Building a hands-off HTPC/NAS
#16
I just started researching what I would need for hardware and software to setup a media server. You have added a lot of functionality to the basics of what I want to do, which I think will allow me to expand beyond my original intentions. My question is do you have any aspect of this that will allow me to rip a DVD to the computer? I ask because one of my goals is to take my entire DVD collection and digitize it, then be able to browse and watch any of the DVDs on the computer and thus on my HDTV. Any thoughts on this?
Thanks!
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#17
zulemara Wrote:I just started researching what I would need for hardware and software to setup a media server. You have added a lot of functionality to the basics of what I want to do, which I think will allow me to expand beyond my original intentions. My question is do you have any aspect of this that will allow me to rip a DVD to the computer? I ask because one of my goals is to take my entire DVD collection and digitize it, then be able to browse and watch any of the DVDs on the computer and thus on my HDTV. Any thoughts on this?
Thanks!

DVD ripping would be a great addition to the project since clicking through the digitized movies on a media server is a heck of a lot easier than having to flip through the collection manually, put the DVD in, etc. I could have put a DVD drive in this case if I had forgone one of the hard drives (you could always just use 2 TB drives instead) or gotten a slightly bigger case (the Chenbro case that I considered has room for all the drives and a slim dvd drive).

The only snag, I believe, would be the software side of things. To the best of my knowledge you would still have to use the command line to rip the DVDs instead of it just happening automatically because it's going to want you to give the file a name etc. Of course the great thing about Linux is that all it takes is for someone else to have wanted to do the same thing you want to do and write up a "how to" or a script. If typing a couple commands in the terminal doesn't bother you I'm sure a little Googling will get you the right commands (I had found this one and some other guides talking about using a combination of mplayer and mencoder). Hopefully that at least sends you in the right direction. If you find a solution that works please let us know! I'll also keep my eyes out in case I find something.

-Dave
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#18
Hi,

Great great guide ... but I was so sure I would buy a Zotac Zbox ... and postpone the purchase of a NAS...

But since I read this thread, I'm so not sure anymore Smile

I'm concerned about the case, I'd rather prefere something like the Antec NSK2480 but it can't hold enough disks...

Looks to me that the Rosewill RS-MI-01 BK isn't WAF enough :-(

But great post thanks for the work !

(I used to configure my ubuntu server with HellaNZB, it automaticly check's a folder for nzb files. And I also installed a plugin onto thunderbird to extract nzb attachments of a specifi mail account to that folder - was a great setup also for automaticly acquire movies)
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#19
tophe323 Wrote:Hi,

Great great guide ... but I was so sure I would buy a Zotac Zbox ... and postpone the purchase of a NAS...

But since I read this thread, I'm so not sure anymore Smile

I'm concerned about the case, I'd rather prefere something like the Antec NSK2480 but it can't hold enough disks...

Looks to me that the Rosewill RS-MI-01 BK isn't WAF enough :-(

But great post thanks for the work !

(I used to configure my ubuntu server with HellaNZB, it automaticly check's a folder for nzb files. And I also installed a plugin onto thunderbird to extract nzb attachments of a specifi mail account to that folder - was a great setup also for automaticly acquire movies)

It was really hard to find a case that I could squeeze enough hard drives into but still be small enough to hide it somewhere. When I originally bought the case though, money was a big factor in my purchase decision. In the future I plan on swapping it out for this case. as it looks a lot cleaner and has hot-swap bays.

The thing I love about Sabnzbd is that not only will it monitor folders, but it will download the NZB files from an RSS feed, start the download, extract them, sort them based on file type, delete the temporary files and has a plugin for Firefox that will send any NZB files directly to your server, even if you're at work. If it gets any easier I'm going to have to dump these 1 TB drives in favor of the 2 TB ones!! Big Grin
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#20
davemex Wrote:DVD ripping would be a great addition to the project since clicking through the digitized movies on a media server is a heck of a lot easier than having to flip through the collection manually, put the DVD in, etc. I could have put a DVD drive in this case if I had forgone one of the hard drives (you could always just use 2 TB drives instead) or gotten a slightly bigger case (the Chenbro case that I considered has room for all the drives and a slim dvd drive).

The only snag, I believe, would be the software side of things. To the best of my knowledge you would still have to use the command line to rip the DVDs instead of it just happening automatically because it's going to want you to give the file a name etc. Of course the great thing about Linux is that all it takes is for someone else to have wanted to do the same thing you want to do and write up a "how to" or a script. If typing a couple commands in the terminal doesn't bother you I'm sure a little Googling will get you the right commands (I had found this one and some other guides talking about using a combination of mplayer and mencoder). Hopefully that at least sends you in the right direction. If you find a solution that works please let us know! I'll also keep my eyes out in case I find something.

-Dave

cool, thanks for the info! What if I were to rip the DVD to my other computer, then transfer it over the network and put it into the location on the linux box that is needed for it to be read?
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#21
zulemara Wrote:cool, thanks for the info! What if I were to rip the DVD to my other computer, then transfer it over the network and put it into the location on the linux box that is needed for it to be read?

Honestly that's exactly what I've done the couple times I did need to rip a DVD! Since you can map the drives on the server to your other computer's you can copy it over just as easy as if it was stored locally.
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#22
Hello,

I working my way through making something similar to your setup, but I don't know how to specify the location I want my TV shows to go using this SortTV script.

I just want know how to specify the location it moves the files to: for example:

/media/TV_SHOWS/

would be the directory where I would want all of the tv shows moved to

So if I set it up to get the episodes of House, then it would go to:

/media/TV_SHOWS/House/


Thanks for your time.

Marco
CPU:Intel 2100 3.1 Ghz RAM:Corsair 4 GB DD3-133 Mobo: Gigabyte H67M-D2-B3 mATX OS HDD: Corsair Nova Series 32GB SSD Storage HDD: WD Green 2 TB Video Card: ASUS EN210 SILENT ODD:
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#23
davemex Wrote:Honestly that's exactly what I've done the couple times I did need to rip a DVD! Since you can map the drives on the server to your other computer's you can copy it over just as easy as if it was stored locally.

cool, I will look into that. I'm thinking of setting up a vmware install of this just for testing purposes before I were to invest in anything serious.

When your wife wants to pick something to watch and interact with the user interface, how does she do it? Do you have a mouse/keyboard hooked up to the media center or is there another solution? I was thinking maybe of a universal remote with a USB infrared receiving hooked up to the linux box for easy access. Would something like that work?
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#24
disregard previous post, dduuhh xbmc has a built in control function LOL

edit: aie! head is spinning. I dont have an android YET, so I go back to my original question about getting a remote to work with the linux box or something of that nature
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#25
Marcozd - SortTV specifies the target folder name in the command. So, for example let's say that all my download content goes to /home/public/downloads/ the script file is located at /home/public/sorttv.pl and I want the to be moved to the folder you specified above. The command I would use is:

perl /home/public/sorttv.pl /home/public/downloads/ /media/TV_SHOWS/
/media/TV_SHOWS/ localhost:[XBMC's Port Number]

The script will then create the /House/ folder if it doesn't already exist along with the /House/Season # folder where the shows will be filed. Each time you run it, it will look for those folders, create them if needed, and then move the files accordingly. You won't actually have to specify the House folder or the season folder, it does all that by itself! For more information on the script, go to the SortTV XBMC forum. And make sure you thank cliffe for his hard work!

zulemara: That sounds like a great way to test it out first!

As for the remote, it would be easy to set up an IR remote for XBMC as many others have done, but my wife and I both have WebOS phones that we use the XBMC remote application on. I know these applications are available for iOS and Android as well. It provides a touch screen remote and a graphical menu of all the server's contents. It's so slick I don't think you could beat it with any off the shelf remote for sheer functionality. The downside, of course, is that you'd have to control all your audio/TV components with a separate remote since the phone can't handle that. If you don't have a smartphone or ipod touch that could take care of that task, I would recommend just using a standard ir receiver/remote kit like others have done for their HTPCs. You should be able to pick one up pretty cheap!

Dave
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#26
Question 
Hi Davemex.

I am in the process of setting up the automated TV show downloading that you outlined in your blog, but I got stuck on one of the commands:

Code:
sudo cp -R html /var/www/torrentflux

gave me a "no such directory" error.

I am running xubuntu desktop edition. Do I need to be running the server edition for this to work? Also, since transmission came pre-installed with xubuntu, do i have to remove it and then re-compile it like in your instructions?

Thanks so much in advance.
CPU:Intel 2100 3.1 Ghz RAM:Corsair 4 GB DD3-133 Mobo: Gigabyte H67M-D2-B3 mATX OS HDD: Corsair Nova Series 32GB SSD Storage HDD: WD Green 2 TB Video Card: ASUS EN210 SILENT ODD:
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#27
You should be fine with xubuntu as long as you have the correct packages installed, like the LAMP server. Now, what that command is doing is it is moving the html folder over to your /var/www directory where it will become a folder on your Apache web server (that hopefully you have installed, if not install it along with mySQL and PHP). If you have a GUI you can just take the contents of that HTML folder and move it to /var/www/torrentflux or you can change torrentflux for whatever you want to call it, just know you will surf to the configuration page using http://your_servers_address/torrentflux. If you installed Webmin you could also just surf to the folder where you extracted the compressed file and move the contents over manually.

As for Transmission, you probably will have to remove it and install the correct version. Torrentflux_b4rt uses a custom version of the Transmission CLI (command line interface) for it to play nice. The instructions following the Torrentflux install instructions are how to get and install the correct version of Transmission.

Hope this helps! Let me know if you've got any other questions.
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#28
using this command "sudo /etc/init.d/xbmc-live start" i get caught witht he terminal telling command not found

i went browsing to the location in webadmin and xbmc is not there.......im at a loss

any ideas

EDIT: im completely stuck here, i cant even figure out where xbmc installed too

i found an occurance of an xbmc root file in "usr/bin", but i can figure out anyhing to do wiht it

when i type "sudo /usr/bin/xbmc start" i get 2 errors:

Error: unable to open display
FEH.py: cannot connect to x server
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#29
Would it be OK to install the server OS on a USB drive instead, if possible?

I don't want to buy a boot drive purely for installing the 10GB or w/e is needed to install Ubuntu server, and if I could boot off of a flash drive, it would save some money and a sata port Smile

Does Ubuntu server have trouble running off of a server and since I'm going to be doing rarring and stuff, will it store the temp files on the flash, making it slower?
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#30
poofyhairguy Wrote:I have samba running on my Unraid box and it is more than fast enough to stream my Avatar Blu Ray rip, which is the largest Blu Ray currently possible. If its too slow for you to serve up something simpler like pictures, something is not setup right....

The Avatar rip might be somewhat sequential on the disk, whereas the smaller pictures could be more akin to random reads. When you start reading that rip, the software has a pretty good idea that you will want subsequent bytes from the same file. Pulling separate files such as pictures does not afford the software to predict your needs as well.
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Building a hands-off HTPC/NAS0