Building a hands-off HTPC/NAS

Yea im gonna look at finding a dvd ripping solution thats easy and runs on linux, because my parents have alot of dvds, so need something thats pretty straight forward.

The main personal issue I have with xbmc doing the scraping itself, is if you have another client pc connecting to the "movie database", you have to rescrape everything again. The way i have it setup on my personal pc, is that ember media manager scrapes, images, nfos, trailers (if available) and any pc on my network can pull them (after xbmc has "scanned the content") which is much faster than rescraping. Also lets me double check that all nfos are actually correct, and to manually scrape fanart for those rare, odd movies.

Im almost sure there is a media scraper for linux, just need to find one (if anyone knows of one, please let us know!!!). Haven't really searched for one, as my personal machine is windows.

Will let you know if I find a solution to these things!!

Surfing google I got brought back to these forums and found a script by linuxluemmel for xbmc, that seems to do what we want to do.

http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=52615&page=36

Please try it out on linux dave and let us know how it works, (currently dont have linux on this pc, might get it running in the next week when I have time)!

nickvda Wrote:Surfing google I got brought back to these forums and found a script by linuxluemmel for xbmc, that seems to do what we want to do.

http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=52615&page=36

Gonna try it out on windows, and see how it works for our goal. Please do the same for linux and let us know how it works!

Great find! Unfortunately this linux HTPC doesn't have a CD drive. This looks so tempting I might just have to put a linux partition on my older test system and give it a try! I'll let you know how it works!

davemex Wrote:Great find! Unfortunately this linux HTPC doesn't have a CD drive. This looks so tempting I might just have to put a linux partition on my older test system and give it a try! I'll let you know how it works!

Let me know if you give it a go!! Not sure how soon ill get my linux running

davemex Wrote:Great find! Unfortunately this linux HTPC doesn't have a CD drive. This looks so tempting I might just have to put a linux partition on my older test system and give it a try! I'll let you know how it works!

External USB DVD drives are cheap.

GJones Wrote:External USB DVD drives are cheap.

Yes they are but since all of my media is already in digital format I have no reason for even making a $50 investment in the device. I was going to test it on my old machine to see how well it worked so I'd know if it would be a good solution for one of my parents that does have a significant collection they'd like to store.

I just wanted to make sure the concept worked seamlessly before recommending it (or I would be subjecting myself to the feared family "tech support" calls when the device failed to work as advertised- I'm sure you know how this goes!).

Anyways, it's Friday and I think that $50 would be much better invested in a decent bottle of scotch for the weekend! (ohh no, did I say that in a tech forum?!)

Hi there.

I was just wondering for the automatic downloading / renaming part of the box, do I need twonky server? Or can I do without.

I would ideally (for right now) like to just have my machine be downloading and then moving / renaming the files. I don't need more functionality than that.

Thanks

marcozd Wrote:Hi there.

I was just wondering for the automatic downloading / renaming part of the box, do I need twonky server? Or can I do without.

I would ideally (for right now) like to just have my machine be downloading and then moving / renaming the files. I don't need more functionality than that.

Thanks

Nope! Twonky is just my personal choice in DLNA server. All that does is stream the media to media receivers around the house (in my case, an Xbox 360) and I'm actually experimenting with other programs to see if they do a better job at this (like PS3 Media Server). If you don't want it to do that, Twonky serves no purpose.

Also, if you're just using it for the downloading and sorting, someone posted this script on my blog to use prior to the sortTV script to check the downloads for completion first and if they are indeed complete, moves them to another folder. From there, the sortTV script runs to just look at the completed downloads folder for shows to sort into the TV folders. This way, shows that are still downloading won't be moved prematurely.

Hi there,

I was wondering if you are still using SHowRSS as your source for the torrents - it has been down and not working for me lately and I have not been able to find very good information on the status of the website or who is maintaining it.

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

Cheers,
Marco

marcozd Wrote:Hi there,

I was wondering if you are still using SHowRSS as your source for the torrents - it has been down and not working for me lately and I have not been able to find very good information on the status of the website or who is maintaining it.

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

Cheers,
Marco

How long has it been down for you? Mine has been working fine over the past week and new shows were pulled down as recently as this morning. I follow them on Twitter (@showrss) and they're pretty good about posting updates on their downtime, show additions and subtractions. Is the actual web site down for you or can you log in but nothing is being pulled down by the server? Their last message (3 minutes ago) said they were working on something but I'm not sure what...

Sorry to hear you're having issues though!

Dave