VortexBox - open source NAS media server with Auto CD/DVD Ripper & BitTorrent Client

prae5 Wrote:I have been working on the dvd side of things too - hopefully i should have a releasable product in the next few weeks if i get time to do a little bit of fixing.

Any news on this

Sorry personal & work life has taken over the past month or so and I haven't had a chance to work on this.

My work commitments should reduce again in the next few weeks and i plan of finish this project then. If not i will tidy up the code and donate it to vortexbox for them to complete.

prae5 Wrote:Sorry personal & work life has taken over the past month or so and I haven't had a chance to work on this.

My work commitments should reduce again in the next few weeks and i plan of finish this project then. If not i will tidy up the code and donate it to vortexbox for them to complete.

No worries. Just curious as to what the status was

Glad to hear your still working on it

prae5 Wrote:Certainly out of the box it doesn't but doesn't take much to do. I have an instance of vortex box running on an 3 or 4gb virtual machine (think install is about 1.5gb from memory).

From there i mount my flac collection by nfs that is on a few other nas's i have, and it shares it out.

For my ripping front end i do something similar, i boot into vortexbox (on a 5gb partition) and it again mounts the destination by nfs and dumps the ripped music there.

I have been working on the dvd side of things too - hopefully i should have a releasable product in the next few weeks if i get time to do a little bit of fixing.

If possible, can you detail how you did this?

From my understand, Vortexbox only works with a single drive as a destination.

From what you say, it sounds like you can make it rip to a drive on a network.

And then xbmc or whatever will play it back from that network location? (does it do this directly, or does xbmc connect to vortexbox which connects to the nfs drive?)

Thanks in advance!!

It's been a while since I posted to this forum. I know a lot of XBMC users are already using VortexBox as their media server but we just release a new version today and I wanted pot here so new XBMC users that don't know about VortexBox can try it out.

VortexBox is an open source Linux distro based on Fedora. It is designed to server media to any player. VortexBox has a built in autoripper to rip CDs to it's hard drive. It supports SMB, iTunes protocol, SqueezeBox protocol, and now DLNA. So any media player you have should be able to access it.

The big new feature for this release is full DLNA support. You can now play media from your VortexBox on your DLNA TV, PS3, XBOX, etc.

So if you have an old PC your not using give it a try. Finally get all your media on one place!

Hi prae5

Did you ever get the code donated or did real life take over

Regards Skare

Sorry for the slow replies. Real life took over and i never really got things tidied up. I will see if i still have the code somewhere, if i do i will post it here and people are free to do with it as they see fit.

As for ripping to a network drive this is very easy.

I don't have access to my vortexbox at the moment so can't give exact paths. In short though all you need do is change the current rip destiantion and make it to a network source of your choice. I use nfs, but you could just as easily use samba, iscsi, etc...

e.g supposing vortex box rips to:
/some/path/mymusic/files

add a mount point to your fsatb to mount /some/path/mymusic/files to mount to your network source

xbmc can then access the files through vortexbox as normal, or alternatively directly to your network source.

We released VortexBox 1.7 last week. I know a lot of people on this forum are looking for an easy way to get their DVD collection onto a NAS so they can use it with XBMC.

VortexBox now has a completely automated solution for automatically ripping DVDs or CDs. VortexBox is open source and based on Fedora so you can easily install it on some old PC hardware.

Hi all. I have just installed vortexbox on an old PC and its all working great.

Time came this evening to connect to XBMC and its all gone tits.

I connected via SMB to the flac folder on vortexbox and XBMC simply does not understand anything thats been done. The music has scanned in ok and in files mode I can see album art etc, if I switch to files mode however there is no 'albums; 'artists' etc there is just nothing, back in files mode if I select an album and get info on it, XBMC does not recognise it. Thing is XBMC pulls up the keyboard waiting for me to put correct data in, but the data looks perfect for instance, artist: Pink Floyd, Album: Saucer full of secrets.

Even though XBMC has presented me this info it cannot seem to present it in library mode.

Whats gone wrong here?

Well anyway ignore that for some reason after deleting the database and trying again its worked all perfect like