As of right now, the site content poll seems to be heavily pointing to guides, so I’m starting to look at what I should be including first. I know I provided examples, but what do you all want to know? Leave a comment or two and let me know what kind of guides to start writing. Configuration guides, ripping, encoding, etc.? I’ll eventually get to it all, but what do you all want/need the most help with? Let it be known here, or forever hold your peace!
Just dropping in real quick to say that I have uploaded an updated ImagesByName RAR file. It’s just under 100MB, so it’s getting quite large already. I may start doing diff files so everyone doesn’t have to grab 100MB just for a few updates. I’ll test that out this week. Anyway, it’s in the download section.
I’m also going to start outlining a couple of encoding guides for the encoders I use…mostly MeGui, RipBot264 and Handbrake. Search them up and take a look if you haven’t already. I’d link, but I’m tired and ready to eat! Hopefully I’ll get some time tomorrow to bring some news.
It’s not exactly new news as there have been several beta versions and an alpha already released, but I decided to sign up so that I could download it for the first time this past weekend.
I’m talking about the latest DivX 7.0 package which now includes an h.264 codec for playback on its included DivX media player. I played a few minutes of a a 720p movie I had and it worked, so yay for that.
I also joined their new project team and downloaded the DivX h.264 CLI encoder they have. I’ve not used it yet, but I think I’ll give it a test run on the next DVD/BluRay disc I get. I’ll see if I can do a comparison test using similar encoding methods with the x264 encoder. They both go use the same frame serving and scripting software, so it may not be that hard. I’ll post my results if and when I get around to doing that.
Last night I put on The Condemned as I had not seen it and was in the mood for some action. Once it started, I noticed that there was something odd about the way it was displayed on the screen. I knew it was a 16:9 movie and I have a 37″ Hannspree XV37 widescreen LCD in my bedroom, but it was displayed more like a 4:3 movie with no black bars. Something was wrong.
I have this movie in Blu-Ray, so I checked it out. Sure enough, it’s in 1.78:1 widescreen. I then used MediaInfo to check the details of the mp4 I had encoded. I reduce the resolution to an acceptable one for most all my HD movies. It saves on space and still provides an excellent picture. For this one, I used a resolution of 800×448. However, for some odd reason, it had a PAR (picture aspect ratio) of 1.5:1. Crap.
Well, I’m pretty picky about things like this and I refused to watch the movie. But I’m also too stubborn to submit myself to ripping and encoding this thing all over again. What ever will I do?
After some Internet scrounging, I found out that MP4Box can alter the PAR. I already had YAMB installed, so I just took the MP4Box executable out of there and dropped it in my C:\Windows directory. I coped The Condemned to a local directory from my server and renamed it to take out the space, then ended up using this command:
C:\>mp4box -par 1=1:1 x:\archange\condemned.mp4
After it completed the ISO writing, I opened it up in MediaInfo and voila! 800×448 (16/9) love! I renamed it, copied it back over to my server, and went back to bed to watch Band of Brothers instead.
So, if by mistake, you or your encoding software incorrectly sets your PAR to something other than the intended one for your mp4 files, this is a good way to change it. Keep in mind that it may not always be 1=1:1, however. I ended up having to change a couple of others using 1=8:9 (which is 4:3 fullscreen) and 1=32:27 (which is 16:9 widescreen). These were encoded in true DVD resolutions of 720×480, but were showing a 1:1, which made them display at 1.5:1. For fullscreen material, this looks very close. It’s not acceptable for widescreen, however.
I could get into PAR, SAR (sample aspect ratio), and/or DAR (display aspect ratio), but I’m afraid I’d just confuse my point here. I’d probably confuse myself as it can be harder to preach than practice.
Hope this helps someone out. Let me know what you think (comment/register). Happy encoding!
For a while now I had been considering a migration path to a new media server in my home. My current server is barely half full (5×500GB using RAID3), but I’m still moving all my DVDs to H.264/AAC (mp4) and with my current rate, I’d be full by June, at the latest. I was also not very happy with its performance. It’s plenty fast enough to offer straight file sharing, but I also was using it as a WSUS, WINS, and MyMovies server. I ended up having to move WSUS and WINS off of it due to memory demands. It has 2GB in it, but the SQL instances were eating almost all of it up.
I had come across unRAID many months ago and was interested in its novelty. This time around, however, I considered it as much more than a novelty and became more active in their forums, as well as others that had users of unRAID. What I was looking for in a home media server this time was expansion capability, low maintenance, redundancy, and low cost. unRAID offers all of these. unRAID supports up to 16 individual drives, can operate completely headless by offering a web management utility, exhibits a proprietary parity system that offers reundancy, and can grow to suit your wallet (they have a free version supporting 3 drives). I also liked the fact that the redundancy system does not result in 100% loss of data in the case of multiple drive failures.
After loading up unRAID on a VMWare system and testing it out for a few days, I was pretty well sold on building around it. unRAID does not have a wide array of hardware support, but what it does support is more than well enough for a home media server. Here is a rundown of my initial startup parts:
I already had an old case and the flash drive, so when everything arrived all I had to do was throw it together. I also had to order a PCIe NIC for my current server. It was on a generic Realtek GbE NIC that was sharing the PCI bus with my S-CURE RAID3 card. Doing a transfer of over 1TB on that saturated PCI bus would have been painfully slow.
I picked these specific parts for a number of reasons – all including cost. However, I also paid attention to unRAID requirements and related performance factors. The Barracudas are probably the most expensive drives, but they’re also one of the fastest and the only ones that offer the 5-year warranty outside of Enterprise-level drives (too much $$$). The Intel DG965RY motherboard has onboard video and LAN, with the LAN being the both compatible and desirable Intel Pro1000 (hardware-based) NIC that resides on the PCIe bus (more bandwidth). The SATA ports also reside on the PCIe bus and support AHCI, as unRAID supports it. Finally, I have loads of expansion with one x16 PCIe slot, three x1 PCIe slots, and three standard PCI slots. Ten total USB and two firewire make it all the better (even though unRAID can’t use the firewire). I plan to expand my externally-based storage in the future by the same manner. I’ll just add 4-port eSATA PCIe cards and grab another external enclosure, as needed. As time passes, these things will just get cheaper.
So, that’s all for the first part of my unRAID server build. Part 2 will come shortly with a step-by-step of my build. I’ve got a few pictures too, so stay tuned!