Category: Media

Audio/Video, Streaming, and More

Blu-Ray on Linux – Part 2

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Blu-Ray Disc logo
Image via Wikipedia

After a lot of consideration between a dedicated hardware blu-ray player and a blu-ray drive, we prepared to take advantage of Newegg’s $49.99 Blu-Ray drive.

At the last minute, we changed to a $129.99 Blu-Ray burner, so we can experiment with blu-ray burning as well as play-back under Linux.

We installed it in a secondary computer, as opposed to our production system, and installed the MakeMKV beta for Linux. It compiled without incident, and was able to rip our test Blu-Ray video to a test drive.

Now, we want to emphasize this very clearly. WE HAVE NO INTENTION OF DISTRIBUTING ANY ILLEGAL VIDEO. Our intention is to be able to exercise our fair use and playback our legally purchased or legally rented videos.

It is a pain in the butt to have to spend this time ripping the Blu-Ray before we can play it. But that is the price we pay for our open-source lifestyle choice.

We figure, for our legally owned(not rented) Blu-Rays, we have two options.

  1. Rip the Blu-Ray, watch it, then delete the working files. This seems to make sense, as a single movie rip is taking up 30GB on a drive. How many of those is it worth storing.
  2. Do above, but create a lower-quality archival copy that can fit on a single DVD. Our first blu-ray came with a digital copy on a separate DVD that can only be played under Windows, so we might as well discard that disc and replace it with our on archival DVD.

Either of these, again, involve a fair amount of preprocessing and working space, however. In the meantime, however, we have a new movie to watch.

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Roku Releases Ten New Content Channels for Video Player

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Roku Netflix Player Size Comparison
Image by yonnage via Flickr

We love the idea of the Roku Video Player, formerly the Roku Netflix Player. We’ve been talking about it from early on, and have used one, although we admit to not owning one(not yet, at least).

Today, Roku started releasing a major update for the box. It includes ten new content channels:  Pandora, Facebook Photos, Revision3, Mediafly, TWiT, blip.tv, Flickr, FrameChannel, Motionbox and MobileTribe.

Now, there are some disappointments there. These are good sites, but nothing show stopping, like Hulu, or even Youtube. And the fact they haven’t incorporated streaming from your own home computer is equally disappointing.

The Roku Channel Store, the platform under which these new channels were launched, hopes to become a platform for future development. We’d love to see that.

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Blu-Ray and Linux – Or Why We Don’t Have Blu-Ray Yet

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Blu-ray Disc
Image via Wikipedia

Many years ago, we owned a hardware DVD player. Then, over time, we dropped the extra device in favor of playing movies back through our Home Theater PC.

But Blu-Ray is a bit more complicated. We use Linux, and a group of intrepid individuals reverse-engineered the DVD standard, as no one would offer a licensed copy. At least until this past July, when Fluendo released a licensed DVD player for Linux. They have not yet released a Blu-Ray player.

Which leaves the reverse-engineering road. The latest versions of mplayer now support most of the Blu-Ray codecs. But that isn’t playback of the disc. That means you still need to rip and encode the disc for it to work. Which is where the problem comes in. There is a limited guide available for Ubuntu that offers some updates on what you might do.

MakeMKV has a Linux version, which apparently works for ripping Blu-Ray discs, even many BD+ encrypted titles. It will take them directly to the Matroska(MKV) container format.

A Blu-Ray rip will take at least 50GB, before post-processing down to a smaller format, which is a lot of hard drive space. Especially if your goal is to merely watch the disc.

Am looking forward to testing all of these methods someday, but will need a Blu-Ray drive and a sample Blu-Ray disc. Will likely choose to wait. Although we may choose to try a hardware Blu-Ray player to dip our feet into the world of Blu-Rays. We don’t really need to watch HD movies, as much as it would enhance our experience, but we want to slowly phase out purchasing DVDs in favor of Blu-Ray for new releases. Not that we buy any movies regularly. We save purchases for special titles.

We’d like to hear what other people think on the subject.

So You’re Thinking of Trying MythTV

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inside my new ubuntu linux PC
Image by spadger via Flickr

We’ve been writing a lot about the new features of the latest release of MythTV, which has now been fully released. Assuming we, or the myriad of other enthusiasts have convinced you to try MythTV as the core of your HTPC(Home Theater PC) system, what should you think about?

Go HD – Don’t Even Bother with SD

In this modern world, even though SD is cheaper, why limit yourself? High Definition TV is the wave of the future, so you should plan for it, even if you aren’t yet ready for it.

You don’t even need a powerful computer anymore to do playback. Just a good graphics card. Under Linux, the best supported cards are the Nvidia line of graphics cards. The 8000 and 9000 series support VDPAU, the latest in offloading video playback from the CPU to the GPU. With one of these graphics processors, you can even use an inexpensive low-power processor like the Atom(common in Netbooks) to run your system.

Now, that is playback. As for recordings, hard drives are fairly straightforward. Get enough space. GBs are cheap now. Beyond that, you need a recording device.

Even with Over-The-Air broadcasts, you can get HD programming using a tuner card. After that, if you have cable or satellite, you can get some channels unencrypted on the cable line, usually local stations as well. Beyond that, you can take the output from the cable or satelite box and pipe it into computer for recording. If you are lucky, you can get channels over a firewire cable from the box(cable only), if not, you can use the HD-PVR 1212 to capture from the analog outputs.

After that, all you need is a remote to control it, and a TV or computer monitor to output it to, and you have the basics of a MythTV setup. Easy, huh?

More to come…

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MiroBridge – A Link Between Miro and MythTV

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Image representing Miro as depicted in CrunchBase
Image via CrunchBase

The MythTV wiki defines MiroBridge as a script which “enables Miro to emulate a MythTV recording device.” However, we feel this is rather inaccurate.

MiroBridge doesn’t appear as a recording device. It does create a channel, defaultly assigned to 999, to assign the Miro recordings to, but it is more an importer of Miro downloaded programs. You configure Miro with your desired online programs, and then set up a cron job to have MiroBridge run.

Miro is an Internet television application that downloads videos from RSS-based channels, manages them, and plays them. It does incorporate a Bittorrent client, but torrent features are disabled in MiroBridge for legal reasons.

MiroBridge in Action
MiroBridge in Action

MiroBridge will let Miro download new episodes, then it will symlink the downloaded episodes into the MythTV recordings directory and import the details of the program as a Recording. It can also move the episodes to MythVideo.

This is an amazing addition to MythTV. Scripts to do this have existed before. We used MythNetTV, which takes RSS feeds for Podcasts and imports them into MythTV. It has never been an official part of MythTV though. MiroBridge is now becoming official, and relies on Miro, which is a popular piece of software in its own right, and well maintained.

If you think about it, with cable becoming more expensive, a MythTV box with a broadcast based system, adding in internet produced programming. If you don’t have cable, at the very least, in the news department, the websites of various cable networks offer limited versions of their programming as RSS feeds you can incorporate in.

Youtube can be distributed as an MP4-based RSS feed as well, using some secondary sites, and thus incorporated in as well. Essentially, there is nothing you can’t do if you can find RSS-distributed video.

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MythTV on Design

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We’ve spent a lot of time, of late, talking about the excitement of the latest version of MythTV. But it is an exciting topic. Video under MythTV is especially important. On the DVR side of things, MythTV has significant attraction. But as a media center application for the playback of video files, the competing software packages change, to software like XBMC and Boxee.

In version 0.22, MythTV unveiled MythUI, which is a complete rewrite of the Myth user interface. New themes were released and several old ones modified. Last night, we did a series of screenshots to show off some of the theme magic available.

Terra(The New Default Theme)

Watch Recordings Screen Under Terra Theme
Watch Recordings Screen Under Terra Theme

Now, Terra shows off the options for a Watch Recordings menu displayed in a manner other than traditional list style, using a horizontal scrolling menu for each program on the DVR side.

But what about for watching videos? As we mentioned in our previous post, JAMU offers an automated method of getting metadata on video files based on their names. There was metadata support in MythTV before, but the inclusion of this new script and other frontend features greatly simplify it out of the ‘box’. A script already exists, but will likely be incorporated as part of version 0.23, that allows for recordings to be exported with metadata information to MythVideo.

A directory of TV show episodes with metadata under Terra Theme
A directory of TV show episodes with metadata under Terra Theme

If you enlarge the image, you will notice that JAMU has added the episode metadata, including description, to these episodes of St. Elsewhere. There is discussion of adding additional options for screenshots for MythVideo(the feature is there for Recordings). If you look at the above image, every episode is using a stock poster.

Graphite

Graphite is being shown off as another new theme for MythTV 0.22 which shows off several of the new features you can enjoy, namely posters and fanart in the Watch Recordings menus. If you note the picture below, you’ll see the ABC show Castle, has a poster, and each episode has an autogenerated screenshot.

Watch Recordings Menu under Graphite theme
Watch Recordings Menu under Graphite theme

The next two images show the background art available in this theme for shows. All of the art shown was imported by the JAMU script.

Daily Show Art Under Graphite Theme
Daily Show Art Under Graphite Theme
The Big Bang Theory Art under Graphite Theme
The Big Bang Theory Art under Graphite Theme

Here is the popup, with the extra art and metadata, for a movie we brought in, and a TV episode. It offers a lot of information, which can be used to sort videos by year, genre, season(if TV show), etc.

Single Video View in MythVideo
Single Video/Movie View in MythVideo
Single Video/TV Episode
Single Video/TV Episode

Here is an alternate display of a directory of movies under the Metallurgy theme, also a theme newly included into MythTV 0.22. As you can see, the automated process didn’t bring in posters for everything. This can be corrected manually, by entering in additional information to better identify the item.

MythVideo Gallery of Movies
MythVideo Gallery of Movies

All in all, MythTV offers an exciting new and themeable interface that brings it on par with XBMC and Boxee, products that are not in the same category as MythTV, but perform some of the same functions. MythTV still has a ways to go in some areas, however, but it has come a long way.

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We’re Going to be Trying Epix HD

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Image representing Epix as depicted in CrunchBase
Image via CrunchBase

Over the weekend, Epix HD launched. The network is a joint project of MGM, Paramount, and Lionsgate and offers some of their not-yet-on-DVD movies. One of the nice things is their website will offer on-demand 720p streaming to all subscribers.

Of course, Verizon FIOS is the only network offering the channel, which will cost $9.99 a month. Epix had hoped the channel would be on the standard tier. Meanwhile, to try to find out how many people are interested, Epix is offering 72-hour passes to anyone.

We don’t have FIOS. It would be a serious consideration if we could, considering our issues with our current provider. However, we can try out the service, as can you. We’ll be giving it a shot this week and will keep you posted.

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Video under MythTV

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MythTV itself is a Digital Video Recorder which records off of various television sources. To make it a complete media center, it also needs playback of video files and DVDs.

MythVideo is a plugin that handles all of your video needs. In 0.22, it is dramatically expanded with support for new metadata information, TV Series handling, Fanart, Banners, Screenshots, and a host of new browsing features.

The biggest change is that MythVideo now supports storage groups. The feature is still in a preview phase, but it means videos can be watched with zero configuration on the frontend. Under the older system. each frontend had its own video directory settings. Thus, if you wanted to share files from a central server, you needed to set up an NFS share.

We’ve been using the new system, which unfortunately doesn’t work for DVD isos, but otherwise works flawlessly. External players, such as mplayer or xine for unsupported file types also does not work. Both are planned for 0.23.

Metadata can be very important to media file storage. As of 0.22, MythVideo uses TheMovieDB as its primary movie grabber. It also includes support for TV series handling with fields for season, episode, and subtitle, and support for TheTVDB to fill in the information. To determine if an item is a movie or a TV program, it parses the filename.

In additional to searching within the interface, MythTV now includes JAMU. We’ve done some basic testing on JAMU, which stands for Just Another Metadata Updater. JAMU provides for mass updating and regular maintenance of associated graphics and text meta data. It can even reorganize the directory structure based on the metadata.

Check back soon, when we will be providing some screenshots off of our MythTV Frontend of it in action. We just need to organize our MythVideo directories so we can best demonstrate these features.

MythTV 0.22 Final to Be Released Next Week

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Terra Theme
Terra Theme

As you may know, MythTV 0.22 has gotten to  release candidates, but now, the team has announced the final version, barring any new critical issues, will be released next week.

Since the initial release candidate two weeks ago, more than 50 updates were submitted.

We’re not sure whether we like the new default theme in actual use, but it doesn’t show of the possibilities the new MythUI offers, and is visually appealing. Our biggest issue was that highlighted items on the new theme have a light box around them which does not contrast significantly.

We’ll be continuing to cover MythTV and the 0.22 release, discussing some of the tricks, tips, and issues we’ve come across.

The Future of Internet Video

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A server used for the My Home
Image via Wikipedia

We like Hulu. We think it is a great service, and like any services that offer good content at the wonderfully low-low price of free. However, Hulu is considering adding a premium product…where they could offer things they don’t offer now at a premium.

Some people, despite its free nature, don’t like Hulu. And it hasn’t exactly made a great deal of profit. Mark Cuban wrote today on the subject of Internet Video vs the Cable Company DVR. As the owner of HDNet, a television channel offered on cable, he may be biased though. But the fact that content providers, cable companies, and the other organizations involved just don’t get the possibilities is not one we can argue with.

Cuban makes the case for better cable hardware with better improved features and remote access so you can enjoy your programs on the go. Beyond that, there is also the network DVR, where the videos are stored on a cable company server, instead of in the house. The library of On-Demand programming offered by all carriers continues to increase.

Cuban makes the point that with the current limitations of Internet based video, cable may be the more popular option for the foreseeable future. At least, in that regard, we agree.  If you are paying for something, you should receive good quality service at a good price.