Greetings all. This is just a short update. I had intended to have more of the libfoundation stuff done when disaster struck. This disaster came in the form of administering one of our NAS units which served 2 terabytes of movies, documentaries, music and more. Our NAS units (the US Robotics 2TB modules; these things are rocks) allow access to them only by IP/hostname/MAC address combinations. The NAS that had been online the longest (6 years not counting a week in 2007 moving from Ventura to San Francisco and about 48 hours moving from there to here (Las Vegas)) had collected addresses from machines long-dead…
continue reading "Of stupid moves that will lead to a better system, libfoundation and more…"

In this article:

* A new DVDMB C++ API

* To plug-in or not?

* To Mono or not?

* To Java or not?

continue reading "New directions for DVD Metabase: development odds and ends…"

This article is a profile on experiences I have had while being an administrator of an open source project. While some aspects of this have been published before, recent work in the world of proprietary software has highlighted in my mind a few of the more powerful aspects of living in a FOSS world that I am sure the proprietary software makers would prefer you not to embrace.

continue reading "FOSS: Freedom to explore, create and avoid intellectual speed-bumps"

In a nutshell, DVD Metabase is the combination of the tools in EZRip and those of DVD Metabase (originally DVD-DB). This toolset allows you to just about automatically populate a home theater server such as we use in our in-house video-on-demand system.

Simply inserting a DVD and running EZRip will scan the DVD and attempt a lookup of that DVD in our database. If not found it will rip as normal but if found it will rip all “interesting” tracks to proper names with its own directory structure ready for Freevo, Oxine, etc..

The client portion (EZRip) wraps HandBrake which is the best extraction tool that I have found for Linux plus it really takes advantage of multiple cores which yields me up to 250fps when encoding. Once configured anyone can use it and has at least a partial command line interface for automated hands-free operation, including the automatic selection of a default language track and subtitle set. This last bit can be really handy with foreign films such as anime. Also included is the source for the back-end DVD metadata XML-RPC server and database.

Here is my little home page for the toolset..

continue reading "EZRip is dead! Long live DVD Metabase…"

A few updates to share:
CMake Wizard 2.1: maint. release, patched the main template to enable the exit() method. Updated source is here.

EZRip is on the verge of release. To release it I gotta round off the documentation situation which is a constant reminder of how far this thing has come from the humble little ripper of old. In any event, the process of documenting everything has shaken out some bugfixes and to help distribute them to my QA dept I have a loose system rigged up where if you run updateezrip.py and the online version is newer than yours the new version is retrieved and installed. This is alpha quality. Also, due to a number of machines going to bust I needed to smooth out the EZRip install process. Now if you run jbcobb.net/bin/ezrip/getezrip.sh it will *attempt* to:
1. Create an ezrip folder
2. Download the latest HandBrake source and updateezrip.py from jbcobb.net
3. Install build libraries needed. This will fail miserably on non-Debian boxen.
4. Unpack, configure and build HandBrake.
5. Install latest EZRip froom JBCobb.net and perform minimal configuration.
This works on my box, would like to expand the script to work in other places. Nice thing is going from a single wget:

wget jbcobb.net/bin/ezrip/getezrip.sh

To a full working system in as little time as possible.

DVD Metabase final update: A handful of new metadata fields will be added prior to going gold at the same time of release of EZRip.

EZRipQt: For a variety of reasons I am creating a Qt/C++ version of EZRip. I personally still think that the command line version is faster and way more efficient even though it is written in an interpreted language but there are a few reasons I wanted to do this in C++ with a dedicated GUI. For one thing, C++ is the language I know the best and I am wanting to make some serious custom extensions to Oxine to add menu-driven DVD import, and easier-to-use data entry system for use by non-geeks.

LOTS of documentation. Also am wrestling w/SourceForge to get an account there so I don’t have to host it all myself. However the instant SourceForge becomes more work than its worth, out it goes. I have VCS, trouble ticket and wiki set up for this already.

Soon,
JeffC

Howdy, this is the author of DVD-DB and EZRip. I can assure you that I am not MIA, I have not been eaten by a pack of dogs, just busy. You know how it is. Also have been fighting a number of irritating bugs in EZRip not to mention the idiocy of (in a weak moment) allowing Vi to reformat the main Python file in EZRip, completely fouling the logic. But first:

• DVD-DB is now and hopefully forever more known as DVD Metabase. I changed it because I found another site that is acting as a DVD database but not for this kind of information. Regardless, the name was too similar and since I really had nothing to lose, I renamed it to something more in keeping with the nature of the data. I am in the process now of expunging it from the site and changing the name in available source. I will leave the smaller utility classes alone since the name at that level is pretty generic.
• By the end of this weekend I will have the rest of the metadata table population scripts online.
• Also, using examples from XML-RPC.org I mean to publish the proper XML-RPC interfaces to the back-end so that anyone can interact with it.
• I have come the a sad conclusion that as much as I love HandBrake for ripping it is brain-damaged WRT scanning the disc. I now have processed at least 20-30 discs from my personal collection where HandBrake segfaults (from 0.9.2 and including the latest version straight from Subversion) yet humble lsdvd reads all of the tracks perfectly. Now HandBrake may work better for some folks and in time they might fix the bugs (or if I run out of things to do I may take a swing at it and submit a patch), who knows. To account for this, there is a new config setting: EZRipConfig::scanWithLSDVD. Set this to 0 (default) and HandBrakeCLI will query the disc. Set it to 1 and lsdvd will be used.
• As mentioned above, part of EZRip got hosed and I am slowly piecing that logic back together. This also reinforces my need to finally pick a VCS and use it. I am still trying to decide if a distributed or conventional VCS makes more sense.
• Finally I have extended EZRip to scan a disc differently. The scan process I am referring to here is where you have a lot of strange tracks on a disc (multiple duplicate episodes on a TV series for instance or perhaps lots of special features) and you want to get a clue as to what they are w/o going through the whole rip process. Scan mode now will rip the first N chapters of each interesting track on the disc in low-quality mode to allow you to “sample” each video file to see if you want to use it or not. The number of chapters can be set by filter or track “type” so movies for instance can rip only the first chapter whereas sometimes you need two or three for a show to get to the title sequence.  Then in full rip mode, any quality/encoding measures you have selected are used.
• The old Target variable in EZRip has gone away to make room for a more reliable method of managing selected track types.
• Lots of bugs fixed.

That is all for now. The current EZRip is in test as I write this. If it passes all of my regression tests I will post a new version tonight. Same for DVD Metabase; no bugs to fix but need to extend the scripts to populate the peripheral metadata tables. I can’t wait to share this with the world because this thing is kicking some serious tail here in the lab…

Me to you

JeffC

With the sudden website move out of the way and only as damaged as expected (there will be the odd bad link for a while, mostly older stuff but if you see something please point it out to me), I turned my attention to the Linksys NSLU2 I acquired at LinuxWorld this year. The only real difference between this box and what anyone else would start with is that this was running OpenWRT. I used this for a year or so on a different device and I have to say its a *whole* lotta fun.

In this story I will show you how I converted a mild-mannered Linksys NSLU2 into an RTorrent Appliance. I can park this on a bookshelf someplace and anytime from anywhere I can scp a torrent file to that machine which will then download the requested file to the attached storage. In this case I installed Debian Etc to a 2G USB key, then plugged in the external storage, a Seagate 200G external drive. The finished product looks like this (EFF shirt is extra):

Sluggo and friends happily torrenting away...

continue reading "Converting a NSLU2 into an RTorrent appliance"

Hi gang. This will likely be the last post from this server. Have a lot to share when this comes back. Suddenly a new project starts, not one but three projects move forward, Bubba shows his or her upper limit, an instant server and more.

The impact here is that over the course of this weekend I am going to set up and move jbcobb.net over to a real headless box running Etch.

But first let me tell you about poor little Bubba and the perfect techno-storm of bugs…

continue reading "The day Bubba choked…."

Holy cow have things caught up with me and the many projects I have going on. For the longest time so many projects were able to run in a vacuum or with only minimal interaction. No more. Now it seems that everything is needing some aspect of everything, not to mention the need for process. The good news is I am going to wind up turning out and releasing a lot of tools and software in fairly short order. To whit:

continue reading "Tasks are multiplying like rabbits…."

After a lot of refocusing of priorities, the DVDDB release will be delayed for at least another few days. Lots of things have changed but I think for the better. As a one-man coding crew, I get done what I can when I have the time. The thing is, while not all of the stuff that is delaying release is needed now; however when it is needed I fear that I will not have the time to do it so and ounce of prevention seems prudent. The upside to this is that the API’s will be more stable on the back-end, the DVDDB will be far more secure and easier to manage and the whole project will be better-tested end-to-end.

continue reading "Last minute details…."