I was just sent a quick preview of the new metadata fetching utility meta<browser />. There is an official site of www.themetabrowser.com in the works, but it appears it is not up yet.  I imagine it will be ready by the time this is released.

Let’s get to how it works.  There was no installer yet, so I received a RAR of the necessary files which I unRARed to a metabrowser folder.  Inside were a bunch of files, but no instructions…which is OK, I like figuring things out.  Upon running the only EXE found, no movies were detected, and since there were no menus available, I figure this meant XML configuration files.  After opening a couple, I found the one I needed – metabrowseroptions.xml.  I located the <Locations /> and subsequent <Location /> tags and edited to add a couple of my movie locations.

I fired it up and saw that it was now searching for titles.

After a few seconds I was greeted with a listing of movies and the first was populated with data.  However, I also noticed that there were a bunch missing.  After looking around a few minutes I realized it was all movies with a MKV and MP4 extension…which are the extensions I use the most.  Turns out these extensions are not listed in the XML.  That was an easy fix.  So after editing, I fired meta<browser /> back up and everything was displayed.

All of my titles already have metadata, posters and nearly all have backdrops locally (except those which I specifically chose over the automatically fetched ones by Media Browser).  So, I thought I would go through and add a few more backdrops.  I select a movie, check the option to not replace my metadata and hit the Fetch link.

I get to choose from a list (or single title if it’s an exact match) and then i greeted with the same screen with all new metadata highlighted with a reddish tint (to show new or changed items).  Also, everything on the page can be edited – actors, directors, summaries, etc.  Control over your metadata is excellent.

After fetching, you will see the number of posters and backdrops found for each title.  Clicking on the link for each respective field allows you to choose from all available.

This is terrific stuff.  TV metadata is not yet available, but is on the plate once the movie portion is released and free of bugs.  The copy I have is still not finished, but other than one small error that affects nothing, it works absolutely perfectly.  The guy has skills.  As much as  Salami’s Movie Organizer has done for me, I have to say that all good things come to an end.  SMO’s end is meta<browser />.

I did run into a few small issues which I assume will either be fixed by fatal as a bug or will solved as Media Browser matures.  The biggest issue I had with meta<browser /> was that every folder that had a number in the name (300, 12 Angry Men, etc. or series of movies like 01 – Raiders of the Lost Ark, 02 – Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, etc.), were detected as a TV show and metadata fetching was disabled (or not available).  Media Browser currently has a “Sort by name on disk  feature that is the reason I put the preceding 01, 02, etc. before my movie series, but they are currently working on implementing the MyMovies SortTitle XML value that should negate the need for that.  That will allow me to remove the numeric series names and meta<browser /> will work normally for those.   We’ll have to wait and see how this works out.

Anyway, I can’t wait for the final release!  Thanks for the sneak preview, fatal!

Update:

After reporting some of the issues I had, it appears the TV detection issue I had stems from the filename and not the folder.  This is a bit of a bonus since Media Browser does not require the filename contained within the folder to have an identical name.  So, a folder named 01 – Raiders of the Lost of Ark, for example, can contain the file Raiders of the Lost Ark.mkv and it will be correctly pulled in my meta<browser />.

I was also able to confirm the report of another beta tester that any pre-existing metadata within a movie folder does not go untouched even if the option to keep existing metadata is checked.  I only downloaded backdrops for a few of my test titles and upon second look, noticed the mymovies.xml file for each one had an updated timestamp.  After opening, I noticed that the metadata layout had changed and some of the information had also changed.  This will need to be fixed also.

Once I hear anything new on these issues, I’ll be sure to update.  Nonetheless, it is still looking very good!

I’ve been knee deep in webhosts all day.  My Mom owns a children’s store in my hometown and for the longest time I’ve tried to convince her to take it online.  She finally decided to listen and has been really excited about it.   I bought her a domain name about a month ago and she said she was a go with it all so I purchased a starter plan via 1&1 Hosting (who this one is through) and started setting everything up.

I know nothing about e-commerce sites, so I went with Wordpress and an e-commerce plugin that was available for it.  It was pretty nice and looked like it would suffice, but 1&1 really sucks when it comes to resources.  I found that after installing that plugin, I pretty much was limited to nothing else.  Memory usage was maxed and doing simple tasks resulted in continuous displays of the  Internal Server Error 500 page.

So, enough was enough and I’ve decided to transfer the domain to InMotion Hosting which rated very high on many webhosting review sites for business purposes.  Only problem is that I have to wait 60 days from the time of domain registration for it to begin the transfer process.  The 60 day mark is February 2nd, so not too bad.  Hopefully it won’t take too long to actually transfer.

This also gave me a chance to look into dedicated storefront software and I was surprised to find so many free options.  I looked at Magento, osCommerce, Mal’s e-Commerce, VirtueMart, Zen-Cart and others.  I finally found one I really like for her in Prestashop.  It’s pretty simple, but has a nice interface and I don’t think the admin panel will overwhelm her.  It also seems to have all the options I can ever imagine her needing…even if it does better than I expect (I hope it makes her millions, but I have to be a little realistic at first).

Anyway, that’s what I’m doing right now as I wait for Prestashop to upload via FTP.  After it gets off the ground, I’ll post the link and you can all buy your kids some new clothes.

It’s the sound of a spinning 2TB Western Digital Caviar.  WD announced their new offering in a press conference yesterday.

The drive has a 32MB cache buffer and operates on 4×500GB platters.  Formatted NTFS on a Windows box you’ll see 1.81TB of new space.  Current suggested MSRP is slated for $299.  A review can be found here (I have no association with this site and am only providing the link for your own enjoyment…I can’t vouch for their findings).

Well, I can’t really afford much more than another 1TB drive right now, but those can be found for around $89 locally for me, so I don’t see much point in spending $300 on something twice that size.  Especially when I’ll need two of them to benefit me with unRAID.  I’ll wait a bit and we’ll probably see it at half that price in 3 months.

I’ve not had any issues with the cache performance, for the most part, in Media Browser, but I’ve wondered if cache performance would be affected if it were located on different media types.  I had already tried a network location for certain parts of the cache so that I could “universalize” my watched ticks, but it didn’t work out too well.  OK, it didn’t work out at all.

I’ve also tried a few of my flash media drives in hopes that the better access speeds may make a difference, but I found that it lead to much slower load times, so I scratched that idea also.  However, the flash media experiment did give me another idea – RAM disks.  I had used RAM disks with MyMovies to store the database and images before it started using a SQL backend and it worked wonderfully.  I still used it for images after that and it did help.  I figure it couldn’t hurt to try for the Cache directory for MediaBrowser, so I had my next little project.

I had a copy of SuperSpeed RAMDisk, but unfortunately for me, it did not include Vista support.  Suck.  I turned to the Internet and found a nice freeware RAMDisk (with GUI) here.  It’s very nice, although it doesn’t include a save-on-shutdown feature.  I’m going to look into the command line for it to see if I can create a batch file to schedule to do that on a daily basis for me.  Otherwise, I’ll just manually create a cache image when I think of it.  I’m doing this on my son’s HTPC and his cache doesn’t change so drastically that it would be a problem anyway.

I ran the included application and installed the RAMDisk driver.  After a minute or so, I was good to go.  I set a RAMDisk emulation of a fixed disk to 256MB, hit Apply and I had a new X: to play with.  I then browser to C:\ProgramData\MediaBrowser, cut my Cache folder and pasted it directly to my newly created RAMDisk (X:).  I then fired up the command line (CMD from Run prompt), changed my path to C:\ProgramData\MediaBrowser and created a new NTFS junction pointing to the X:\Cache folder:

C:\ProgramData\MediaBrowser>mklink /J Cache X:\Cache

I was greeted with a success message and I was all ready to fire up Media Browser.  I decided to clear my cache so that I could see if there was anything to gain there and I did notice that my collection populated a little quicker.  The increased transfer rate and decreased access times definitely seemed snappier to me.  My son’s system is only a Pentium D on a single channel memory platform and an old PATA IBM 80GB HDD, so it was a bit laggy.  What I witnessed was no fluke…populating the cache and subsequent browsing was much smoother for me.

I can’t say that this will do much for faster systems, but if you’ve got an HTPC that barely meets the mark for Vista, this could certainly help.  It really doesn’t require much to setup and once you get things setup the way you want and your cache set well, saving an image to load after reboots won’t be much of a hassle.  Hopefully there is something in the command switches that allows it to be loaded automatically upon reboot.  We’ll see.

I’m going to trial some X64 RAMDisk software in the next bit to see what it does for my test system.  I’ll also be trying this out on my faster HTPCs to see if there is any improvement.  I’ll update later on what I come up with.

If you decide to try this yourself, let me know how it goes.

UPDATE:

I found a free public beta of another RAMDisk software that supports startup-to-image and save-image-on-shutdown features.  I don’t see any indication of it expiring, although I’m sure the non-beta will not be free.  So far, it works very well and is what I plan to use on my remaining HTPCs.  It supports both x86 and x64 systems.

Download is here.

So, out of complete boredom, I decided to try and stream some videos to my Blackberry 8320 that was provided to me by my work.  I manage a Blackberry Enterprise Server Express at work and I have them configured to for data usage, so I can do this without relatively no impact.  Unfortunately, I found that the OS that shipped with our Blackberries (4.2 I think) did not support streaming media, so I was out of luck…until I decided to upgrade it.

I downloaded v4.5 from T-Mobile, which is our carrier, and it took about an hour to go through the install.  I wasn’t expecting that.  Anyway, I first tried TVersity as my streaming media server since it was supposed to support the transcoding of MKV files better, but I repeatedly timed out when trying to stream a file.  So, I figured I would try out the Orb one more time.

I set this up on my VPNSVR since it doesn’t do much except run my WSUS and act as my VPN access point.  It’s not the most powerful system  (E1200 and 2GB DDR2), but it passed Orb’s system requirements.  After configuring a folder for Orb to use and making a few configurations to test with, I accessed mycast.orb.com and logged in from my Blackberry.  I initially browsed to a folder containing a movie in AVI format and hit play.  Success!  I was presented with the Blackberry media player and it started playing 12 Angry Men.  The resolution was extremely small, however, and did not fill my screen, but I was still pretty happy that it even worked.  I don’t have any initial plans for this functionality, but it makes my work phone a whole lot more fun.  I was able to get MKVs to playback, but the video was not viewable.  The audio appeared fine, but it was still unwatchable.  Oh well, I imagine I would only really use this for TV episodes or home videos and I only have a handful of those in MKV format.

So, if you have a fairly new Blackberry, upgrade your OS to 4.3 or later and enjoy streaming media using Orb!