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Just to let everybody know, installing 1004 did nothing to resolve the issue. After adding the drives to lmce, they continued with the same behavior of appearing/disappearing from all orbiters.
Then I figured maybe if I formatted them as ext3, it would make a difference. I proceeded to format 2 out of the 3 drives and that seems to have resolved my issue. I don't know exactly why them being in xfs gave me troubles, but this is what solved it for me.
Thanks for the help.

Yeah, prior to installing 1004 I was using rtorrent. While I did like it, I'm finding that deluge is a little better. It's made from scratch as a client/server so there's no need for screen. You can access it remotely either with the gtk app or a web ui. And there are tons of cool features. The console-based interface isn't as good as rtorrent's, at least for me. But all the other pros outweigh the cons for me so far.

What would be worthwhile... is dredging up this thread.
http://forum.linuxmce.org/index.php/topic,8442.0.html

I don't use torrents and have attached myself to other projects... but SOMEONE needs to make this. Seems a very easy entry into real dev work.

Yeah, I remember that thread. If I get to a point where my system is stable and I have free time, I'll try to devote some effort into this.

Ok, I feel really stupid now. I just installed 1004 (because of unrelated issues I had with 810) and tried to install deluge again. And I found out that the deluge team has a ppa repository for ubuntu with the latest version available. It was as simple as
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:deluge-team/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install deluge

I don't even think this is worth a wiki page. Am I wrong?

Please understand fellas, the hard drives are mounted AS NEEDED by autofs. The UpdateMedia system understands this, and it continually scans the connected filesystems, so you'll see the disks periodically mount and unmount.

-Thom

Yes, this was explained to me by l3top on IRC the other day. That's not the issue here as there is no problem accessing the drives via shell. What is going on is that the symbolic links that point to the correct directory in the drive do not appear on the orbiter and are in fact missing from the database. Every time UpdateMedia runs, it updates PK_File 7875 from the File table to point to either one of the two hdds.

Hey,

I noticed a bit the same when I added a 1TB to my system.
My monitoring sees the disk mostly as 'down', and from time to time it was there.

For the moment I removed it again since i didn't trust the situation...
So I certainly will follow up this topic for the results...  

Hey Brononi, it seems to me we're having different problems. I guess I forgot to add an extremely important piece of information in my original post. The drives themselves are always mounted and available for direct access (i.e. via shell).
The problem lies in lmce's database not recognizing them even though they're working normally.
Another thing I forgot to mention is that the sdc1 drive is 100% empty. All it has is the lmce directory structure.
sdb1 on the other hand has all kinds of stuff in all kinds of naming schemes. But the files themselves all (at least the 100 or so that I manually checked) get recognized just fine. It's the symbolic link created at /home/public/data/videos that gets this odd behavior, thus making it impossible to navigate the system by filename through the orbiter.

Now, I know navigating by filename is not optimal but my media is not tagged as of yet and from what I can gather, for TV Shows it seems to be the only way to go. Since my TV Show recordings are nicely organized in their respective folder, navigating by filename is a breeze for me.

About your issue, did you test that drive on another system? Is it working properly?

I think I finally got enough information on this to open up a thread and see if I can get some help. Here's a description of the issue I'm encountering:
On any MD, when I go Media > Video, only 1 out of my 2 hard drives appear at any time. And they switch back and forth.

Let's go a bit more in-depth about my setup:
I'm running 0810 final.
I have 1 core and 1 MD.
All HDDs are plugged in to the core internally.
There are 2 hard drives configured on the system (apart from the OS hdd).
sdb1 - 2TB SATA Hard Drive known as device #46. This device's name is "2000"
sdc1 - 1.5TB SATA Hard Drive known as device #45. This device's name is "1500"

The system switches between them every 2 minutes.
I've tracked this down to the UpdateMedia execution. Every time UpdateMedia is run, they switch places (i.e. 1500 disappears and 2000 appears).
Here is an interesting excerpt of the UpdateMedia execution log during which 2000 appears and 1500 disappears. http://pastebin.com/b1feFdQQ
In it you can see that it tries to re-use PK_File 7875 for 2000. I can confirm that, prior to this execution, this same record on the File table of the pluto_media db referred to the 1500 symlink and that it got updated to refer to 2000, thus leaving 1500 out of the db.

Without knowing how UpdateMedia works (or perhaps some other lmce component I'm not aware of), I feel like there's not much else I can do to find out what's going on here. It seems that it gets the information (PK_File 7875) from some sort of id3 file but I don't know how that works.
If someone could enlighten me on how this stuff works, perhaps I can find out what's going on.

Thanks in advance!
ps. I know I talked to some people on the IRC channel about this before but time is really tight right now so I figure maybe the forum is a more appropriate tool this time.

Your medibuntu repo is fine, the gpg error is telling you the signing key is missing, it will not affect the repo.  The key is added to the core during installation, it must not be included in /usr/pluto/bin/Diskless_CreateTBZ.sh or it would be automatically applied to the MD as well. 

I left the original libxine2 version linked in the post in case anyone had problems with the updated version.

libavcodec52 will not be immediately available to you through any intrepid repos I know of.  I apparently neglected to include the dependencies (new libav build).    I have updated the first post with the latest libav dependencies.  Let me know how it goes and if you have any more missing dependencies.

J.

Awesome, I'll try to install it tonight. Should I expect a difference in performance between the version I have installed and this new version?

Do an apt-get install mplayer.

That should pull the codec you are looking for.

I think I now know what the problem might be. the medibuntu repo fails on apt-get update. Something about GPG verification failing. On the core it goes fine but on the MD it fails. I'll check it out when I get home.
Thanks for the help!

Updated the archive in the first post to include a newer libxine2 from the yavdr ppa recompiled for intrepid.  For best results use the nvidia 285 driver with it.  Merry Christmas and happy media playing!

J.

Just as a feedback, I tried to install the current package linked in the first post and was unable to resolve its dependencies. It requires libavcodec52 which was nowhere to be found on the repos configured on my MD. I was able to find libavcodec51 but not 52. I was also able to find libavcodec52 on the linuxmce jaunty repo but was afraid to add that repo to my sources.list and break something else.
I then proceeded to install the previous version still linked in the original post and everything went smoothly.
720p MKV playback is MUCH better now, with almost no framerate issues. Prior to installing this it was unwatchable.
Video is still a little dark but it might be an issue with the actual file I'm testing with. It's an old file and I don't remember if it looked good on my windows box or not.
I'll test 1080p playback tonight and report back with my findings.
If help is needed to setup a repo for this package, I can try and help, as it is too helpful not to be easily available.

My work has taken up my time at present, so it is on pause. But my notes from what I am working on are on the wiki, and the code is in SVN under the LinuxMCE-1004 branch.

The driver itself is to be a hybrid device sending IRBase events for buttons (so they can be remapped dynamically), while presenting a joystick and a pointing device when the visible screen type is G. Another example of how to start this, is the USB Game Pad device (which instead of reading Wii Remote packets, it deals with decoding event input device packets.)

-Thom

OK. I'm setting up my first core as of right now an am still wrapping my head around LinuxMCE's structure so I don't think I'd be of much help at this point. Once I have a relatively stable environment, I'll try to get around to coding something simple for LinuxMCE. If I'm successful with that, I'll try and help you with this.
Thanks!

Hey tschak909, I see you updated the wiki in september stating you're writing the base driver. Are you still working on this? I'm available to help, though I've never coded anything for LinuxMCE.

Thanks!

I don't remember having this exact behavior but when I tried my first install, ubiquity wouldn't show up because I was hooked up to a plasma TV and it couldn't handle the resolution. When plugged into a CRT monitor, everything went fine.

I'm running 10.04 as my main LMCE, most things work absolutely fine. But - it's still alpha code, so anything could happen. But by doing a proper backup before doing any upgrades would take care of that. An of course your mileage will vary, I can only talk about my setup on my hardware.

/Joakim

Great. If this continues to give me headaches, I'll try 10.04. Thanks for the help.

Hmm, you're in for a re-install my friend. By adding the Jaunty (9.04) repos you messed up you installation seriously. You can only use repos with the same version as Kubuntu (8.10 or 10.04). With mixed versions you'll get all dependencies going crazy...

After a re-install, I go the compile route, if you cannot find a repo with a back-ported or retrofitted torrent package. And do document your solution on the Wiki, that way we all improve. ;-)

/Joakim

About the repos, I only added it in order to install the packages I needed and would remove them after being done with it, so I don't think I would ruin my installation so seriously. But since I messed everything up I'm doing the reinstall anyway.
btw, I don't think I've mentioned it but I'm using the 810 final version.
I've been thinking about going with 1004, but I don't have a lot of free time at home and the wiki says that it might drive me insane. Is it *that* unstable or has it developed a bit since then? I'm able to fix stuff on my own but time restrictions are what made me choose 810.

I'll definitely add it to the wiki. There is an article about using wine to run uTorrent but that's a no-go for me. I've never been able to use wine with much success and I'd like to give linux clients a try.

As for the python upgrade, was anybody ever successful in upgrading it to 2.6?

Thanks for the help!