial skipping from my Recorded TV from Vista Media Center. Unfortunately after banging my head against the wall for hours and trying to modify the configuration repeatedly I still got the dread message: "Commercial add skip has stopped responding, you will now be returned to MCE." The problem seems much more common on Vista x64 MCE. There are numerous postings and rants in babgvant's forum about the issue. Please don't misconstrue my frustration for DVRMS toolbox, I just think think things need to be easy and simple. Lifextender does just this and does it very well. I will probably take another run at DVRMS Toolbox when release 1.2.0.9 is released publicly, but until then Lifextender will be my choice for enjoying commercial free content.

Lifextender is my current choice because I simply downloaded the executable install, ran it, and presto! Now I am able to enjoy commercial free television on my Windows Vista x64 Media Center.

The only real tweak I have to offer up here is that initially I would get a message that stated "Windows has blocked some startup programs" when the application started upon login. This is a documented feature of User Account Control (UAC) and is discussed here on the the Lifextender FAQ:

http://www.lifextender.com/troubleshooting.aspx#i_have_uac_enabled_and_lifextender_doesn

The Fix

Yes, I said there is a fix for the UAC issue with Lifextender. The fix doesn't however come from the MS support site at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/930367. I found that the better solution to the problem is to use the Vista Scheduler to launch Lifextender rather than launching from the Startup Folder. Here are the steps to follow:

From the Start menu Type "Task Scheduler" in the Search Box. You can also access the scheduler by going to Start Menu → All Programs → Accessories → System Tools, but the previous is much faster and more fun.
From the Actions pain to the right side click "Create Task". This will bring up a dialog box that looks like this:

Enter a name for the task such as "Lifextender"
Click Change User or Group to specify the account the application should run under
Select the Run only where user is logged on Radio Button
Check the Run with highest privileges box
Go to the Triggers tab and click New. This will bring up the dialog box below:

Choose At log on from the Begin the task drop down box
Select the Any User radio button
Be sure the Enabled box is selected in the Advanced Settings area and Click OK
Go to the Actions tab and Click New. This will bring up the yet another dialog box:

Select Start a program from the Actions dropdown list
Click the Browse button and navigate to the Lifextender executable by default at "C:\Program Files (x86)\Yellow Cup\Lifextender\Lifextender.exe" and Click OK
Navigate to Start Menu → All Programs → Startup. Right click Lifextender and delete it from the startup folder.

Woot! No more annoying dialog boxes in the tray after startup. Lifextender is now working and will startup properly at login!

Good luck and enjoy commercial free recorded television. Just in case you didn't catch my link above. It is available totally free from here: http://www.lifextender.com/. Great job Yellow Cup Project for putting out a wonderful new MCE add-in.

WebGuide Setup and Configuration

J-Man — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 04:03:53 GMT

The MCE customization begins.....

With the hype of the Doug Berrett's WebGuide and Microsoft Deal, I figured it was time for me to set it up for myself. Specifically I wanted to be able to stream to my HTC TyTN II and watch recordings on my laptop while I'm on the road on my consulting engagements. I downloaded the binaries from http://www.asciiexpress.com/webguide/ and began setting up the prerequisites. I'm going to go into a lot of detail here for newbies so feel free to jump around if you know what you are doing.

Install and Configure Web Guide

Run the WebGuide executable to install the software. The setup wizard here is pretty intuitive. My only complaint is if you choose not to install the Cassini Web Server then the installation ends. So go ahead and install the Web Server and then after installation and configuration is complete Cassini can be removed from the Programs and Features dialog.

Now on to configuration. WebGuide is pretty simple to configure with most default options being reliable. First click the Windows Accounts button from the General tab. You'll need to setup the Windows Media Player user so that the application can retrieve information about your library from the player. Next I went ahead and entered a username/password for the Streaming Service. This is a Windows service that runs in the background and handles the video transcoding. Next you'll need to setup users on the user table. This is pretty straightforward so I won't elaborate. The Network configuration can be crucial. For the Web Port choose the port that will configured IIS to use. In my case 8080. I just left the video port set to the default but made note of the port number so that I could configure my Router later. Finally, configure the options on the Media Sharing tab and SAVE your Settings.

IIS Configuration

Rather than use the Cassini Web Server, I decided that I might as well use IIS 7 in Windows Vista. I navigated to the Turn Windows features on or off dialog and began to configure install the IIS components that I wanted.

Having recently installed SQL Server 2005 reporting services on another Vista based machine, I chose to install similar components here. Detailed steps are available here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/934164. Another important note is that since we have installed IIS after the .Net framework we should run aspnet regiis. From an administrative command prompt navigate to C:\Windows/Microsoft.NET/Framework/V2.0. Now run aspnet_regiis -i.

Because my ISP, Cox, blocks port 80 the first thing I had to do was configure the Default Website to use a different port. I chose port 8080.

From the Control Panel Select Administrative Tools
Double Click Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager
Expand Web Sites
Right Click the Default Web Site and click Edit Bindings
Select the http entry from the dialog box and click Edit
Enter the port number you want in the Port textbox and click OK
Right Click the Default Web Site and click Restart

Now you should be able to navigate to http://localhost:8080/ from a Web browser. Be sure to include your port number as I have done here. This will show the default II7 page. IIS Configuration is now complete.

Finally, we need to add a virtual directory for WebGuide. From IIS Manager perform the following steps:

Right Click the Default Web Site and click Add Application
Enter WebGuide in the Alias Textbox
Choose the Physical Path by clicking the ellipsis. Standard path is C:\Program Files (x86)\WebGuide\WebGuide4 on an x64 bit machine
For the App Pool choose the Classic .Net AppPool from the drop down box and click OK
Click OK and the WebGuide application should appear under the default web site.
Restart the Default Web Site for good measure

Now we can bring up the page in a browser by navigating to http://localhost:8080/WebGuide.

Router/Network Setup

Before you can access WebGuide from outside your internal LAN you'll need to setup some port forwarding rules on your router. In my case I had to open up port 8080 for http traffic and port 49253 for video streaming traffic on my Dlink DIR-655 Extreme N Router. Also, if you have a dynamic IP address you'll need to configure dynamic DNS and sign up for a dynamic DNS Service. This configuration varies greatly for each router, so consult your routers manual. Here are some good links on port forwarding and Dynamic DNS.

Free Dynamic DNS Service http://www.dyndns.com/
http://portforward.com/routers.htm

Final Thoughts

Woot!! WebGuide is a great extension to add to your Media Center bag of tricks. It's easy to setup and something that you can brag about to all your friends. With terminal web client enabled machines becoming more prevalent and broadband mobile access, you can watch your recordings and even live TV from almost anywhere! Here's a screen shot from my favorite Showtime series "WEEDS" streaming over WebGuide.

Windows Media Center Setup

J-Man — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 03:30:15 GMT

A couple of months ago, I had the motherboard in an old Alienware machine that own go kaput. Since I had been wanting a good PVR solution for sometime and I like to build my machines, I decided to shell the guts of this thing and build a Media Center PC. Because Vista has the hottest buzz right now, I decided I would go the Vista MCE route rather than MythTV, Freevo, LinuxMCE, or many of the other respected platforms.

Hardware

I started off with an Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 Conroe 2.66GHz that I decided to pull from my Gaming PC figuring that I could upgrade it to a Quad core. Next, I navigated to newegg.com to start building the beast that became my MCE. I went beefy just in case I wanted to scrap the project and do something else with the hardware. Here were my final specs:

ASUS P5LD2 Motherboard R2.0
Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 Conroe 2.66GHz
OCZ Platinum Revision 2 2 4GB (4 x 1GB)..unfortunately the board only recognizes 3GB usable
Zalman CPU Cooler
PNY VCG7300GXPB GeForce 7300GT 256MB Graphics Card
Hauppauge WinTV-PVR 500 MCE Analog Dual Tuner
Hauppauge WinTV HVR 1600 Digital/ATSC Tuner
Western Digital 500 GB Hard drive... RAID 5 here we come (~1.4 TB)
Reused a couple of DVD drives
ThermalTake 600W Power Supply
DLink DWA-556 Extreme N Wireless NIC
MS media Center Keyboard: This is total junk don't make the same mistake
Gryration MCE remote...I couldn't live without this thing
Windows Vista Ultimate x64

The parts arrived from newegg on time and in perfect condition as usual. I quickly threw the system all together and got Vista Ultimate x64 installed and configured. Of course getting the Extreme N NIC card to be recognized and working was a bit of a challenge. After finding the right drivers for the NIC, I was ready to move this Media Beast into the Living Room. I quickly and easily attached my two cable TV set top boxes to the Hauppage MCE 500 and attached an HDTV antenna to the HVR 1600 and I was ready to go. The Vista MCE setup wizard was smooth and the tuner configuration was seamless. I was ready to rock and roll. I also configured MCE to recognize my media stored on my Dlink DNS-323 NAS. Victory!

Bill certainly rocked things this time. This was the easiest setup and configuration I had done. Of course this was just the beginning.......Lots of customization to come!!!

Recently Discovered Emotiva - Will never look back!

SKG — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 01:42:00 GMT

Recently, I purchased an amazing pre-amp and amplifier from Emotiva, and I'm completely impressed with both their customer service and their products. These have awesome construction quality, and beautiful sound quality, while giving you professional components that you can upgrade independently over time. Here's what Emotiva has to say about the products, it's all true! Designed for the serious home entertainment enthusiast who has an eye for real value. For about the cost of a mid-line...(read more)

UPNP AV Server using MediaTomb and Ubuntu

SKG — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 22:10:00 GMT

First, I'll mention that there are indeed off-the-shelf NAS solutions that do this, such as the DNS-323. I've had pretty bad experience with these, and in my case i'm actually replacing my DNS-323 because I was just tired of the constant lock-ups/failures/etc.

I've definitely not completed this project yet, and have a lot of scripts and some web-interfaces to build before everything works the way I'd like, but I'm going to go ahead and throw out the basics for anyone else thinking of setting a similar system up.

What it does:

Serve Audio and Video to UPNP AV devices such as xbox, dsm-320, Roku, etc.
A network file-server for your home
A web-based torrent client

Other things you could add:

Control your home lighting using X10 and a web interface
Automatically rip DVD's inserted into the box and put files on the network
Be a WINS server for your network
Many many more!

Parts List:

These parts were all picked to stick to the low price point while providing reasonable quality and performance. I've linked most of the parts to newegg or amazon, which seems to have a competitive price. You may find them cheaper elsewhere.

Shuttle SS21T Barebones System - $120 (info)

The shuttle SS21T is a nice low-cost barebones solution, with a reasonable form-factor. I wasn't too worried about the looks, as the device will live in a closet, but this is a pretty nice looking case and is amazingly well prepared inside, with all cables tie-wrapped, labeled, etc.

AMD Athlon 64 3500+ 2.2 GHz Processor- $65

This processor seems to have plenty of power to serve the media and even do some format transcoding on the fly, but if you want to spend a few extra dollars you can bump up to the dual core versions for alot more power. Keep in mind that the bigger the CPU you use, the more noise you'll need to generate to keep it cool.

Hitachi Deskstar SATA 7200rpm 400GB - $100

The deskstar is a great value, and fast enough to serve a few concurrent streams. In my case I also added in a raid 0 set from my retired DNS-323, which required an $18 sata card to add to the 2 onboard sata ports the shuttle already provides.

Kingston ValueRAM 1GB - $30

The only thing special about this ram is the price, but it's hard to complain about 1GB of ram for $30. The stuff works fine, runs cool, and in most cases it's not worth blowing extra cash on something more expensive for this sort of project.

The Shuttle can actually utilize 800mhz ram, and this ram is only 667mhz, so if you wanted to spend a bit more for higher-performance ram, go for it.

Lite-On CD-ROM- $19

A CD-Rom is definitely not a requirement. You'll need some way to install Ubuntu, so it's easiest if you can find an old cd-rom laying around, or steal one from another machine for use in the install atleast. Keep in mind that the shuttle has only 2 sata ports, so if you bought 2 hard drives make sure you get an IDE cd-rom. Also a usb cd-rom would work fine. Also, don't worry about finding a black cd-rom, as it will be hidden behind the black 'flap' on the case.

Ubuntu Install Disk - Free!

Ubuntu can be downloaded in a 700mb cd image from the Ubuntu site, ordered (for free), or downloaded as a torrent (which is probably the quickest way). You want version 7.04 (or better) Standard or 64bit.

Assembly:

Everything should go together pretty easily. Cut the tie-wraps holding the cables to the case, and remove the front of the case, which snaps off. Take out the hard drive bay holder too.

Insert the CPU first, and get the fan mounted carefully. Then insert the Ram, hook up your CPU fan, and get the drives in. You can probably also pull out the floppy drive cable to clean things up inside.

If your looking for a silent and more reliable fan than AMD ships with the CPU, check out this Zalman fan, which is a fantastic, very quiet, fan.

Get everything put together, plug in the power, and see if the machine starts and your drives show up on the post screen.

Install:

So the plan is to boot into the Ubuntu Live CD, install Ubuntu, and then install our media server.

First, insert your ubuntu CD (or whatever other method you chose to install) and let the machine boot into Ubuntu. You should successfully enter into Ubuntu, although don't be surprised if the graphics are a bit of a mess, as the Shuttle's video chipset is not well supported. Hopefully your graphics look good enough to allow you to run the installer (the install icon should be on the desktop) and get Ubuntu setup.

I won't go into detail on how you should configure your drives, you can decide for yourself what is best. There are software raid options if you want to read up on 'MDADM' which is available via apt (sudo apt-get install mdadm)

Get Ubuntu installed, it should be painless, plug in a lan cable, and reboot. (Don't forget to remove the cd).

If your having icky-looking-video problems, try to open up a terminal window and reconfigure the x-server.

sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg

Hopefully your booted into your Ubuntu install now. Ubuntu has probably given you a laundry list of updates it wants to run, if not, lets do them ourselves

sudo apt-get update (update the apt package sources lists)

sudo apt-get upgrade (upgrade all packages to the newest version)

You may opt to reboot once the upgrades finish.

Enough messing around now though, lets stream some media, we will use a package called Mediatomb. There is a nice debian package for this, so we just need to add a source to apt so we can install it easily.

We'll need to add the following line to our /etc/apt/sources.list file.

deb http://apt.mediatomb.cc/ feisty main

Go to 'System->Administration->Software Sources'

Under 'Third-Party Software' click Add, and add the line. You can also edit the sources.list file yourself (sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list)

Now lets update apt again, to include the new source:

sudo apt-get update

and install MediaTomb:

sudo apt-get install mediatomb

Cool, we are almost ready to try to stream some media. Now is the time you might want to visit the administration menu in ubuntu, and use the shared-folders control panel to enable samba on your disk. That way you can copy some media files over from your windows machine. Don't forget that after you enable samba, and your users are listed in the control panel there, you'll still need to run this command on your user for a windows machine to authenticate.

sudo smbpasswd -a myusername (supply password when prompted)

Ok ok so you have some files on your drive, so lets stream them, assuming your plugged into the single ethernet port on the shuttle, we can use the simplest case mediatomb command to launch the server:

mediatomb

MediaTomb should start up, and leave you with a URL where you can browse to configure your server.

You can visit this site, and add files and folders you want mediatomb to share.

Go read the MediaTomb documentation

MediaTomb will let you do lots of customization on how files are represented to your UPNP devices.

Mediatomb should have added a file into your /etc/init.d directory to start automatically in the future on-boot.

That's all for now! Later I'll post with some of the scripts I use to manage my Media box while it sits in the closet!