Marc’s Mind

So this week I did something unprecedented for me.  I downloaded and installed a new Fedora release the same week it was released officially.  After reading a bit about how stable and quick it is for others I decided to take the plunge.  I’ve now installed it on three machines (in this order):

• My laptop, an older Toshiba Satellite system.  Previously running Fedora 10 and dual booting with Windows XP.
• My home system, previously running Fedora 10.
• My work system, previously running Fedora 8 (see my earlier post on my experience with Fedora 9)

The install on my laptop would have made a Linux novice ditch Fedora completely and run screaming from it.  The actual upgrade went smoothly.  I booted up from the DVD and told it to upgrade my previous installation which it found with any problem, and update my boot loader config.  The updating of the boot loader was a mistake.  I rebooted the machine and “GRUB” was filling the screen as fast as the poor laptops GeForce4 chipset could pump it out.  I booted the DVD again and chose rescue mode and re-installed grub.  After that all was fine.  It booted up and Xfce came up with my old desktop settings.  Looked good, faster boot.  I was a bit disappointed to not see any suspend or hibernate options, which was part of my decision to do my laptop first since these were included in the latest Xfce.  More on that later, though.

I will say that it did take almost 5 hours to upgrade my laptop, but I kind of expected that since it is about 6 years old now.

The second system was my home system.  Same process, and I even the same mistake with grub.  My home system is quite a bit faster, and it only took about two hours to upgrade.  I upgraded my home system the morning of the 11th.  I only had about an hour or so to work with it before heading into the office that morning, but the upgrade itself seemed to be fine (once I finished kicking myself for having to fix the grub setup — again).

So, great, things appeared to go smoothly.  Since I knew I would only be at the office for a few hours on Thursday and probably wouldn’t get much else done, so I decided to start the upgrade there, too.  That and the fact that I like to be consistent at home and at the office — I’ve always been that way, it makes transitioning back and forth much easier for me.  That one wasn’t so great.  You can only upgrade to Fedora 11 from a fully updated Fedora 10.  So, I upgrade from Fedora 8 to Fedora 10, do a ‘yum clean all’ and then a ‘yum update’, then boot from the Fedora 11 disk to do my upgrade.  This time I finally got smart, though and told it to create a new bootloader configuration.  No problems with grub on this install.

Thats where the successes ended.  A bit of back story first.

As I mentioned earlier, I use Xfce now.  Between KDE’s attempts to be like Windows Vista Aero and MacOS/X and Gnome’s brain dead window placement (though it has gotten better, it is still not good enough and you can’t change it) I chose to go with Xfce.  Xfce is light-weight looks good and is well maintained.  It stays out of my way, is configurable “enough” and I really like the Terminal and file manager (Thunar).  It also plays pretty well with Gnome and KDE apps.  It works exceptionally well with non-Gnome Gtk apps (i.e. Firefox and Thunderbird) since thats the toolkit it is written with.

The failures of Fedora 11.  The most notable was the inclusion of  Firefox 3.5 beta 4 and Thunderbird 3.0 beta 2.   Its nice that they tried to include the latest and greatest, but it broke almost all of the extensions of both apps.  The way that Mozilla tags extensions, you have to jump through a lot of hoops to get them re-installed.  I haven’t even bothered with it yet, I’ve been too busy trying to get a stable Xfce again.

Something that I figured out yesterday was that after upgrading to Fedora 11 from Fedora 10, it didn’t actually upgrade everything.  I had to do another “yum clean all” and “yum update” to download another GB of files before I was actually updated.

Now that my machines are all completely updated, I’ve discovered a few other issues.  Notably, a bug was introduced into the Xfce Terminal.  The option MiscAlwaysShowTabs if set to TRUE now causes the app to segfault on startup.  I prefer to have that option enabled so my windows don’t resize when I open a new tab (major annoyance).  Several of my custom keymappings also vanished or no longer worked.

If I had done a clean, fresh install it might have been different (except the Terminal segfault), but I’m just not happy with Fedora 11.

Thunar also doesn’t seem to support LUKS encrypted volumes, either.  Patches were approved for adding that about 4 months ago.  I’m thinking Fedora is racing to try to beat some other distro in having the cutting edge, and in that they seem to be succeeding, but for most people I’m sure its not worth the several days it will take to work around the quirks.

As I was writing this post, I was downloading the latest Xubuntu.  I know of a lot of people that have switched to using Ubuntu for their desktop and are really impressed with it.  I think its mostly because of the compositing, though.  I may just end up re-installing today, we’ll see…

marc Reviews

As I mentioned before, I keep coming back to MediaTomb, playing with it for a few hours and then going back to uShare.  Not this time.  For the last couple of days I’ve been reading a lot more on the MediaTomb wiki, particularly the scripting pages.

I’m not sure why it wasn’t obvious to me before, but somehow I’d managed to keep overlooking those pages.  Using the scripting I was able to create a hierarchy almost exactly what I wanted.  I just wish there was an option to prevent the  “PC Directory” from being sent to the renderers.

Building and installing from source, switching the layout from builtin to js and modifying the import.js script is what I needed to do.  Probably not something a Linux novice would want to do, but it wasn’t too bad — once I knew what I had to do.  I think it was the whole “scripting” thing that made me overlook it in the past.

Its still not what I would call speedy, but that doesn’t really matter since I doubt many people will be constantly changing hundreds of files all the time.  As I’ve said before, it is stable, too.

It also solved one of my other problems, too, that of my playlists.  I can now stream the same playlists that my MPD server uses to my Netgear MP101.  I haven’t tried the MediaLounge or the Homepod yet, but will soon.  The only thing I have to do differently is tell MPD to use my MP3 “root” directory as its playlist directory and use relative paths.  MediaTomb parses these playlists fine and allows me to use them on the MP101.  MediaTomb also handles my “internet music” URL’s too, so I can now also point the Netgear to my icecast server and listen to my MPD stream directly.

That now covers almost all of my requirements.  I still need to put it through its paces for the next week or two but I think I may have found a solution that will work.

marc Projects

So after a bit more Googling, I took another look at FUPPES.  The “release” (SVN-578) seems quite a bit more stable.  The version I was working with is SVN-634, which is the latest from the author’s subversion repository.  It still has the mostly the same pros and cons.  The stable version doesn’t automatically watch directories, though.  So the pros and cons balance out again.

I also read on the uShare site that development has stopped there.

FUPPES does seem the most promising out of all of them, but Ulrich Völkel hasn’t been doing too much with it lately.  There was even a fork of FUPPES proposed in the forums so people want to contribute, but not much has become of that, either.  I may try to debug some of the segfaults myself, we shall see…

marc Projects

After doing quite a bit of research on media players in 2007, I convinced Jessica to get me a D-Link DSM-520 for Christmas that year. Since then, I’ve made most of our DVD collection and all of our music “on-demand”. Well, sort of.

Things still have a long way to go in the whole “digital entertainment” arena. The focus of this post, however is the Media Servers that serve the content. Being geeks, we’ve acquired several media players in the house over the years. This includes my now aborted MP3 Box project as well as off the shelf products. We have a Netgear MP101, a MacSense HomePod and the aforementioned D-Link MediaLounge DSM-520. They each have their strengths and weaknesses.

The idea behind them all was to have a central location that we store our content. That I’ve got covered without a problem. Shortly after getting the MediaLounge, I put together a file server to hold all of our media. This includes all of my MP3’s, Jessica’s MP3’s and a big chunk of our DVD collection. Its a Centos 5.2 box with the content exported via NFS and CIFS/Samba. Being geeks, Jessica and I each have a Linux machine and a windows machine that we each use. For me, I use the Music Player Daemon on my Linux (Fedora 10) box to play my music, Jessica uses Amarok on hers (Fedora 7). All of our music is stored on the file server. Neither of us use Windows to play music. We do use Windows to play videos, but not very often, thats what the MediaLounge is for. The file server provides everything in a consistent way to us on both our Windows and Linux machines.

So far, so good, right? Not really. Amarok and MPD both store their playlists differently, so we can’t share playlists. Not a big deal. Until, that is, we want to hear music in the dining room, the entertainment room, or our bedroom. I still haven’t figured out a good way to do that.

That brings us to the topic of this post, UPnP Media Servers. The idea behind them a UPnP Media Server is brilliantly simple: Given a collection of media, listen for connections on the network from Media Renderers and serve them the content. The implementation, however, leaves much to be desired.

I’ve experimented with about half a dozen different media servers. They each have their pros and cons. What I would like to see is something that will only expose audio files (MP3’s mainly with a few OGG files thrown in for good measure) to the Netgear and Homepod and expose video (mostly XViD) and audio files to the MediaLounge. The containers that they expose should be consistent with the file system hierarchy I’ve setup on the file server.

Part of the reason for the MediaLounge is for playing TV shows. For example, show’s like Las Vegas are really annoying to play on the DVD player because the disks are double sided. After watching a show, I have to go and flip the disk, wait for the DVD player to read, go through all the annoying notices, etc, etc,. Some of the DVD’s take nearly 10 minutes from the time you put in the disk to the time you can actually watch the content. On the file server I’ve got the directory structure laid out in a tree like so (for example):

/SharedMedia

• Movies (non-series movies are here)
  • Star Trek
• TV
  • Las Vegas
    • Season 1
    • Season 2
    • etc.
  • Mash
    • Season 01
    • etc.
• Music
  • Jessica
    • Celtic Women
    • tATu
  • Marc
    • Nevermore
    • Soilwork

(No our musical tastes don’t really match, which is another reason that we’ve both wanted this type of setup.) Within these directories are the actual video files or audio files. This makes it very easy with the MediaLounge to find a movie or TV show and watch whatever season/episode that we want.

So here is the list of pro’s and cons for each of the Media Servers I’ve tried:

uShare

This is the one that I’m currently using. It is very basic, though.

Pros:

• Reliable - it has never crashed.
• Easy to configure. The entire configuration consists of about 10 options.
• Follows my container/directory layout.
  • If I tell it to add “/SharedMedia/TV”, then it will present “TV” to the MediaLoung as a top level menu, complete with all of the subdirectories. This is probably the biggest reason I stick with uShare.
• Fast. It keeps its entire directory structure in memory, so it doesn’t have to scan the disk when a renderer is asking for the content.

Cons:

• A little too basic at times. There is no way that I have discovered to server an Internet Radio Station (i.e. Shoutcast/Icecast) to the MP101 or the DSM-520. I can stream from MPD to Icecast, but I can’t get uShare to serve the URL in a way that either of these devices will recognize.
• Adding or removing media requires either a restart or a “killall -HUP ushare” to get it to rescan. This also means that any connections to the server will reset. Since I add and remove media from it via Windows or a different Linux machine, it would be nice if it could automatically see the changes and not require me to login to the file server to issue additional commands to get it to recognize the changes.
• Playlists don’t seem to be able to be seen by the MP101. Perhaps that is because the file system is different from either of the media players, but perhaps a “playlist transcoder” would help. Again, we would be talking about extra scripts or more commands each time a change was made to a playlist. Now that would be a pain.

GMediaServer

I’ve probably got the capitalization wrong on that, but it doesn’t matter. If I remember correctly, uShare is a fork of GMeidaServer. GMediaServer is almost the same as uShare, but it is unmaintained. I wouldn’t even bother with it at the moment. It did have one pro over uShare, in that it has an MP101 mode that gives the Netgear its “Artist”, “Genre”, “Playlist”, etc menus. Nice, but not necessary. I’m not even going to bother with a pro/con list for GMediaServer since the project seems dead.

MediaTomb

This one I keep coming back to ever few months and after fiddling with it for a couple hours end up going back to uShare.

Pros:

• Stable. This is another one I haven’t had crash.
• Easy to add files to share via the web interface.
• Transcoding. MediaTomb claims to be able to transcode media. This would be great if I had a bunch of ogg files that I wanted to play on the Netgear, it could theoretically transcode them to MP3 on the fly. I’ve not tried it though.

Cons:

• It has its own container structure when serving files. What was once “TV” on the root menu of the MediaLounge is now buried 3 layers deep and it exposes “SharedMedia” as well. That means I have to drill down at least 4 levels before I even get to the “TV” or “Movies” directory. Supposedly this can be changed, but the default display configuration is about 2000 lines of Javascript code and not something I want to mess with. It tries to organize things in a reasonable manner, but it seems very “music-centric” with meta-containers for artist, album, etc, that don’t work well for video files.
• Slow. It takes hours for it to scan the 10,000 or so files I’ve got shared. This is the meta-data scanning, but its still slow.
• Couldn’t get it to serve an “Internet Radio” item for my icecast server.

FUPPES

I just discovered FUPPES on Saturday, which is partially what prompted me to write this article. I would describe FUPPES as somewhere between MediaTomb and uShare. It supposedly can transcode (though I didn’t test it) and have virtual containers that can be laid out in the way that I want. The default presentation of the containers is exactly what I wanted though.

I can’t use FUPPES at this point though. First, when I tried compiling it from the latest subversion code, I had to go in and fix a typo in one of the functions before it would even build. Second, I had to manually configure the configure script to support the taglib for meta-data in audio files. These first two things didn’t bode well for it. The killer was that it kept segfaulting and crashing every time I did a database update or refresh. That was the deal breaker. I can’t and won’t run something thats not stable. The last thing I want to do is be sitting and watching Blazing Saddles and have the server die for no reason, get up, restart the server and then try to get the MediaLounge to fast forward or jump to where I left off. The 15 minutes that would take would kind of ruin my enjoyment of the movie.

Pros:

• Quite configurable. More configurable than uShare or GMediaStreamer and much easier to configure than MediaTomb, though perhaps not quite as tweakable as MediaTomb. Since I don’t want to spend 40 hours configuring MediaTomb, this is a big plus.
• “Virtual” folders. A bit tricky to setup, and not very well documented, but pretty cool. With just a bit of massaging, you can set up a virtual folder layout that will list music by Artist, Genre, etc.
• Per-device Virtual folders. This is what really drew me to FUPPES. This would, in theory, allow me to present only the audio files to the Netgear MP101 and Homepod while still presenting all media to the MediaLounge. To make this work, I would have had to give the MP101 a static IP address on the network, and then have FUPPES use that to identify it, but thats a minor thing and really speaks more to limitations in the MP101 than it does to FUPPES.
• Quick. By quick, I mean in comparison to MediaTomb. uShare and GMediaStreamer don’t pull the meta-data in so they are very fast. FUPPES loaded the 10,000 or so files in just about 10 minutes, which isn’t bad. You only need to do this scan once, so the speed is kind of a moot point, though.
• Automatically rescans directories for new content.

Cons:

• Crashes whenever a database update or rescan is started. I did a bit of debugging and a couple gdb backtraces on it to see if it was one file that it didn’t like, but it wasn’t reproducible. It just crahsed. This was my deal breaker for FUPPES.
• Lost directories for no apparent reason. In my Music directory, I have three sub-directories, marc, jessica and playlists. Playlists dropped and I had to remove and re-add Music to get it back. It crashed when I did this, too.
• Building FUPPES is not for the feint of heart. I didn’t have any trouble with it, but not everyone is going to be able to figure out subversion and fix typos in source files. The authors would go a long way by getting it added to the RPM Forge repositories for Fedora and Centos, or even Fedora Extras.
• Couldn’t get it to serve an “Internet Radio” item for my icecast server.

TVersity

TVersity gets more of an honorable mention here. Mostly because it actually meets all of my requirements, save one: Its Windows only. I’m not the type of person that will run a Windows server. Say what you will, but you’ll never convince me otherwise, Windows is not well suited for being a server. I can’t NFS mount from a Windows machine without all kinds of extra (buggy or expensive) software, I can’t SSH in to manage it remotely, etc, etc.

Pros:

• Easy to setup. Very easy, its a Windows program with a wizard.
• Was able to add an Internet Radio feed to my Icecast server and feed it successfully to the MP101. The way that worked was I had my Music Player Daemon set to stream to the Icecast daemon on the file server. I setup the URL in TVersity and added it as an Internet Radio feed. On the MP101 I selected that from the list and it worked. None of the others seem to be able to do that. I don’t know if its a mime-type setting or what, but I haven’t been able to figure out how to make any of the others do that.
• The folder heirarchy was for the most part preserved.
• Has the ability to transcode.
• Can pull RSS and other video feeds from places like YouTube and stream them to the MediaLounge.
• TVersity is the only free Windows server I came across that was quite complete and good.

Cons:

• Windows only. This is a deal breaker for me.

There are a few others that I haven’t tried, but they’re all similar in function to uShare, GMediaServer, MediaTomb or FUPPES. Most of them aren’t as mature as these four are. There is a pretty extensive list on Wikipedia but most of them are tied to other projects such as MythTV (uShare) and are not designed to be generic enough for my needs.

I’ve got high hopes for FUPPES, but development there seems stalled, too. Surely there are more people out there with a setup similar to mine, who don’t want all of the “active content” and just want to serve their files to their devices simply and easily.

I’m still looking for a playlist solution, but that seems elusive too without resorting to writing another program or some other scripts.

My search continues…

marc Projects

Well, the last two years have been…..Interesting.

This is just a quick update to give the site a recent post and start to get back into the whole blogging thing again.  Things have been extremely hectic for the last two years.  Some good things have happened, some bad, but mostly just busy.  I haven’t wanted to spend much of my “off-time” behind the computer, but things are settling down a bit and I find myself wanting to post more.

I decided to update the site with the latest version of Wordpress, give it a new look and move it to a different server.  The servers that the old site was on were no longer under my direct control.  Moving things around gives me the ability to keep it maintained a bit more than I had been.  The old site also had a few vulnerabilities that let spammers in.  I lost a few posts and a bunch of my posts had hidden link spam in them.  Its all cleaned up now, still a few lost posts.  They weren’t that important or interesting.

I’ve also decided to add a couple more categories in the near future, too.  There are some articles that I want to write about coding as well as contribute some of my code to the OSS community.

Stay tuned…

marc Ego