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.