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Tag: Metadata

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Calibre and the E-Book

Calibre is an Ebook Management Platform. Originally started in 2006, it has grown, with a team of dedicated developers from a small project to get content onto a reader to myriad of options.

  • Library Management – Calibre manages e-books stored in it for you, including options to sort, tag, comment, etc. Supports the downloading of metadata.
  • E-Book Conversion – Supports all major formats(full list here) including EPUB and MOBI. The conversion program supports rescaling font sizes, automatic detection/creation of chapters/table of contents, and insertion of metadata at the start of the book.
  • Syncing to E-Book Readers – Supports a list of devices it can sync to(Full list here) and automatically chooses the best format for the device.
  • News Ripper – Downloads news from websites/RSS feeds, formats it into an e-book and sends it to the device. Supports full versions of articles, not just summaries. Pre-supported sites include the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, etc. You can create custom ‘recipes’ for other sites and use them, even upload them to share with others.
  • Built in E-Book Viewer
  • Content Server – Calibre supports acting as a web server to access your collection using a web browser. Supports email and mobile devices.

Now, this is great if you have an E-Book Reader. Let’s go back to our recent discussion of the Amazon Kindle, with Wi-Fi. Many papers are available for free online. Let’s take the Wall Street Journal, which does charge. The cost of an Amazon Subscription to the WSJ is $14.99 a month. The cost of getting the newspaper is $2.29 per week($9.16 a month) and online only at $1.99 per week(7.96 a month). Personally, while we think charging more on the Kindle is wrong, here’s a way to extract the information using your login and send it to your Kindle.

We did a little test of this feature, and picked a few of their over 200 English news sources(They have additional foreign language offerings). We were able to program it to autogenerate a few choice news sources and send them on a custom frequency to our device as long as Calibre was running in the background. Next, it seems to have a command-line interface, and we’ll have to see if it can run as a cron job on our server.

We have yet to test it, but according to the Calibre forums, the following should work…

ebook-convert <calibreroot>/resources/recipes/nytimes.recipe todays_nytimes.mobi

That should work if set up as a cron job, but e-book conversion, we gather, can be resource intensive. We’ll have more on these experiments later.

Either way, Calibre is available for PC, Mac, and Linux. Why not give it a try?

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Published on September 26, 2010
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Video under MythTV

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.

Published on October 31, 2009
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