Danny Tsang » UPNP

Migration Plan From Ubuntu 10.04 LTS To 12.04 LTS

Danny — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 00:01:30 +0000

Overview

I’m preparing myself to move from 10.04 to 12.04. With 12.04 as the next Long Term Release (LTS) coming in the next release I thought it was time to prepare for the inevitable move from old to new.

Setup

LTS from Canonical has support for 3 years for the desktop but it has been increased to 5 years for 12.04 code named Precise Pangolin. My Linux headed server currently does a lot and I like to treat it as a production system which cannot go down for long periods of time. The following services are being used:

FreePBX – PBX system which manages the phones in the house
Energy@Home – Logs power usage at home
uPNP – Allows streaming of media to the T.v / Playstation 3
Ampache – Music streaming service
MythTv – DVR for digital and analogue T.V

Most noticeably the most important one is FreePBX. The rest are good to have but will only cause inconvenience if it was not running. To complicate things slightly the system is currently using LVM. I have never migrated an LVM before.

Hardware

The computer was originally built in 2004 with some minor upgrades including CPU, RAM and HDD but it’s starting to show it’s age. The hardware was bought as a budget secondary desktop computer but has since resided to a headless 24×7 server. Now it has so many services and software running that the load average is constantly above 5 on a AMD Athlon 64 4000+ (1×2.4GHz stock) with 2GB RAM. The system has a 500 watt PSU but consumes around 130 W.

I think it’s time it received some TLC and a well deserved upgrade and it would be perfect if I could time it with the next LTS. Some of the features I’ll be looking for are:

Gigabit Ethernet (hopefully 2 if possible)
More than 4 SATA ports
At least dual core CPU
Water cooled CPU

Check List

List of things to do before upgrading:

Backup user files – Music, pictures, etc
Backup settings – FreePBX, Gnome(possibly), fstab, apache conf, …
Backup website files
Backup Database

Test Backup

It’s always important to test the backup to ensure they actually work! Files and databases are easy. They can be restored into a different database and files can be copied to a different computer or different location as long there is enough space.

Summary

I probably won’t migrate on the day of release but I may test the backup plan around that time to make sure everything works. Once that’s done, Setup a VM and try installing and restore some of the backed up data and see if it works.

Ubuntu 12.04 LTS to get extra-long desktop support cycle

MediaTomb DLNA To Playstation 3

Danny — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 00:01:19 +0000

Overview

I found the Video plugin for MythTV 0.21 to be inadequate for streaming to the Sony Playstation 3. It didn’t update fast enough when you dropped a video into the UPnP directory and also there was no external way of telling it to refresh it’s list of files without starting up Myth Frontend.

MediaTomb

MediaTomb is a UPnP server which can run as a standalone or as a daemon. It uses an XML configuration file for it’s settings (pretty neat stuff) and is pretty small in size. The software comes with it’s own web server so you don’t have to install a full apache install to get to the control panel and it uses SQLite by default so no big database backend to be installed.

Install & Configure MediaTomb

Install MediaTomb and ffmeg thumbnailer
sudo apt-get install mediatomb ffmpegthumbnailer
That’s it for the install!

edit the file config file in /etc/mediatomb/config.xml and change the following settings:

Enable PS3 support change this:

and also

–>

Add the line

below
/usr/share/mediatomb/web
so that it looks like this
/usr/share/mediatomb/web
This hides the full directory path from the Playstation so it can only view the directories added and not the full system.

Add the following to enable thumbnail previews. I have found this does not work 100% of the time.

Enable transcoding

to

Add the following transcode mappings under tag:

Add the following settings between the elements. Not the parent is plural and each profile is singular.

image/jpeg
yes
yes
128×128

<buffer size=”524288″ chunk-size=”512″ fill-size=”1024″/>

Restart MediaTomb service sudo /etc/init.d/mediatomb restart If it fails to restart then double check the config file for errors.

Go to the machine in a web browser on port 49152 e.g http://localhost:49152

On this web page configures the directories available over UPnP. The Database section shows what directories are visible / registered to MediaTomb and Filesystem shows the computer directories that can be added for DLNA / UPnP visibility. When a directory is added MediaTomb scans the directory and register them so they show up on the Playstation. These can include music, videos and pictures.

In the top right hand corner there is a plus “+” with two arrows around it. Clicking on it loads a new page in the main window, replacing the file lists in the directory. This is the page for setting how often it scans for changes.

Go to the Playstation, turn it on and go to the relevant category e.g photo in the menu. There should be a MediaTomb server in the list. If it does not appear go towards the top and scan for more media servers to look for MediaTomb.

Summary

The software is pretty self contained but I would have liked the option to use Apache and MySQL because those are already installed on my system.

MediaTomb does the job for now and whilst I cannot get the thumbnails to work on all the media it still does a brillant job of streaming the media to the Playstation. Unfortunately it’s not integrated into MythTV so records will still have to be done via MythTV but this is not a problem because all recorded TV shows are registered in the database.

A problem I did encounter was that I added multiple directories but reguardless of where they reside on the computer, all videos appear in one directory on the Playstation. I’m not sure if this is a bug or how it’s suppose to work.

[HOWTO]:Stream DivX/XviD to a PS3 with firmware 2.10 using MediaTomb and Ubuntu 7

My Alternative Free Software On Windows

Danny — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 23:01:54 +0000

Overview

Here are my picks for free software on Windows (currently Windows 7). Free and open source (two different licenses applied to software) have come a long way and have come to replace my ageing proprietary and non-free applications. I list my choices below in this post.

Multimedia Player

VLC – stands for Video Lan Client is an open source player that runs on all 3 major platforms (Windows, Linux and Mac). It supports a very wide varity of codecs and video formats. The player has plugins for web browsers and can be used to play music and videos.

I use it as my video player as it does not have a library component to manage my music and videos but does have a playlist feature.

Web Browser

Mozilla Firefox – I have been using Netscape 6 browser back in the day when the company still existed. Even though it was slow and crashed every so often it did not deter me from trying a different browser to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. I leapt straight onto Firefox (what was called Phoenix at the time of it’s alpha launch) version 0.6 and stuck with it since. Whilst Safari and Opera has improved over the years along with Firefox moving to 3.5 very quickly.

Email

Mozilla Thunderbird – An open source using standard design I have used it for well over 2 years now. Whilst it feels lacking in terms of polish and that bit of TLC compared to Mozilla’s web browser offering it still forefills the task as a good email client. I do find it lacking development and features sometimes for example the lack of naitive calendar integration so I’m less likely to hold onto the software if a new and better software came out.

File Compression

7Zip – This is a free and open source software (FOSS) which handles a lot of different compression protocols from 7zip (it’s own format) to zip and rars. The UI could do with some work but it does have context menu built into Windows.

Drawing

Paint.net – Initially developed to replace paint in Windows it uses the .net framework and is free. The software does a lot of effects and enhancements to images all for no fee (but please donate to the project). It does all the simple things like cropping drawing to slightly more advanced tools like, layers, lots of undo levels and controls with good fine controls.

CD/DVD Burning

CDBurnerXP – Despite it’s name it does handle DVDs too. The software is not as good as Nero but does the job well enough. The software UI flow needs a bit of work but the burning part is faultless. When creating a project it detects the current media in the drive to determin the size. In my opinion I prefer to set what type of media I am going to burn because I don’t always take out pre-burnt or non writable media in the drive which means it will always say you don’t have enough space. Despite this it is free so I’m not going to complain – too much. It does not support any cover editing or light scribe burning.

PDF Reader

Foxit Reader – A much lighter version than Adobe’s PDF reader. It has all the features I use in Adobe Reader so it’s a perfect drop in replacement. The reader has plugins for web browsers so you can view PDF from within the browesr. It does have a tiny advertisment in the top right corner below the windows border.

FTP Client

Filezilla – A free and open source FTP program. It has a lot of options and clever download / upload queue which you can specify what you want to do with file conflicts. Transfer limites can be set by the user from number of simultaneous file downs to the speed at which it down / upload files.

Remote Desktop

RealVNC – It’s one of the stable tools in Linux but it is available on cross platform. The server application isn’t as secure but if you hide it behind a firewall and tunnel in it should be safe. It’s very basic but it works and quicker than Remote Desktop on slow connections. There is a free and paid version depending on your needs.

TODO

I still have use non-free software because I have yet to find an alternative to fill it’s place. A good site to search for alternative software is at AlternativeTo.net

These are the following programs I need to find a good replacement for:

Text editor – I would love Notepad++ to be 100% compatible with Windows 7 but it’s not quite there yet.
RSS Reader – I’m using Feed Daemon but I would like an RSS reader than supports Google Reader and on all 3 major platforms including the iPhone.
UPNP Player – Not quite figured out what I need or how it will work but I want to move all my video and music collection to one central place and accessible on my computers for personal use.
Podcatcher / Podcast Aggregator – I’m still using Juice but there has been no updates to it since early 2000 but I have yet to find a replacement.
Music Player – A good all round music player with library support. I also want to be able to play podcasts in accelerated mode.
Diagram Tool – A good FOSS alternative to Microsoft Visio. It seems I’m alone on this one as there are hardly any out there and the Linux Dia program is too basic. Dia also shows it’s age.
Office Suite – I’m using Microsoft Office and have used Open Office in the past but found it lacking in terms of stability or usability.

I would like to use agile light weight applications where it does not require say Mono on Windows but keeping them as independent as possible. Any suggestions or recommendations are welcome. I will try and update the list in the future.