Transclusioning Images without permission is bad, mmmkay?
Why do people think that it is ok to steal my bandwidth to host images for them? I guess this internet thing must be free.
Another dork thought it was a good idea to use an image off my website in their forum profile. http://forum.dzmusique.com/discussion-generale/se-separer-a-cuase-du-voile-t1298.75.html
Not only that, but it happened to be a 1280x1360px image that was being sized down to 100×100 by the forum, so each page hit was 350kb of data off my server. Thanks dude, how about instead you get a 680byte .gif called “i-suck-balls.gif”
For those interested, the following code block is responsible for this. Thanks apache and mod_rewrite:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} habboxforum\.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} forum\.dzmusique\.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/images/i-suck-balls.gif [NC]
ReWriteRule .*\.(gif|jpg|png|jpeg)$ http://www.ub3rgeek.net/images/i-suc
k-balls.gif [L]
Why the computer should think for you.
I am tired of thinking for the computer. So instead of having to learn the gritty irritating useless internal details about every single piece of software I need to use I think it makes more sense to have a set of sensible defaults that work for as much of the user base as possible and then if need be allow customization away from the defaults to encompass the rest of your potential users.
A few (4?) years ago I wrote a RSS feed reader because I wanted to think for the computer and didn’t like any of the readers out there at the time. Similarly I have found myself writing things instead of using software that is out there for trivial tasks because the software that was out there was too infuriating, or complex, or just broken by design.
Working, as I do now, in an environment that needs to scale beyond that of the typical open source geek I find the short-sighted-ness of much of the community depressing. So much otherwise good software is written to ‘scratch an itch’ and is only engineered to work in the author’s basement. Scaling to a million users and many tens to hundreds of megabits/sec of traffic in a lot of cases is a huge headache where we have to work around shortcoming after shortcoming.
As such I’ve started to look for services that do most if not all of the work for me that I can just tap into and think less. The front page of www.ub3rgeek.net is a perfect example. That is 30 or 40 lines of python using the FriendFeed API to aggregate all the various stuff I do on the internet down into one easily manageable stream of data. I don’t have to think about sorting the RSS feeds, or tracking down the links, I just parse some standardized markup from FriendFeed and I am done.
More software needs to be written with the understanding that the user doesn’t want to have to think, that’s why we use the computer.
PlayStation 3 with MediaTomb on Linux and OpenBSD
I have posted a few journal entries on this subject, but this page is here to be sort of a more general overview. There is some detailed information in these posts if you are interested.
Nat Type 3
I run an OpenBSD router, and some port forwarding needs to be done to make sure that the PlayStation 3 can properly communicate with the internet. I have verified the following works for WarHawk, including voice chat, as well as the PlayStation Store, and the voice chat built into the XMB.
Allow Outbound (only necessary in some cases with extremely restrictive firewall rulesets)
TCP: 80, 443, 5223 and UDP: 3478, 3479.
Port Forward inbound
TCP: 9293 and UDP: 3658
TCP/9293 is the port for Remote Play, and 3658 is for other users to connect to you. If you do not forward 3658 you will get the dreaded NAT Type 3.
Media sharing with MediaTomb
Since MediaTomb is the only Linux UPnP media server that I have found that can do transcoding I have been using it for some time now. It is highly configurable and fairly stable. I tend to track the SVN version fairly closely, but now that 0.11.0 is out the transcoding features are available to anyone. Most of the new transcoding features are really well documented on the MediaTomb site, so I won’t reproduce my entire config here, but my transcoding stuff looks like:
<transcoding enabled="yes">
<mimetype-profile-mappings>
<transcode mimetype="video/quicktime" using="vlc-sh"/>
<transcode mimetype="video/x-matroska" using="vlc-sh"/>
<transcode mimetype="video/mp2p" using="ffmpeg-sh"/>
<transcode mimetype="video/ogg" using="ffmpeg-sh"/>
<transcode mimetype="video/mp4" using="ffmpeg-sh"/>
<transcode mimetype="video/avi" using="ffmpeg-avi"/>
</mimetype-profile-mappings>
<profiles>
<profile name="ffmpeg-sh" enabled="yes" type="external">
<mimetype>video/mpeg</mimetype>
<accept-url>no</accept>
<first-resource>yes</first>
<agent command="/staff/mernisse/bin/ffmpeg-tr" arguments="%in %out"/>
<buffer size="6144000" chunk-size="131072" fill-size="2048000"/>
</agent></profile>
<profile name="ffmpeg-avi" enabled="yes" type="external">
<mimetype>video/mpeg</mimetype>
<accept -url>no</accept>
<first-resource>yes</first>
<agent command="/staff/mernisse/bin/ffmpeg-tr" arguments="%in %out"/>
<buffer size="6144000" chunk-size="131072" fill-size="2048000"/>
<avi-fourcc-list mode="ignore">
<fourcc>XVID</fourcc>
<fourcc>DIVX</fourcc>
<fourcc>DX50</fourcc>
<fourcc>WVC1</fourcc>
</avi>
</agent></profile>
<profile name="vlc-sh" enabled="yes" type="external">
<mimetype>video/mpeg</mimetype>
<accept-url>yes</accept>
<first-resource>yes</first>
<agent command="/staff/mernisse/bin/vlc-tr" arguments="%in %out"/>
<buffer size="6144000" chunk-size="131072" fill-size="2048000"/>
</profile>
</profiles>
</transcoding>
Some notes about that config:
- I transcode MP4 – You may not have to if your MP4 files are all playable on the PS3, I would try it out without first and then transcode if necessary. I have more files that don’t work than files that do.
- Audio transcoding doesn’t work right now on the PS3 – A number of weird things that the PS3 does is keeping this from working, hopefully the MediaTomb guys will nail it and make it work, it sounds like the on the horizon ‘built in transcoding’ might fix this issue, but that is still a bit off.
The MacBook bites it
So last week I get to work and the MacBook’s LCD backlight doesn’t turn on. An trek to the Apple Store confirms that it is in fact broken and not something loose that they could fix in the store. So they tell me to go home, back it up and call AppleCare so I can get a prepaid shipping container and label to send the thing back in. The good news — Ubuntu 7.10 appears to have hfsplus support built in so I just booted the MacBook in Firewire Target mode (hold t down while you power the thing on) and was able to copy all my crap off.
I called AppleCare and amazingly was spared most of the usual tech support pain. They looked me up in their system and saw that I had in fact seen a “Genius” and opened me up a case so I could return the unit for service. All told I was without the laptop for a week.
Monday – Go to Apple Store, call Apple Care.
Tuesday – Receive prepaid shipping carton, pack MacBook.
Wednesday – Schedule pickup with DHL, carton ships.
Thursday – Apple gets, repairs and ships my MacBook
Friday – Receive Doortag — This kind of sucks, I hate door tags, I really wish people would stop assuming that no one works and is home all the time.
Monday – Receive MacBook.
All in all a good experience, Kinda wish the Retail Store was a little less useless but I can understand that they may not be stocked for such things.
Fixing Kruft
This internet thing is really taking off. A short 11 years ago I found my first mp3 files, this new format along side the Real Media .rm files of the day on a bootleg Nine Inch Nails site. I spent hours dowloading these 3 and 4 meg 128k mp3 files of albums I couldn’t afford, over a 14,400bps (no K, nor M for all you web 2.0 generation kiddies) dial-up link. Waiting literally HOURS for each file. At some point in the early 2000′s my mp3 collection broke 20GB and I was forced to buy an even bigger hard drive just for my media, because Windows, Games, and my mp3 files just were getting to cramped and too hard to backup on my one internal 30GB hard drive.
Then came video. My media server swelled from 30G to 182G (6×36.4G FC hard drives RAID5) to 250G to 690G (4×250 RAID5). Now, my video collection has broken 400GB and I’ve moved up to a 1.5T (3x750GB RAID5) RAID array.
I guess instead of deleting things, I just decided I will continue to grow my storage capacity.
Pictures for the interested are over at Gallery -> Everyday Everything -> Equipment Pictures -> Apollo (1.5T Array Build), and for anyone who has a Tyan Tiger MP (AMD 790-MP, S2460) motherboard who needs to figure where the hell Tyan hid the docs so you can plug in your front panel LEDs, the pinout refs are in the user docs at ftp://ftp.tyan.com/manuals/m_S2460_103.pdf or you can find them attached to this post (if Tyan moves / finally deletes them)
Now, hopefully I can go back to not having to fight with computers at home for a while. I have so stopped enjoying it as much as I used to. I guess that’s the drawback of turning your hobby into a profession.
catch up if you can
The last week or so has been pretty crazy. I booked my travel for my England/Scotland trip on Sunday, so I will be flying from ROC to EDI on 27 Oct, and then back from LHR to ROC on 3 Nov — just in time to vote in this year’s presidential election. I also converted one of my laptops to use dm-crypt for /home. Clearly this is not perfect and if someone wants to come and snatch the laptop while it’s on and snarf a copy of the RAM to find the key they’ll get the data, but that is a smaller subset of people than who would be able to get data off the machine without encryption. If you use Ubuntu of a recent version, I found the community docs here helpful. The system prompts me for a passphrase at boot now, all automagically. A real testament to the Ubuntu guys and all the work they do.
I have also been playing around with the new release of mediatomb and have been futzing with the new fourcc features to try to get the largest subset of avi’s working on my PS3 that I can — it doesn’t detect the audio type so there are still some that don’t work, and there is still that freaky glitch where Dattebayo encoded fansubs either don’t play at all or freeze after a few seconds. My PS3 transcoding profile now looks something like this:
<profile name="ffmpeg-avi" enabled="yes" type="external">
<mimetype>video/mpeg</mimetype>
<avi -fourcc-list mode="ignore">
<fourcc>XVID</fourcc>
<fourcc>DIVX</fourcc>
<fourcc>DX50</fourcc>
<fourcc>WVC1</fourcc>
</avi>
<accept -url>no</accept>
<agent command="/staff/mernisse/bin/ffmpeg-tr" arguments="%in %out"/>
<buffer size="6144000" chunk-size="131072" fill-size="2048000"/>
</profile>
So basically I transcode any AVI files other than DiVX 4, 5 XViD and VC1 video streams. I will have to adjust this a bit but until I find a command line app that can read the fourcc code without needing X11, that’s going to be somewhat tricky I think, it would be nice if they offered the ability to filter by filename / pathname regexes as well, maybe I’ll open a feature request.
In other news (related to the PS3 and mediatomb because that’s what I use to watch this stuff since I’m too cheap to pay for cable/sat) the Formula 1 season started last weekend. I can’t wait to see how this season turns out. The three-way grudge match between Alonso, Räikkönen, and Hamilton will be killer to watch, not to mention the up and coming challanges from the Red Bull & Toro Rosso teams as well as Honda and Super Aguri. Another exciting year begins!
Goodbye GoDaddy
So, for a while I’ve been less than impressed with GoDaddy. Not withstanding their asinine behavior suspending names at the drop of a hat without informing the registrant, their website is utter crap, cluttered and unusable. Since my domain name is about to expire, I have started the process to transfer it to gandi.net — a european registrar that is much friendlier, with a much nicer and easier to use webiste. So please forgive any whackyness over the next day or so, hopefully the transfer will go smoothly and nothing will break.
Back to watching Ukie play Super Smash Brothers Brawl!
Finishing up the checklist
I have been meaning to finish moving the essential services off my home DSL line for some time now. Unfortunately I’m out on the fringes now as opposed to when I was living at Chateau Square where I had superb DSL service so now the DSL is somewhat less than reliable. As such I’ve moved most of the stuff that I use daily or really rely on over to imladris, the machine I co-locate but because I have a somewhat complex e-mail setup, I have left that alone. Well over the last few weeks the DSL has gotten worse and I’m contemplating switching to a different service. The downside is that as an employee of the phone company I get some perks with my service, such as a static IP, which I will NOT be getting from the ‘other guys’ — so I have to have all the important stuff out of here before I move.
Right now my mail is copying over to the colo box, and once it is done I think that will be everything that I need to move.
If the DSL was faster out here, this would be easier.
Heh.
Silly things amuse me, but global is the future.
I’ve been a Sprint PCS customer for 7 years, ever since I heard Emmanuel Goldstein on Off The Hook talk about this new “digital” cellphone tech. Their service has always been outstanding, clear and reliable. Their customer service has always been good to me, but I admit I have heard some horror stories from friends about botched bills, messed up service, lost replacement phones, etc. Of course, their service is based on the CDMA technology, which is an all-digital cellular telephone system that unfortunately is used… in the United States… and not really anywhere else. There are a few carriers in Canada, but service is spotty at best, and roaming charges are just scary. Japan uses a CDMA standard, but it is not compatible with the US standard.
Today I finally cancelled my account with Sprint, as I have switched over to T-Mobile. The only real reason is because T-Mobile uses GSM. GSM is the Global Standard for Mobile communications, most countries these days use GSM, according to the GSMA, the association that promotes GSM, over 212 countries and 2 billion people use GSM phones. It is probably most famous in the US for coming up with SMS, the Short Message Service that most people these days know as ‘txting’. But the big draw for me is that I can take my GSM Blackberry nearly anywhere in the world and at the very least be able to make voice calls and send and receive SMS messages. This is literally as easy as switching out the little SIM card from the back of my phone. I already have a O2 SIM, which is good for service in the UK and most amusingly a UK phone number.
I guess I’m most excited about finally getting to travel. I really really hope I can make this a regular thing. This is such a wide wonderful world, it would be such a shame to die without seeing any of it. If I can manage to visit the UK in 2008, I’d like to see Ireland in 2009. It would be rocking to get to see Japan, but that is a level of culture shock that might just drive me insane!
History is important, change is good too!
Many years ago (circa 2002) I had a little website with two copies of b2 running on it. I had hacked the crap out of one of them to make a dynamically generated news page (archive.org link), the other was running as sort of a more journally setup. I have been meaning to import this data into wordpress ever since I moved from b2 but have been too lazy to actually make it work. So some hacking on the old b2 RSS2 engine enabled me to import ~108 posts from my distant internet past.
It’s cute to see how much I’ve grown the fuck up.
So to celebrate I went ahead and found a new theme for wordpress. It’s cute, kinda digg-esque. I’m not sure if I like it more than the old one so we’ll see how it goes and maybe I’ll go back. (if anyone actually reads the site, not the rss feed comments would be welcome!)
Sundays, and how I suck at this internet thing…
So it is technically Monday morning now and as seems to be the case I’m fucking wide awake and dicking around doing things that probably could wait until later. Like uploading images into the gallery, and updating this silly little journal of mine that from what I can tell only a few people ever actually read. I have slowly been picking up this social internet stuff, getting accounts at linkedin, facebook and even twitter! I am not sure that any of this is better than good old IRC and e-mail in my screen session that I can ssh to from anywhere on the planet, but alas it seems the world is moving along.
I am finally getting over this stupid coldthing that has been messing me up over the last week which means I can stop swilling down NyQuil like it is water… which is kind of a shame, for the NyQuil coma is precious and dear, even if it makes waking up neigh on unbearable. Most of the mates at work seem to be over the hump of this latest winter menace and I think my friend Nina and her son are doing better as well, she seemed very unwell last time I saw her and the poor boy had a bit of the sniffles too. I think the best thing would be for this damned winter thing to end… if we can even call this schizophrenic season we’re having winter.
The first week of shovelglove is over and I have to admit it is a fantastic system. It hurts, it tires me out, it gets me sweating and thrashing around like a dork and yet for some reason I actually look forward to doing it. I don’t quite understand it but I feel like I am accomplishing something useful and I actually look forward to spending time doing it. Hopefully that means I will continue doing it.
And I miss my poor RX-7, sitting all alone at home. It doesn’t help that I still have another 200 or so miles left on the break in period on the new engine in the Kia. It has been very emotionally trying not getting to use the entire throttle or RPM range on the car. Nothing relaxes and de-stresses me like the sound of a lightweight engine spinning at 7000 RPMs or more. Not to mention carving freeway on / off ramps at 2x their ‘rated’ speeds. And I probably could use some of that good de-stressing.
So the plan is to spend a week in the UK this fall with some of the boys, culminating with a live Shpongle show. Should be a good time on many many many different levels, not the least of which getting to finally leave this country for a bit and see what it is like out there, elsewhere on this little blue marble we call home. I think this Mark Twain quote is sufficiently cliche’ to sum up how I feel about this:
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”
–Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad (1869)
As one of my friends mjw seems to say occasionally “hope on top”.
***mernisse opens his hand, showing his soul as it sparkles and brightens.
Cars, Phones and bitching.
So the Kia is over at Dorschel Kia getting a new engine, and a new set of front tires, and an alignment. So far I have been thrilled with the service I have received from the dealer so I have no fear of the outcome, though being without a car is very strange.
At the same time I’m playing with the Blackberry 7100t that I bought last week, it is an amusing little device and so far I am happy with the service. I’ve used barry and msynctool to synch my LDAP address book to the device and gcalsync to pull my google calendar down. It is a really slick tool and a handful of useful procmail recipes kick the e-mails I want to the T-Mobile provided Blackberry push e-mail account. The IMAP synch works but it takes about 20 minutes for a new message to show up on the Blackberry so using procmail to kick messages to the push account makes a lot more sense.
Now that it looks like I’ll be using T-Mobile for a while I am trying to write a scraper for the my.t-mobile.com site to track my minutes and data usage, but their website is full of perverted JavaScript, so it’s fairly difficult to extract useful information from it.
PS3 Firmware 2.10 and Mediatomb
PS3 Firmware update 2.10 brought VC-1 and DivX playback (finally) to the PS3 natively. Now I have been playing back my 400GiB DivX/XviD/h264 collection via transcoding for quite some time now using the development branch of mediatomb. Now when I setup mediatomb it autodetected .avi as the mime-type of video/x-msvideo, the PS3 doesn’t recognize that mime-type. That was fine since I was on the fly transcoding it to MPEG2, but the PS3 wants video/avi. So I changed the config.xml file to include a new mapping and I removed the transcoder mapping for the video/avi and video/x-msvideo mime-types:
<mappings>
<extension-mimetype ignore-unknown="no">
<map from="avi" to="video/avi"/>
...
</extension>
</mappings>
Then I deleted the shared folders from the db and rescanned, since I use inotify the mime-type mappings in the db won’t automatically update unless the kernel tells mediatomb the file changed.
So far, I have gotten native VC-1 and DivX playback working on files up to 720p.
Hooray Sony, just hooray. Now if we can have messaging and music playback working in game it would be everything I could hope for in a system. It is a fantastically powerful system and I am ever gladder that I replaced the XBMC box with it.
The dust, the dust, always covered in the dust.
You look so tired and unhappy
Bring down the government
They don’t, they don’t speak for us
I’ll take a quiet life
A handshake of carbon monoxide
I’m trying to move the last bits of things onto my colocated server, and it’s not easy let me tell you. All the years I’ve spent doing this for a living has made me want to have cock-all to do with computers at home.
Of course losing my cellphone sometime after dinner tonight hasn’t put me in the best move either… stupid piece of crap belt-clip…
Anyway, I’m trying to be as gentle as I can be, but I imagine some things might be cocked up a bit until I have it all sorted, DNS is probably dodgy and I hope the redirects all work.
If anything is broken, feel free to drop me a line, mernisse at ub three rgeek dot net, or via comment, as those get e-mailed to me.
( as a side, m4a files can go jump off a bridge. My poor RIO Karma will play ogg, mp3, wma, flac and wav but not m4a, and transcoding them is more than I care to deal with right now… so I’ve got Radiohead playing on the PS3…. oh well, could be worse I guess )
More silly software…
I am not really a programmer, or at least I have never really thought of myself as such. I am more of a ‘systems & network engineer’ in the typical benevolent BOFH jack of all trades, master of the electric stapler kind of guy, but lately I’ve been flexing the software muscles a little bit more than usual.
I have been meaning to start learning python AND to start playing with the Gnome libnotify stuff a little bit here for a while now. Using Ubuntu 7.10 has sort of re-ignited those desires due the the large amount of python on the backend (as well as plenty of notifications from the various little applets). There seems to have been a push at work to start using python more, and the big application that I have been working on is purely python except for the web UI layer (which I will rewrite at some point) which I prototyped in PHP because it was fast and I needed access to visualize the datasets so I could continue work on the backend.
Anyway, all of the current event crap aside, I tossed together a little python guy that works on both OSX and Linux because I wanted some excuses to work with OSX a little bit. It trolls your last.fm profile and pops a bubble when one of your friends listens to a track. It’s kind of neat in that it lets you see what deranged music your friends listen to. It currently will even fetch the artist picture from the last.fm site for the popup bubble.
It’s not done, but it’s usable, and you can get it from my cvs web. Enjoy, and drop me a line if you like it!
Moved out, partied hard, now what?
So I’ve moved out, gotten the new place all setup and have started sort of getting into the groove here. My first revelation was to find out that my internet service here isn’t as nice as it was at the old place. The outside plant here is old and oversubscribed so it’s tough. I finally threw down and colocated a server with DigiNex and as such imladris.ub3rgeek.net was born. I’m busy moving things off my server here at home onto the colocated box. This is a good thing though, because it’s time to audit a lot of that crappy old code that I have running all over the place. It’s running OpenBSD, so many things are different. But most of the websites I host are over there, as is most of my e-mail stuff and my irc client.
Last weekend was the annual Halloween party that a couple of my friends have been trying to get me to go to. I blew it off in 2005 and 2006… but wentthis year. It was a fantastic time, lots of really awesome people. A co-worker and I camped out in the back yard of the hosts’ house and despite the wind and rain it was a relaxing, refreshing weekend. We went hiking, there was a ton of fooling around with DDR, Guitar Hero and some kick ass old school Roland electronic synthesizers (a 303 and 808 were on hand along with a Moogerfrooger MF-104 ANALOG delay / feedback pedal, a Micro Korg and a MetaSonic Scrotum Smasher). I didn’t even unpack the laptop once throughout the whole weekend, which is a pretty crazy thing if you think about it. The only downside is the fact that reality is a harsh mistress and coming back to the real world after such a great weekend is a total bitch.
That said, I’ve been having a good time with the MediaTomb transcoding feature. It works really well and I’ve watched a bunch of stuff on it, including the season of Top Gear (so far), a bunch of Bleach, and the last episode of the new Doctor Who. I still have not gotten mencoder working on the damn thing, so I still don’t have a few media types playing, but if I ever get that done, I’ll post the stuff here somewhere.
Life, movies and games
So I’m officially 26 now, and I figure that’s a good reason to update anyone who actually reads this on a few things. First of all, I’m on chapter 4 of Heavenly Sword. The game is still awesome though I’m afraid it’ll be over soon. There’s some really fun and challenging missions with Kai (the funny cat-girl looking character) at the end of chapter 3, and the boss fights keep getting more involved. It’s defiantly not just a button masher. I’ve cooled off on the Warhawk lately, but it’s still a ton of fun to pickup and spend a few hours blowing people up. I’m totally into the dogfight aspect. I should probably play some ground battles more but it’s just not as fun as the expansive open chaos of the dogfight. In other PS3 news I’m currently testing the development transcoding stuff in mediatomb. It works pretty well, considering the age of apollo (the server that is running this thing) and the fact that it’s an external transcoder so seek/pause doesn’t work. It pretty much makes my dream of having just the PS3 and my stereo hooked up at the new house a reality. I just have to get mencoder working so I can watch quicktime movies.
I finished cleaning out the rack the other day, it’s so empty now… but I’m also only using 66% of the one UPS now, so that’s a 33% decrease in electricity usage which I can totally get behind. It also frees up the other UPS to move upstairs to protect the WAP and switch in the den. Since my workstations are both laptops that means I can survive a short power outage unscathed. Hooray.
In other news, I’m waiting to hear about my car which remains at the dealership being worked on and the approval paperwork for the new place is still in limbo so hopefully I’ll start hearing soon and we can begin moving on to the next stage.
Notable birthday events: Had dinner with mom and the family, was nice if not hectic as usual :) Had wine with Nina, was a nice quiet way to end the day. Generally laid around and relaxed.
More Playstation 3 noise
I have been reading game sites now that I have settled into the Playstation 3 and am anticipating a whole bunch of games coming up.
I’m almost through with Resistance: Fall of Man — it’s pretty fun for a FPS, which I generally don’t like at all. I am constantly amazed by the capability of these new systems.
I am still waiting for a release of the MediaTomb software with transcoding, but mp3s and videos that have been pre-transcoded for the PS3 work perfectly, I just wish you could copy media FROM the PS3 TO the DLNA media server. It would be nice to get these huge videos I’ve downloaded from the Playstation Store off the PS3 onto the network, though the 60GB hard drive is seeming plenty big thus far.
On top of that Blu-Ray looks amazing both on my 20.1″ LCD and on my room mate’s 51″ projection CRT, the DVD upscaling is pretty fantastic, I just got finished watching the movie Children of Men on DVD and it looked really fantastic.
The 1080i TV is nice, but I have my eye on a Samsung 40″ 1080p FullHD LCD (LNT4065F) for when I move out at the end of the year, I’ll have to replace the front speakers in my surround setup at some point, they just don’t have the punch to do this stuff justice anymore (Polk R150′s look neat) .
More Playstation 3 Media fun
As I’m sure anyone who read my previous comment on the topic can tell, the Playstation 3 is currently fairly esoteric in what it supports as far as media types for video playback. From as far as I can tell, Sony (nor Microsoft for that matter) has not licensed DivX, and while rumors abound that they have been talking to the DivX folks I’m not holding my breath. In that vein I have been looking for DLNA UPnP media servers that do transcoding. The sad reality is that currently no one does (for Linux at least, nor Mac OSX as far as I have found). The only project that seems to come close is MediaTomb, and they have an open SourceForge feature request for transcoding that seems to be expected to be finished soon.
So I installed MediaTomb 0.10.0 on my Slackware 11 server and after installing libmagic from an external package repository, I had it up and serving data.
If you use Windows (which thank God, I don’t) then you have some choices (list, Wiki Article, Wikipedia Article), including a few free ones that do transcoding.
Once Mediatomb makes a release with transcoding support I’ll get it setup and let everyone know how it went.