Serendipity

I am still here on the planet. Just been too tired to do much other than work, tutor, work out on the treadmill or elliptical, and sleep. I haven't even played many video games lately.

I was playing on my media server remotely (laptop power cord stayed at work) and I downloaded a flash movie to play on my iPod. And I simply typed this:

ffmpeg -sameq -i file1.flv file2.mov

And the file plays on my iPod when I navigate to it using safari. With sound. Looks like I went overboard when I tried to do this before.

I still want to set up a VPN server on here so I can access the media server from my iPod.

Just taking a break

I'm not doing much work on the media server lately. Ok just trying to relax, playing video games and playing around with the fam. One more thing I want to do with the media server is add pptp VPN support, do I can access it from anywhere using my iPod touch. I have the application emerged already, so it's just a matter of configuration.

More challenges

I finally was able to work some on my media server. I installed a newer kernel on it, which I'm glad worked right out the gate, because I accidentally removed the older kernels to reclaim some disk space.

Back to trying to transcode. It appears to transcode videos faster (I only teanscoded a few seconds of a Fringe episode. ) But now the transcoded video has no sound. Ffmpeg doesn't even show an audio stream being transcoded. Time to take a debut at that. Once I have that taken care of, I am going to set the server to encode and serve flash videos

Busy Bee

This past week has been mighty hectic, thus slowing down working on my media server. I'm still trying to get the transcoding to work at some level; over 10 hours for a vid and then getting it with no sound doesn't cut it in the least.

I was able to get another kernel compiled strictly for the Pentium II, so once I do that, and transfer all my media files to a larger hard drive, I'll get back to trying to optimize transcoding on that machine. I need to find a bitrate calculator.

Not much ado ok the media server...

But I am working ok something else.

I have this nasty habit of testing out new techniques and technologies on real word events. I have been tasked with deploying respondus lockdown browser on our lab computers where I work. I'm trying makemsi to build a custom package I can deploy using either a active directory login script or group policy.

I already compiled the sample makefile, and it worked out fine. I intend to first add the installed respondus files into the makefile, then figure out how to register dlls and update the registry. More later.

Ffmpeg works now

By recompiling the x264 ebuild (I tweaked the ebuild with --disable-asm flag) I was able to get ffmpeg to work on my media server, but it seems like now it takes literally forever to transcode a file.

I wonder if there are any magic settings to make this work.

Ffmpeg a wash

It took over ten hours to transcode this lsttst episode of fringe, making my media center not the ideal place to transcode. That sucks, because I really would like to download and transcode fringe episodes so I can watch them, as I never have time to catch fringe at the time it airs.

Couple of things I still may try. I have a new kernel I want to try. I also left the resolution the same, so I'm going to change the resolution. Let's see what happens. If all else fails, I can disconnect the USB drive and transcode on another machine.

Xbmc a wash

I tried to get xbmc to work on my media server as a way to improve the streaming from my laptop, and to try something else. Well, I had problems getting it compiled on my gentoo VM, primarily due to lack of disk space. So I'm charging that to the game.

I was able to tweak my portable mplayer settings so that I can stream iPod videos wirelessly to my laptop with ampache. So I am going back to transcoding vids with ffmpeg. That means I need to recompile my kernel to support MMXEXT option. More on that later.

Possibly a new direction

In trying to figure out how to stream hulu videos to my iPod I looked at boxee, which was a fork of xbmc (xbox media center). While streaming hulu may be far off, I may consider using xbmc to better stream videos wirelessly. I am going to install it tonight to see how it works.

More tweaking to do

Okay. Stage 4 backup. Check. Just need to verify by installing on a virtual machine, and I am good to go. So far everything is working okay, with some tweaking to do.

I used to be able to stream vids to my laptop using ampache/vlc/portable mplayer combination, which worked pretty well until I switched the media server to a wireless adapter. Assuming I need to keep this up I was thinking about possibly transcoding the bids to a lower bitrate. I tried to do that, but I get an error message about MMXEXT not being compiled into the kernel, so it's time for an upgrade of the kernel, and possibly adding some extra compile flags to my make.conf files.

To test the low bitrate idea I'm going to find some samples to test and see what happens.

Server update

Well, I got hamachi running, so now I was able to log into my server from work and do "work" on my lunch break. I also was able to tweak ampache such that it will recognize avi files as well as mp4s. I am able to stream the mp4s to mplayer portable, and the avi files through vlc. I also found a faster bittorrent client, rtorrent. And it's MUCH faster.

I tried to kick off a stage 4 backup, but I lost my hamachi connection, so I will have to check it out when I get home.

Server update

Well, I got hamachi running, so now I was able to log into my server from work and do "work" on my lunch break. I also was able to tweak ampache such that it will recognize avi files as well as mp4s. I am able to stream the mp4s to mplayer portable, and the avi files through vlc. I also found a faster bittorrent client, rtorrent. And it's MUCH faster.

I tried to kick off a stage 4 backup, but I lost my hamachi connection, so I will have to check it out when I get home.

Media server TODOs

I want to install Hamachi on the server so I can log into it from anywhere and do any streaming/remote administration that suits my fancy at the time. In order to do that I have to recompile my kernel to add TUN support to my laptop. No big deal. I'm emerging the source to my VM now, so I can start compiling at lunch. Once I do that, installing Hamachi should be no big deal.

I've done a lot of configuring/installing/tweaking of this server, so I need to get a stage4 backup of this server immediately!

I also want to get another hard drive. The one I'm using right now is several years old, and I don't want to wait until it dies and I lose all of my music/movies.

Media server updates

Media server is going well. I have been able to now upload my music into it now, and have been constantly updating its software. Jinzora didn't work too well (took too long to load anything,) and after some quick google searching, I found another app I could use: ampache. Nice part about this is that it was in portage, and after an update of a few other packages it installed well. I'm really impressed with the fact that even though ampache depends on mysql it runs very smoothly on a Pentium II with 128MB RAM. After setting up the database I was able to add all my music and movies in no time.

It's almost done!

I've been working on setting up a media server of sorts; basically it's a file server I use to serve up my audio and video files, preferably by streaming to my iPod.

This machine is an old Pentium II laptop with 128MB of RAM, with 4GB of hard disk space, no Ethernet or wireless adapter. A perfect candidate for installing Linux on it, especially Gentoo.

Since I have more powerful machines than the laptop that I can compile software on, I set up another Gentoo installation in a virtual machine so that I can initially set up the OS and software, and tar up the installation using the stage4 method outlined on gentoo-wiki.com. I set the virtual machine up months before I got any of the hardware I needed to put the laptop on the network.

I bought a USB ethernet adapter from TrendNET (TU-ET100C) that has drivers readily available in Linux. I also bought a Belkin Wireless G USB adapter, that uses the zd1211rw driver. Once I used the SystemRescueCD to extract my stage4 tarball onto the laptop I compiled the kernel to allow wireless access using instructions in gentoo-wiki.com. I was able to get the wireless adapter working flawlessly, by emerging (installing in Gentoo-speek) the firmware for the wireless adapter, setting up wpa_supplicant, and editing the /etc/conf.d/net (The file for setting up ethernet and wireless adapters in Gentoo.) I now have an Internet capable laptop.

Next I installed Apache, Samba, and PHP. I downloaded some scripts to take a folder of fileiles and generate a .m3u playlist, andI found a script that takes a m3u list and turns it into a RSS feed. This allows me to stream audio to my PSP, as well as allow me to download movies over my network at home. I also downloaded and installed SQLite and Jinzora, because I want to make that work, also. Right now I'm having time out issues with Jinzora, probably because I have such a slow machine. I'm going to tweak the scripts some to get around that.

Relevant links

http://en.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/Wireless_Networking
http://en.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/Custom_Stage4#Introduction
http://www.doughellmann.com/projects/m3utorss/

Another project

It's been over two years since my last post. But I have another project I am working on.

I got a laptop from a student whose Internet I fixed, and I am working to put gentoo on it right now