New in the Wiki: Alx9r's Sample Setup

[Todd]

I find your wiki documentation very helpful.  Have you got the SPDIF-OUT/OPT working?  Do you have 5.1 surround sound?

[alx9r]

Hi Todd,
I'm glad it's helping you.  I don't have 5.1 working yet because I haven't received my receiver yet.  I've got a Marantz sr7500 5.1 and 7.1 capable receiver on order.  It should arrive in about a week.  I don't expect it to be any more difficult to set up than the TV and remote.  Once I have it set up I'll post the setup and tweaks I made to get it working. 

If you look at my system diagram (if you haven't already checked it out) you can see how I'm intending to connect the receiver and speakers.  I'm hoping that configuration is going to work.  I'm planning to use SPDIF to output audio to the receiver.  I do have the SPDIF-OUT/OPT breakout already, but won't have any component that accepts SPDIF input to test whether that it's working until I get my sr7500.

Cheers,

Alex

[alx9r]

I find your wiki documentation very helpful.  Have you got the SPDIF-OUT/OPT working?  Do you have 5.1 surround sound?

Hi Todd,
I do have the SPDIF-OUT/OPT working now.  I can hear the surround sound and the display on the SR7500 confirms that 5.1 surround is arriving digitally and in either DTS or dolby surround depending on the content. 

One oddity that I have found is that the audio of some stereo-only media (i.e. media that doesn't have any surround sound encoding) seems to be routed through analog line-out instead of SPDIF.  Gladly the SR7500 auto-detects the source and switches accordingly, so it is not a big deal in practice.

HTH,

Alex

[bulek]

Hi,

I'd love to read more about how you setup torrents and podcasts to be usable under LMCE.

Thanks in advance,

regards,

Bulek.

[alx9r]

Hi Bulek,
I'd say both the way I'm handling torrents and podcasts is at the experimental stage.  Both schemes work, but they're rather haywire so I didn't really want to post the schemes as "solutions" yet. 

Really what this applicaiton needs is headless daemons running on the core for managing torrent and http downloads both manually added and using rss feeds.  I haven't found such a thing for http downloads (which could handle podcasts) but Deluge seems to be promising for torrents.  From what i've read Deluge's rss plugin is still under construction and doesn't work at all in the headless configuration right now.

So what am I using in the meantime?
 * Podcasts - using my windows laptop (I'm using WinAmp as the podcast downloader right now) with the podcast download destination mapped to the samba shares on the core.  It works fine until I take my laptop away from the house with me.
 * Torrents - uTorrent running under wine with the WebUI.  I can manage torrents from the WebUI, but rss feeds still have to be administered from the KDE desktop.

Hopefully that helps a bit.  Once I get good solutions working I'll post them in detail.

Regards,

Alex

[bulek]

Hi Bulek,
I'd say both the way I'm handling torrents and podcasts is at the experimental stage.  Both schemes work, but they're rather haywire so I didn't really want to post the schemes as "solutions" yet. 

Really what this applicaiton needs is headless daemons running on the core for managing torrent and http downloads both manually added and using rss feeds.  I haven't found such a thing for http downloads (which could handle podcasts) but Deluge seems to be promising for torrents.  From what i've read Deluge's rss plugin is still under construction and doesn't work at all in the headless configuration right now.

So what am I using in the meantime?
 * Podcasts - using my windows laptop (I'm using WinAmp as the podcast downloader right now) with the podcast download destination mapped to the samba shares on the core.  It works fine until I take my laptop away from the house with me.
 * Torrents - uTorrent running under wine with the WebUI.  I can manage torrents from the WebUI, but rss feeds still have to be administered from the KDE desktop.

Hopefully that helps a bit.  Once I get good solutions working I'll post them in detail.

Regards,

Alex

Thanks for info. I think we could manage podcasts with simple Perl scripts or other that exists on Internet. The trick is how to enter proper metadata into LMCE media database...

Any ideas ? Do we have some templates already that would be useful for running app in background ?

Regards,

Bulek.

[alx9r]

The trick is how to enter proper metadata into LMCE media database...

I've found this to be more of an issue with torrents than with podcasts.  I've noticed that most (perhaps all) podcasts that I've downloaded include an adequate amount of meta tag data to keep the media library from getting too messy. 

Rips of TV shows that I download from torrents on the other hand don't come packaged with any meta data.  It would be nice to have some way of automatically tagging, say The Simpsons, with the appropriate genre and thumbnail automatically when it gets downloaded every sunday night.  I was planning eventually to write a script that creates appropriate .id3 files for each torrent that is downloaded.

[samuelmukoti]

The trick is how to enter proper metadata into LMCE media database...

I've found this to be more of an issue with torrents than with podcasts.  I've noticed that most (perhaps all) podcasts that I've downloaded include an adequate amount of meta tag data to keep the media library from getting too messy. 

Rips of TV shows that I download from torrents on the other hand don't come packaged with any meta data.  It would be nice to have some way of automatically tagging, say The Simpsons, with the appropriate genre and thumbnail automatically when it gets downloaded every sunday night.  I was planning eventually to write a script that creates appropriate .id3 files for each torrent that is downloaded.

Very nice,

I was looking into doing some scripts aswell, wanted to automaticaly import downloaded TV Shows and Music videos into the database - and kept putting it off coz i thought i had to import it into the SQL database too, but after reading your post Alex, its going to be simpler.

I had a whole bunch of media nicely cataloged in XBMC and Boxee, and want to write some scripts that will export the metadata into id3 files - this should also be quite easily possible.

Question is on cover-art.  Any ideas?  How were you looking at dealing with that.  I could easily search and download cover-art for various media - but if i want to go the id3 route, how do i store the cover art so LMCE will pick it up?

Thanks

[sambuca]

alx9r,

Have you looked at mldonkey http://mldonkey.sourceforge.net/Main_Page ? It's been a while since I looked at it, but I think it supports downloading bittorrent and http downloads. Don't think it can handle RSS though...

It uses a remote protocol to allow the client to communicate with the daemon (it's headless). It also has a telnet interface...
There exist many different clients http://mldonkey.sourceforge.net/Gui. I suppose the protocol or the telnet interface could be used from within LMCE to start downloads of different kinds.

It can also run a command when a file download is done (i.e. LMCE sql insert)

Regards,
sambucs

[alx9r]

I was looking into doing some scripts aswell, wanted to automaticaly import downloaded TV Shows and Music videos into the database - and kept putting it off coz i thought i had to import it into the SQL database too, but after reading your post Alex, its going to be simpler.

The concept of the script I had envisioned is quite simple:
 * create a .id3 file with appropriate metatags and name it accordingly for the newly file. (i.e. for a file called The.Simpsons.S20E04.PDTV.XviD-LOL.avi create The.Simpsons.S20E04.PDTV.XviD-LOL.avi.id3)
 * run UpdateMedia for the folder in which the new file resides (e.g. sudo -u root /usr/pluto/bin/UpdateMedia -d \"/home/public/data/videos/Hitachi_HDP72505 (sda2)-CORE [33]/The Simpsons\")

Question is on cover-art.  Any ideas?  How were you looking at dealing with that.  I could easily search and download cover-art for various media - but if i want to go the id3 route, how do i store the cover art so LMCE will pick it up?

In my experience LinuxMCE picks up id3 tag cover art from the .id3 files the same as it would if it were an embedded id3 tag in an MP3 file.

[alx9r]

Have you looked at mldonkey http://mldonkey.sourceforge.net/Main_Page ? It's been a while since I looked at it, but I think it supports downloading bittorrent and http downloads. Don't think it can handle RSS though...

I haven't.  I'll take a look at it though.  RSS support is critical.  Otherwise someone has to manually add a torrent for each new episode.

[sambuca]

My curiosity got the best of me, and I did some googling 

I found a script which will receive RSS and submit the torrents for download to mldonkey. http://xyzabc.xy.ohost.de/
Most likey someone can create a similar script to do the same for podcasts.

I haven't tried this setup, and have not tried deluge either. Just wanted to let you know of a possible alternative. And I think from what I have seen of mldonkey, that it allows for  easy integration into lmce, it having a command line interface, a remote protocol and more. Then again, don't know what Deluge is capable of..

regards,
sambuca

[Dave89]

Thanks for posting your sample set up. 
I want to build a LinuxMCE hybrid core machine.  The problem is that many of the components you used are no longer available.  That is also the case with what I find on the Wiki.
How do I know which components to use?  Also, should I use 710, or wait until 810 is out?
Thanks for your help.

[alx9r]

Thanks for posting your sample set up. 
I want to build a LinuxMCE hybrid core machine.  The problem is that many of the components you used are no longer available.  That is also the case with what I find on the Wiki.
How do I know which components to use?  Also, should I use 710, or wait until 810 is out?

Hi Dave,
The problem you describe is, I think, common to most new users -- it certainly was a challenge for me when I was getting into LinuxMCE.  I am currently working on a hardware selection guide to hopefully get newbies going in the right direction.  It would be great if you would be able to test the guide out with your fresh mind once it is ready and provide some feedback.  I've got part of the mainboard selection guide complete already.  I'll post it once the first draft is complete. 

Regards,

Alex

[Dave89]

Alex,
That sounds great!  I would be more than happy to use your guide and provide feedback.  I am well versed in WindowsXP and am using the latest Ubuntu version of Linux on a laptop and can navigate around pretty well with that.  While I am no tech genius, I do know my way around a computer.

I saw that there were some complete systems except for the AMD processor and RAM recommended on the Wiki.  Those were manufactured by MSI and available at NewEgg.  However, they have been discontinued. 
Do you recommend a system like that, or building one from the bottom up?
I would like to begin working with LinuxMCE soon, so let me know when you get your guide completed.
Dave