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How I stay digitally organized: media files

As a follow up to my “How I stay organized post” here is how I keep my music, pictures, and videos organized.
First I need to talk about where/how to store important files like media files. All of my media files are stored in one place as a master and multiple other places as copies. I keep my master copy on my home NAS and then I have secondary copies on my laptop, desktop, and MythTV. I also keep a backup of the master on one of my USB hard drives and a second backup on my webhost (no you can’t have access). This is the ideal way to keep this information backed up for me. If I ever find a file that is labeled wrong I change it on the master copy and eventually it will filter down to the copies. Storing everything in one place has helped my organization habits more than anything.
My music folder is organized with the following folder structure.
Artist
Album
Songs
In order to keep all of that organized I had to make a standard naming scheme for all my files too. Here is what I chose. My album folders are named %Artist% – %Year% – %Album% and my songs are named %Artist% – %Album% – %Track% – %Title%. I chose this naming scheme so that if a file gets lost somewhere where it does not belong, which they often do with this many computers, I can easily find where it goes. Two extra things that I make sure all my music folders have is every album folder has a folder.jpg file of the album cover art and every artist folder has a copy of the folder.jpg named after each album I have. For example I have the artist Bush. Inside of that folder I have two folders for the two albums I have and two pictures for those albums. This way when I view the artist folder I can see what albums I have without even opening the folder. This doesn’t work so well in OSX or Linux but works great on my Windows machines and Xbox Media Center.
I have used TagScanner to edit all of my songs by hand. Yes it has been very tedious but I have yet to find a automatic tagging system that did well for me. I also use TagScanner and Album Art Downloader to embed album pictures into all of my songs. This took a while but is worth it when you see the album art in XBMC, on an mp3 player, or any other player that supports viewing album art from within the ID3 tags.
My pictures are stored in folders with the “Date (Event)” so Halloween is “2008-10-31 (Halloween)” This sorts my pictures by date taken, and then with a description of what the event was. If the event is multiple days I use the first day for the date and then I have sub folders for day 1, day 2, etc. I keep a few category folders for folders I don’t want to have to sort through every time I view my pictures. Some of the main folders I have are Automotive, Desktops, Misc, Downloaded, and folders for Beth and I. Desktops and Automotive are pretty obvious but Misc is for 1-2 pictures for a event, screenshots, icons, and drawings. Downloaded is for fun pictures online that I have found. The user folders are for project pictures and other misc stuff that Beth and I want to keep.
Finally, videos are stored by type. Not filetype but more source type. Movie, TV, Web, Shot are the main categories I have. Most of my shot video is actually in my pictures folder with the event it is tied to.
Once all my media is organized on one source it is fairly easy keeping it maintained (so long as I am the only one writing to the NAS). Got any tips or questions just let me know in the comments.

Well that was stupid…easy MythTV fixes

Just a real quick tip for anyone having problems watching live TV or recording shows in MythTV. After a fairly fresh install I could not watch live TV. My screen would go black for a second and I would be kicked back to the main menu. I also was not able to record shows. The recording would show up on the schedule but nothing would happen when the time to record would actually come. So my tip is check your log files!!! They are stored in /var/log/mythtv (at least they are in ubuntu). You should have mythbackend.log*, mythwelcom.log, and mythfrontend.log* in that directory. The log files are incremented making the highest number the oldest file and the one without a number your newest file. So check the newest file first.
As for my problem I checked my frontend log first, but I didn’t see much information besides the fact that I changed skins. So I decided to check the backend. Here is what I found.

2008-11-23 10:26:22.432 TFW, Error: Opening file '/media/mythtv/recordings/1941_20081123102621.mpg'.
eno: Permission denied (13)
2008-11-23 10:26:22.436 TVRec(1) Error: RingBuffer '/media/mythtv/recordings/1941_20081123102621.mpg' not open...
2008-11-23 10:26:22.437 TVRec(1) Error: CreateLiveTVRingBuffer() failed
2008-11-23 10:26:22.438 TVRec(1) Error: Failed to create RingBuffer 1

Now this may not be too obvious to most people but take a look at “Permission denied (13)”. DOH! I forgot to give my user permissions to the directory I set up to record my shows in (as well as my live TV folder).

sudo chmod 777 /media/mythtv/*

and now I am able to watch live TV and record whatever shows I feel like.
Just thought I would save you the hassle if this happens to you.

How I stay digitally organized: downloads and files

I was inspired by download squads post on getting a hard drive organized and I thought I would post how I keep all my many computers organized. I hope to follow this up with a couple other posts about how I keep my cloud life organized and how I keep my media files organized but, first lets tackle local files.
To explain how out of hand my files can get, here are the computers and storage devices I use regularly: work laptop (with 2 OS’s), work desktop, home desktop, MythTV computer/NAS, wife’s laptop, wife’s desktop, numerous memory cards, 2 external hard drives, a home NAS, network drives at work (8), backup CD’s, a original xbox (which stores more than you’d think), and obviously this website/server and more email addresses than I want to admit to (or even know exist).
So lets start with how I keep my files organized on the computers I use the most. My work laptop and work desktop.
The first thing I always try to remember on my work computers is anything and everything on my work laptop and work desktop are counted as files I can lose at any time. I do not keep them backed up as often as I should because I use these computers mostly for work purposes. If I lost my job or either of my hard drives failed all of the files would be gone and I am fine with that because all of my important files are backed up somewhere else. Both of my work computers are running Windows Vista and I had to create some extra folders in my user profile to stay organized.
The first folder I make is install. This is where I keep my most used program installers that are not updated too often. Programs like Firefox, Filezilla, and Pidgin are all updated far too often for me to keep installers for them but more random/large installers I want to keep around for future use so they go in this folder. Inside my install folder I have the following subfolders: Backup, Game, Hardware, Operating System, Software, and Windows Mobile. The backup folder is not where I store backups from the local computer but usually backups for other computers/memory cards. This folder structure is almost identical to one of my external hard drives. The external hard drive keeps a much more permanent set of installers and backups but my laptop is just for programs I install often. The other folders in my Install folder are pretty self explanatory.
The second folder I create is a scripts folder inside my user folder. I have debated naming this projects because it is where I keep scripts/programs I am writing and general tools that I make for myself. For now though I just put scripts in that folder.
The last folder I make is my work folder under documents. This folder is simply for work related documents (pdfs, spreadsheets, etc.). I don’t keep a lot of work documents on my laptop because they are generally stored on my network drives at work. This folder is just for documents that relate specifically to me such as expense reimbursements, system logs, and checklists.
The last set of folders I make are in my downloads folder. Inside downloads I create a Firefox, torrent, FTP, and dropbox folder (the desktop and Starcraft folders in the screenshot are only specific to my laptop and are there for quick access). I then tell each appropriate program to put the freshly downloaded files in the correct directory (dropbox is a writable samba share folder). Once I have all the folders created I add a toolbar to the Windows taskbar for easy access because this is probably my most used folder. This is also usually my biggest place of disorganization because I download things frequently. I have found, however, with this organization it is very easy for me to go through old files and delete them with ease. I used to use Belvedere from Lifehacker but I found I did not like my files moving on their own.
My linux computers/partitions have similar folders in the home directory and my wife’s computers she keeps organized as she wishes but usually keeps important files on the NAS at home. I will go over organizing media files next.

Why the Mac Mini sucks for MythTV/PVR

I bought the mac mini for a few reasons:
1. It is very small and very quiet
2. It looks good with my AV equipment
3. There are a lot of accessories that match the looks of the mini
4. It came with good enough specs for video playback and recording

The main problem I had was dealing with the small/slow hard drive. So I wanted to upgrade that but here are some of the things I ran into.

First of all, the Mac Mini had almost everything I wanted (and some things I didn’t care about) built in. I wouldn’t need to add any features to the device unlike other small computers I was looking at. Most other small computers came with almost everything I needed except one or two thing, built in IR for a remote or firewire. These were requirements for me. I know I could have used a USB -> IR adapter but I wanted this computer to look a little less DIY than my last MythTV. And not having firewire seemed too complicated to try and add my own through expensive adapters.

My goal for the Mac Mini was to upgrade the internal hard drive and use an external 1 TB drive. The reason for this was storage and speed. The internal hard drive in the Mac Mini is only 5400 rpm and while that works fine for web pages and word documents, when reading and writing large media files all day it just would not be fast enough for the task. One option was to install the OS on the internal hard drive and use a external hard drive just for storage over USB but the CPU overhead of USB and the read/write speeds would just not cut it (internal SATA II is over 6 times faster than USB 2.0/Firewire 400). There also is no firewire 800 port so that wouldn’t work either. I tried following a walk through that someone else already did with a mini hard drive upgrade but apparently Apple has updated their device since this was done and adding a hard drive the same way is no longer possible. If this worked for you on a post Nov 2007 Mac Mini please let me know in the comments. The problem I had was the Mac Mini would never detect any hard drive outside of the chassis. I tried with multiple cables, hard drives (2.5″ and 3.5″) but never once was able to get OSX or Ubuntu installed on the bigger hard drive.

To break it down, the reasons the Mac Mini actually sucks for building your own PVR are these.
1. Slow (low storage) hard drive
2. Expensive features that are not needed but you don’t have a option but pay for. (OSX, iLife, Apple tax, etc.)
3. Hard to upgrade processor and memory

And these are the reasons I picked the AOpen over the Mac Mini.
Mac Mini uses a older 945GM chipset with 667 Mhz vs. GM45 chipset with 1066 Mhz, it uses a more power hungry 65nm (T5600/T7200) processor vs. 45nm (T8100 or any socket p processor you want), and GMA950 GPU vs. GMA X3100. Not really big deals considering both should have the ability to play back most 1080p content. But having updated specs just make things a little easier, and the ability to upgrade helps make the PVR future proof…well almost.

For anyone interested, here are some pictures of the steps I took to make the Mac Mini NOT work with an external eSATA 1 TB hard drive.

	Sata to eSATA adapter. I was sent the wrong adapter and Microbarn would not accept the fact that this was a female SATA to male eSATA cable when I needed male to male. Even after sending them this picture. P.S. don’t order this, order this.
	Adapter plugged into the Mac Mini SATA riser card with a male to male sata adapter I had to buy extra thanks to Microbarn. Maybe I just don’t understand male and female connectors.
	SATA cable run inside the case. This wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be. See the picture above for what it looked like coming out of a slightly modified Kensington lock hole.

Let me know how a Mac Mini is working out for you as a PVR or what other machine you bought as a substitute in the comments.

MythTV…another build

So I have really been missing the ability to record/rewind/pause TV. I haven’t had a full time MythTV box for over a year and a half. I sold my old MythTV computer and had been saving the money till something perfect came out to use as a fast and quiet MythTV computer and samba server. I actually bought a Mac mini about 2 months ago in an effort to get it working with a external hard drive for speed and storage. Needless to say, Apple did a good job of making the Mac mini too annoying to try and get it to work the way I wanted it to. I will post a little on my experience there later.
So I returned the mini and found the AOpen mp45-dr. It is about the same size as the mac mini (technically smaller) and it came bare bones. This is great because I could either get the same specs as the mini for cheaper or I could improve the parts I wanted to improve and not get the “features” I didn’t need (like internal wifi or internal laptop hard drive). Unfortunately, the mp45 had one thing I really needed to complete my HTPC, firewire. I looked around to see if I could get firewire out of the eSATA port or one of the two internal PCIe mini ports but I couldn’t find anything that would work the way I wanted and I needed firewire to record premium HD shows from my cable STB. So I found the mp945-dr which is just the older model of the same computer. It looks almost exactly the same but has a slightly slower video card, no eSATA port, and slower chipset (which included a slower FSB). When I really looked at it though, the parts it came with would be plenty for what I needed and so I used the money from my MythTV sale (and a few other side projects) and bought the AOpen mp965-dr.
Here is my build.
AOpen mp965-dr (from Buy.com)
Intel Core 2 Duo T8100 (from newegg)
2GB Kingston Ram (from newegg)
WinTV-HVR-950 Tuner (from newegg)
1TB ministack v3 (from other world computing)
Sata -> eSATA cable (from mwave)
I also already had a HDHomerun tuner and firewire cable for a tuner from my STB.

I am excited to get this up and running again and will post my build as time goes on. Here is a quick rundown/reference to the sections I will be writing. I will update these later with links.
Part 1: Setting up the hardware
Part 2: Choosing the software
Part 3: Setting up software
Part 4: Using the machine day to day

Buying a NAS part III

Ok, it has been quite a while since my first two articles on this (Part 1 and Part 2) and I wanted to post a little update on my situation. I haven’t worked on my linkstation hard drive because I decided to go a slightly different route. Ultimately, I want something that has some sort of RAID set up for backup purposes but at this time I don’t have the time, money, or space for such a device. Instead I decided to use my MythTV computer as my network storage device on top of its current PVR functions. Because MythTV will be a full computer it will have a lot more features and options I can use to configure and set up the NAS exactly as I want. This will also mean that I only have to have one device on at all times instead of my originally planned 2 devices which will save a bit of money in power bills. I finally have a computer that is going to work for my new MythTV setup (more on that to come) so as I get that configured I hope to post some more how-to’s on my quest for the perfect cheap NAS solution.
Just so I get some of my goals in place here are my current needs for the NAS setup.

1. Separate users to allow read only access to certain folders and write permissions to others.
2. At least 500 GB.
3. Upnp server to allow easy playback on my PS3, XBMC, WMP, etc.
4. Under $300. While this is still a goal it is going to be quite skewed with my budget for my MythTV computer. I will try to add all the cost up correctly though.

Two more items were on my list from my first posting so I will echo them here as well.

5. Be able to connect to a ethernet network without adapters. This won’t be a problem at all because my MythTV computer will be plugged into the network at all times.
6. Low power consumption. While the MythTV computer will draw more power than my original Linkstation, the ability to get rid of the Linkstation in favor for just having one device will defiantly save power over having both devices turned on at all times.

So I haven’t given up on getting my NAS up and running but my plans changed a little. For now the Linkstation still gets used every day and it is helping a lot with temporary storage. I will keep the site update with my install notes and what has worked for me.

HTC Titan dock

Unlike the HTC Apatche (Verizon xv6700) The HTC Titan (Verizon xv6800) did not come with a dock. I decided I really missed having a dock with a Pocket PC phone so I had an idea for making my own. I broke the whole process down into 4 easy steps you can follow.

1. Get a CD you don’t need. I guess it could be a DVD or if you are fancy one of those Playstation 1 CD’s with black backing. BTW, I didn’t need this CD anymore because Linux Mint 5.0 was released this weekend. Go download it if you are interested.

2. Glue two “L” brackets to the CD. I chose the back because it made it shinny and harder to take pictures of.

3. Put the CD in your laptop drive. OK this works a lot better if your computer is on a slope or in a docking station but I am working on another solution for my desk at home.

4. Put your phone on top of the CD.

There is also a optional step of plugging the phone in but that isn’t required.

I hope I didn’t lose anyone in those steps. They were confusing to me too. Check out the gallery of a couple more pictures and let me know what you think or what you would do different in the comments.

Like I said I am already thinking of a couple different variations that may solve the problem for people that don’t have a docking station or don’t want to use their laptop for a holder. This just happened to work great for my situation.

As a side note, Windows Sideshow is pretty neat but needs a bit more functionality and florescent lights suck for pictures.

Buying a Nas part II

The Linkstation was not satifying what I needed. So I turned to the internet to see what I could do about the problems I was having. I found a site called Nas-central which happened to have a ton of info about hacking the Buffalo NAS devices. The site had so much information it wasn’t well organized so I spent a good amount of time just figuring out what I could do with the Linkstation. I started my search by finding out more about what the Linkstation has out of the box, and then what I could do with it. It turns out the Linkstation runs a Buffalo modified version of Linux and because of that it is pretty easily hacked with a few utilities.

The first thing was to figure out what operating system I wanted to run on the Linkstation. I found a few main options. Most people would either hack the standard firmware, install a modified buffalo firmware called jtymod, install a more open version of the buffalo firmware called openlink, or install a full replacement with a build of debian linux called freelink. All three options had very good merits, but for my needs I tried to just wanted to get a better DLNA server installed so I decided to modify the current buffalo firmware using acp_commander.

The next thing I needed to decide was what DLNA server I was going to install. I had no idea there were so many DLNA servers out there. The main options I found were mediatomb, ushare, FUPPES, and twonky. I was already pretty familiar with mediatomb because I was using that on my desktop for sharing media. I was familiar enough with it to know I wanted to look for something else. While ushare and FUPPES seemed pretty limited in their options they had one big advantage over twonky.  They are free whereas twonky costs $30. I really liked the features of twonky 4.4.4 so I installed the 30 day trial and gave it a test drive with my PS3. I was very impressed. Not only did twonky have a great web interface to configure everything you could want, but it also worked right away in Windows Media player 11. As soon as twonky scanned all of my media I was able to play almost everything on my PS3 without problems.  I had a couple of problems with videos cutting out but quickly realized that the wireless network was not able to keep up with the high bit rates of some of my videos. It turns out that with twonky installed and the default DLNA server turned off a lot of the hard drive noise was gone as well.

So I got a replacement DLNA server installed and fixed the problem with the drive being loud. But I wasn’t finished. The default firmware still gave me very limited samba settings and required all of my folders to be ordered in a fassion that only my grandma would do if she had 200 GB of divx files. So next I need to installed Freelink.

Buying a NAS Part I

I have been looking for a network attached storage (NAS) device for some time because keeping everything on my desktop was not the best solution. Here is what I needed my NAS to do:

1. Connect to the wired network without adapters. Wireless would be nice but lets face it.  With media files you really want it on a wired network no matter what.
2. Be quiet and use low power.  Not silent desktop kinda quiet (see refrigerator), more like the wife will forget it is behind the couch kinda quiet. I have free computers that I could easly put FreeNAS on and just have it sit somewhere but that would not be quiet enough and would draw more power than a dedicated device.
3. Lots of storage! 400 gb of usable storage was my minimum and having expandability through USB would be a plus.  RAID 1 was also a desire but was out of the question for my price range.  Manual backups would have to suffice for now.
4. SAMBA server and DLNA server built in. I have used XBMC for about four years to stream my media to my TV and it uses samba to stream all of it’s content.  I have just recently started using my PS3 for these tasks because it plays all the codecs I need and it is easy!! I don’t have to explain to someone how to search the network or share a folder on their computer. This has been a life saver for my setup because I don’t need to worry when a folder changes.  The DLNA server just scans it and shares the media exactly the same as it was.
5. This was probably my biggest opsticle…I needed the solution to be under $300. I know that this may seem like a lot, and when I was first looking I thought I wouldn’t have any problems finding what I needed. It turns out there wern’t as many available options as I first thought.

I had been looking at the Buffalo Terrastation for a little while because it came with 4 drives and had everything I wanted, minus quietness, but the system started at $700 and quickly climbed in price from there. I had also been looking at the Terrastations lower priced cousin the Linkstation Pro‘s but they did not support DLNA and were quite expensive when I was looking.

I was at Fry’s one weekend and saw the Netgear Sc101 for $40. Wow, $40 for a two drive NAS enclosure how could I go wrong? The device only supported IDE drives but I wasn’t too worried because I had a few 200 GB IDE drives that I could use in this to get the storage I wanted.  I also figured that I could find some way to mod it, or follow directions online to mod it, to get some of the missing features to work. I brought the Netgear home and put in my two drives. I open up the manual to see how I can map the drive in Ubuntu and quickly find that the hard drive can only be used in Windows because it loads a proprietary driver into windows to mount the drive locally. So back in the box it goes and sits for another week until I am able to go back to Fry’s to return it.

I returned the Netgear and waited for the next weekend to see what new deals would spring up the following weekend. I went back the next Saturday and saw that they had the Linkstation Live 500 for $170. There was only 1 left on the shelf and I didn’t know much about it but I saw on the box that it supported DLNA so I bought it on the spot and brought it home with much anticipation of how awsome it was going to be. I open up the box and plug it into a local switch and start a disk format.  The drive already showed it was formatted but if this is going to be my main storage device I want to make sure everything is as clean as can be. The format seemed to be taking a little while (hours) so I just let it run through the night.  In the morning the format was still not done and I was getting worried. I let the format run while I was at work and when I got home I was greated with a nice “the drive is not formatted error” in the web interface.  I upgraded the firmware to the current one on Buffalo’s website, 2.10, and started another format.  This time it went much faster ~30 min. and I was ready to transfer everything over.  I started with everything on my desktop because my hard drive had 20mb left of free space and ubuntu was starting to complain.

Once I got most everything copied over from my desktop, 1 day of transfering, I enabled the DLNA sever and tested it with my PS3. I was very disapointed! I could see the server but couldn’t see/play any of the files. The drive also seemed pretty loud. So far this was not a good solution for what I wanted…

Knoppmyth R5E50 Backend won’t start after reboot

I have been running into a problem for a little while and I could not figure it out (not that I expected to figure it out on my own but I thought I could search for it). What happens is if you force the computer to shutdown (hold the power button) of if the video has an error while displaying and you reboot, your mythtv-backend will not restart after rebooting. Well thanks to the knowledgable users of Knoppmyth there is a fix in the forums.

You need to be root and you edit the following things.

edit \etc\init.d\mythtv-backend and change
start)
to
startold)

and
restart|force-reload)
to
start|restart|force-reload)

You will get a little warning from it on startup because you will now be doing the restart code on startup.

That is all I have done and so far it looks like it worked. I will update this if I have something break because of this fix.