I have been using Mediatomb for nearly two years now but I decided to give MiniDLNA a whirl since it is a fully fledged DLNA server whereas Mediatomb is UPnP only. I am currently running both Mediatomb SVN and MiniDLNA CVS. So, how does MiniDLNA compare to Mediatomb?

• MiniDLNA is easier to compile, configure, uses less RAM and has less software dependencies than Mediatomb.
• MiniDLNA doesn’t currently support music play lists or Last.fm scrobbling. Mediatomb supports .m3u and .pls playlists but requires a 3rd party patch to add Last.fm scrobbling.
• MiniDLNA doesn’t support dynamic video thumbnail creation, which would be nice to have but is not essential, cover images are supported. Mediatomb supports video thumbnailing via ffmpegthumbnailer.
• MiniDLNA doesn’t currently have any transcoding support. This is of little consequence for me since I import video content into my library in a format natively supported by the PS3, either MP3, MPEG-2 TS or MPEG-4. Mediatomb does support transcoding but it is somewhat fiddly to setup and you can’t pause transcoded content.
• MiniDLNA works “out of the box” with the PS3 (and other DLNA clients) while Mediatomb requires some tweaking.
• Mediatomb’s default video import script doesn’t suit how I organise my video library, but MiniDLNA fit my video library perfectly.

So, as of today I am running both Mediatomb and MiniDLNA. Mediatomb is exclusively handling audio since playlist and Last.fm support are essential for me. MiniDLNA is now handling video exclusively. I’m very happy with the results but should MiniDLNA add .m3u/.pls play lists and Last.fm support I will switch everything to MiniDLNA

I’ve written up my notes on installing Mediatomb SVN (including Last.fm support) and MiniDLNA CVS on Ubuntu Karmic 9.10 Server, get them from the links below…

• MiniDLNA
• Mediatomb

A while back I released a script that rips a DVD to MPEG-2 PS allowing the user to select one audio stream and one subtitle stream. Optionally the video can be requantised, using M2VRequantiser and an ISO image created. If creating an ISO image the chapters are also preserved from the original DVD. You can see the original post below.

• DVD to MPEG-2 PS Ripper for Linux

I’ve just released an update to that original script which fixes subtitles in the original MPEG-2 PS mode but now adds the capability to rip MPEG-2 TS. The video stream can still be shrunk and in MPEG-2 PS mode the video is still
requantised but in MPEG-2 TS mode the video is re-encoded as H.264. Requantising is faster but can introduce artifacting. H.264 encoding is slower, but produces very good quality. I am currently re-importing my entire DVD collection, using this script, to my DLNA server using MPEG-2 TS and re-encoding the video to H.264. This gives me high quality rips at relatively small size (~3Gb) whilst preserving Dolby Digital 5.1 audio. Perfect for playback via DLNA on the PS3

Some things to be aware of:

• Subtitles are only supported in MPEG-2 PS mode.
• MPEG-2 PS files created by this script are DVD compliant.
• ISO files created by this script will preserve the chapters from the original DVD.
• The PS3 can only play DTS audio in MPEG-2 PS streams when they have been authored to DVD.
• The PS3 can only play subtitles in MPEG-2 PS streams when they have been authored to DVD.
• The PS3 can’t play DTS audio in MPEG-2 TS streams therefore this script will transcode DTS to AC3 when in MPEG-2 TS mode.

If you are running Ubuntu then I strongly suggest you add the Avenard repository to your system as it includes recent builds of mplayer and x264.

• http://avenard.com/media/Ubuntu_Repository/Ubuntu_Repository.html

To download the script and find out how to make full use of it visit the release page below.

• DVD-to-MPG

Back in April I released a script to create a MPEG video summarising a movie using data from IMDB, you can find the original post in the URL below to learn why I created such a script in the first place.

• IMDB Film Summary as a MPEG2 video

Today I’ve release v2.0 of that script, which is almost a complete re-write mostly thanks to Eric at yPass.net who contributed significantly. Thanks to Eric the script is much improved since version 1.0, here is a run down of what’s new.

v2.0 2009, 19th September

• Merged yet more contributions from Eric, http://www.ypass.net. Thanks Eric!
• Added usage instructions.
• Added categorisation by Certificate.
• Added dynamic computation of video bitrate.
• Added silent audio generation.
• Added a shell script to reprocess an entire film store.
• Re-added MPEG-2 video encoding.
• Improved video encoding speed by removing pre-processing with ‘jpeg2yuv’.
• Fixed spiffy animations when cover art is not available.
• Fixed spiffy animations on platforms that may have incomplete GD.
• Modified filename input so that an input filename is optional rather than mandatory.

v1.2 2009, 17th July.

• Merged extensive contributions from Eric, http://www.ypass.net. Thanks Eric!
• Updated the README to reflect Eric’s changes.
• MPEG-4 video encoding replaced MPEG-2 video encoding.
• Never released to the public.

To download the script and find out how to make full use of it visit the release page below.

• IMDB-to-MPEG

You’ll have seen reference to “spiffy animations” in the change log, take a look at the example video summary clip below to see for yourself.

• About The Usual Suspects (~2Mb)

As it stands the IMDB-to-MPEG script does what I require, so I will maintain it in it’s current form. However, Eric has been working on a new direction by adding support for NetFlix, creating a GUI with php-gtk and some other cool stuff. While Eric has shared the details with me, I simply don’t have the time to add all that good stuff to IMDB-to-MPEG, so if you like the sound of what Eric has been up to hop over to his site to find out more.

• Netflix Has a Developer API

The Play Station 3 can’t play MKV file. Therefore I’ve written a script that creates a PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360 compatible MPEG-4 from Matroska providing the video is H.264 and audio is AC3 or DTS. Xbox 360 compatibility requires that audio is forcibly downmixed to stereo with ‘–stereo’. AAC 5.1 audio will have the correct channel assignments when transcoding from AC3 5.1 and DTS 5.1. If ‘neroAacEnc’ is installed then it in preference to ‘faac’ for encoding the AAC audio as it produces better quality output. neroAacEnc is optional.

The script does as little re-encoding as possible, only the audio and subtitles are re-encoded or converted. The script can detect profile 5.1 H.264 and patch it to 4.1 in under a second. Any subtitles in the Matroska are preserved. If ‘mp4creator’ is used the subtitles are extracted stored in a seperate file. If ‘MP4Box’ is used (default) the subtitles are converted to GPAC Timed Text and muxed into the resulting
MPEG-4. The PS3 can’t display these subtitles but some software players can.

The script can optionally split the Matroska if it is greater than 4GB to ensure Play Station 3, Xbox 360 and FAT32 compatibility.

This script works on Ubuntu Linux and should work on any other Linux/Unix flavour and possibly Mac OS X providing you have the required tools installed.

• MKV-to-MP4

Work has been crazy. We’re moving house. Hence, not much time for geeky stuff recently.

I’ve been putting this off for ages, I need to “normalise” the volume of my MP3 music music library. Not all CDs sound equally loud. Whilst different musical moods require that some tracks should sound louder than others, the loudness of a given CD has more to do with the year of issue or the whim of the producer than the intended emotional effect. This difference carries over when you rip the CD to MP3 and random play through my music collection requires constant manual volume adjustment. This has been bugging me for a while now, but when it started to bug my wife I knew it was time to find a solution

My main concerns with applying some sort of audio normalisation were….

• My MP3s should not be irretrievably changed into something I end up hating.
• The method used should be free of the application used for music playback, given that I play my music on iPod Nano, iPod Shuffle, PSP, PS3, Linux desktops, TomTom 720T FM streaming and in car MP3 player.

After some research mp3gain seems to be the tool for the job which provides an implementation of ReplayGain.

However, as of today my entire CD collection is ripped, which is very large, so I needed a way to process my whole music collection in an automated fashion. I found some examples of how to script this, but there are caveats with the solutions I found.

Therefore I have created my own script, MP3Gainer, to apply ReplayGain using ‘mp3gain’ which overcomes these common limitations. MP3Gainer recursively applies ReplayGain to a MP3 music collection of any size and directory depth. ReplayGain can be applied in ‘track’ or ‘album’ mode and if ReplayGain has previously been applied it can also be undone. It is important to understand that MP3Gainer ‘album’ mode really is per album, which is what you want. Trust me!

This script works on Ubuntu Linux, should work on any other Linux/Unix flavour and possibly Mac OS X providing you have the required tools installed.

• MP3Gainer

Some of my mobile phones have been able to record video clips in MPEG-4 format. Sadly some of these clips don’t play on the PlayStation 3 and those that do stutter terribly. I use ‘iplayer-dl‘ to download content from BBC iPlayer. Sadly the files are in a Quicktime container and are not playable on the PS3. In order to address both these issues I created a script which extracts the audio and video from an existing MPEG-4 or ISO Media Apple QuickTime container and repacks them in a new MPEG-4 container with optional splitting of the resulting MPEG-4 to maintain FAT32  compatibility. The new MPEG-4 files play back just fine on my PS3

This script works on Ubuntu Linux, should work on any other Linux/Unix flavour and possibly Mac OS X providing you have the required tools installed.

• See the Code section of my site for the download and more details.

Mp4-Repacker.sh was released on April 23rd 2009 to help celebrate St. George’s Day.

The Play Station 3 can’t play MKV file. Therefore I’ve written a script that creates a PlayStation 3 compatible M2TS from a MKV, assuming video is H.264 and audio is AC3 or DTS with as little re-encoding as possible. Any subtitles in the MKV are preserved in the M2TS although the PS3 can’t display subtitles in M2TS containers. Optionally splits the M2TS, if it is greater than 4GB, to maintain FAT32 compatibility. Unlike other MKV to M2TS solutions, this script doesn’t create any intermediate files during the conversion. The PS3 can’t play DTS audio streams in M2TS containers, therefore DTS audio is transcoded to AC3.

This script works on Ubuntu Linux, should work on any other Linux/Unix flavour and possibly Mac OS X providing you have the required tools installed.

• See the Code section of my site for the download and more details.

MKV-to-M2TS.sh was released on April 23rd 2009 to help celebrate St. George’s Day.

Every so often I find myself in looking through the ex-rental DVD “bargain bin”. Quite often I find something I consider a bargain. However, the experience of watching an ex-rental DVD is typically ruined by the various trailers and marketing guff at the start which you can’t skip. My wife hates that stuff, and I love my wife, so I routinely rip the main feature of newly acquired ex-rental DVD movies so we can avoid that crap. I run a Mediatomb DLNA server and I want to load it with all my DVDs. Ripping them helps reduce the amount of storage I will require. MPEG2-PS files are compatible with my PS3 which is the client to my Mediatomb DLNA server.

As a solution to the above I created this script, which can extract the main feature from a DVD video, allowing the user to select one audio stream and one subtitle stream. Optionally the video can be requantised, using M2VRequantiser, and an ISO image created. If creating an ISO image the chapters are also preserved from the original DVD.

• See the Code section of my site for the download and more details.

DVD-toMPG.sh was released on April 23rd 2009 to help celebrate St. George’s Day.

I recently discovered that ‘tcrequant’ (part of the transcode suite of tools) has been deprecated. Worst still I found that when I ran ‘tcrequant’ on my 64-bit Linux workstation is was corrupting the video. See the links below for details.

• transcode 1.1.0 Final Release
• [transcode-users] tcrequant status

Therefore I decided to get the M2VRequantiser code from Metakine working on both 32-bit and 64-bit Linux as a replacement for ‘tcrequant’.

M2VRequantiser accepts the raw MPEG2 video data (not VOB) from the standard input and writes the recompressed frames to the standard output.  M2VRequantiser takes two arguments. The first one is a floating point value specifying the ratio of compression. The second is the size of the M2V, since the data is streamed to M2VRequantiser it cannot know the M2V size. The following command would recompress ‘original.m2v’, whose size is 1024000 bytes, by a factor of 1.25.

M2VRequantiser 1.25 1024000 < original.m2v > requantised.m2v

I’ve only tested on 32-bit and 64-bit Linux, specifically Ubuntu Intrepid 8.10. It works for me but I’d be interested to get your feedback.

• See the Code section of my site for the download and more details.

M2VRequantiser was released on April 23rd 2009 to help celebrate St. George’s Day.

If you’ve read my blog before you’ll know I run Mediatomb DLNA server with my PS3 as the client, You’ll also know I am working towards importing my entire DVD collection into my Mediatomb server. However, my wife wants to know something about each film in the library without having to dig out the DVD case from storage. My solution is to include a MPEG-2 video displaying the film summary in the Mediatomb library for each DVD I have imported so it can be easily viewed from the PS3.

My script is called IMDB-to-MPEG and I’ve finally got round to uploading it. See the Code section of my site for the download.

The scripts takes one parameter as input, a film title. The plotline, year of release, genres, cast list and running time for that film are gathered from IMDB and formatted as text. Here is an example.

The Usual Suspects (1995)

A boat has been destroyed, criminals are dead, and
the key to this mystery lies with the only
survivor and his twisted, convoluted story
beginning with five career crooks in a seemingly
random police lineup. (106 mins)

Starring Stephen Baldwin as Michael McManus,
Gabriel Byrne as Dean Keaton, Benicio Del Toro as
Fred Fenster, Kevin Pollak as Todd Hockney, and
Kevin Spacey as Roger 'Verbal' Kint.

Genres: Crime, Mystery, Thriller.

Rated 8.7 out of 10 from 227,964 votes.

The text is converted into an image and then encoded into a MPEG-2 video using the lowest possible bitrate/resolution that is acceptable to read when viewing on a 42″ plasma from my sofa.

Directories for each matching genre are created and also one for the IMDB rating (rounded down). The MPEG-2 is stored in the ‘All’ folder and then symlinked to the genres and rating for that film. I then copy my video into the appropriate directory in ‘All’. For example.

.
|-- All
|   `-- The_Usual_Suspects
|       `-- About_The_Usual_Suspects.mpg
|-- Genres
|   |-- Crime
|   |   `-- The_Usual_Suspects -> ../../All/The_Usual_Suspects
|   |-- Mystery
|   |   `-- The_Usual_Suspects -> ../../All/The_Usual_Suspects
|   `-- Thriller
|       `-- The_Usual_Suspects -> ../../All/The_Usual_Suspects
|-- Ratings
`-- 8
`-- The_Usual_Suspects -> ../../All/The_Usual_Suspects

This code was lashed up in a few hours, it ain’t pretty but it works for me on my Ubuntu Linux systems, maybe it’ll work for you too