Windows Web Hosting, Web Technologies, etc
Archive for September, 2007
Stream DVDs to your Xbox 360 from your Media PC (part 1)
Sep 26th
I’ve spent the past few days looking for the easiest method to rip a DVD and stream it to my Xbox 360 from my Windows Media Center (or Vista) PC. There’s many different methods for this and most of them involve ripping the DVD to a single VOB file, renaming that file as a .MPG running it through some sort of AC3 filter and then streaming the large MPEG file to your Xbox. The problem with each of the methods I found for this has been that they are time consuming and require you running 2-3 different programs before it’s completed. My goal was to find a way to do this with just one or at most two programs involved and in as short a period as possible. This is how I’m doing it.
NOTE: I do not endorse, encourage or recommend anyone rip/stream/copy any DVD they do not legally own. My project is strictly using DVDs that I purchased myself and that (as I understand it) I have the right to make backup copies of for my own personal use and how this information is used by you is up to you, I am not liable for any misinformation.
The Tools Needed
I’m using the following applications
- AnyDVD, from www.slysoft.com — This is used to defeat the copy protection on the DVD so you’re able to copy it. It’s works on almost all of the DVD’s I’ve tested.
- CloneDVDmobile from www.slysoft.com — This is used to actually RIP the DVD from the DVD to a Windows Media file (.WMV).
- and occasionally DVDfab from www.dvdfab.com. — This is really only used because it’s my preferred application for backing up DVDs, it’s never failed on a DVD yet.
- MyMovies for the Xbox 360, a free application from www.mymovies.name. — This is used to index the movies on my drive and access them easily through the Xbox.
- A Large DVD Collection. I own about 250 DVDs and the goal of this project is simply make managing and accessing my collection of DVDs easier.
The hardware I’m using is a Sony DVD+/-RW USB drive and a Maxtor 500GB USB drive to store the movies. I know ripping from a USB drive and writing it to a USB drive is slowing things down but it’s the hardware I have and it works for me. The average time for a full rip varies from 30 minutes to 70 minutes so far.
Part 1. Ripping the DVD
This is really straightforward and should be pretty easy for anyone to duplicate.
1. I loaded AnyDVD and run it in the background.
You’ll see it running from the taskbar on your desktop (it’s the little fox, get it sly as a fox 
):
And when you first run it you’ll see it doing it’s magic:
I just leave it running in the background, make sure the little fox is there and let it do it’s thing.
2. Start CloneDVDmobile.
The reason I’m using CloneDVDmobile is that it supports ripping directly from the DVD to WMV file (this is tagged as experimental in the app but with half a dozen DVD’s done in 2 days it’s been pretty good).
When you first start CloneDVDmobile select the option *Generic WMV/WMA (experimental)
3. Select the movie chapter you’re going to copy.
My DVD drive is F: so I browsed to F: and it did the rest. It generally picks the correct one automatically. You’ll notice we’re only ripping the main movie and not all the special features and such. From what I’ve read the Xbox can’t handle the menu and hey if you ripped the whole thing then all those DVD’s would be useless!
4. Set the Audio and Subtitle settings.
From reading the slysoft forums it seems subtitles aren’t handled very well by this app but then I don’t use them so I haven’t checked. I always pick English Dolby AC-3/6 and disable the subtitles.
5. Output Method and Settings
Okay here’s the part where a little experimentation will be needed. For the widescreen videos I’ve been picking 852×480 for the resolution, for the regular format videos I pick 720×480.
I set the output file by the name of the movie, in this case e:/away-from-here.wmv (I’m writing to my USB drive E:\, I don’t know why it wants to use forward slashes(/) instead of backslashes (\) perhaps it has to do with the mencoder.exe app it uses in the background. and I set a Label for the movie but it usually picks this correctly itself.
6. That’s it the Movie is ripping!
In about 60 minutes I’ll have a WMV file ready to stream to my Xbox but we’re not done yet.
You’re probably wondering why I’m using WMV files instead of MPEGs or DIVX or whatever. The WMV files give me the ability to fast forward and rewind the movies and are natively supported. DIVX requires (from what I’ve read) a transcoder and MPEGs don’t support the fast forward and rewind (from what I’ve read and experienced so far).
Amazon Unbox Videos on the Xbox 360
Sep 23rd
Since I have my wireless mesh network setup in the house, I have OUTSTANDING wireless access throughout the entire house. Now with good latency and no packet loss it’s time to start making the best of the network in the house.
The first thing I did this weekend was enable my Xbox360 to connect to my Windows Media Desktop running Windows Media Center Edition 2005 Rollup Patch 2. If you’re not familiar with windows media center it allows you to stream media files (videos, pictures, music), watch TV (if you have a TV tuner card), act as a PVR and more.
The Xbox 360 has Media Center Extender capabilities built in so that I’m able to connect to my Media Center Desktop over the network and access all the Media Center features remotely through my Xbox and display it on the TV. The goal with Media Center Edition has always been to rip all my DVD’s to files and then stream them over the network to the TV and Amazon Unbox Videos takes me a little closer to that.
First getting the media center to tie into the Xbox 360
Getting the Xbox and Media PC to see each other should be pretty simple, unfortunately it wasn’t as straight forward as it should have been. It turns out that if you’re running XP you need to download some software (Vista users don’t need to do this).
Here’s a few sites to help you with this:
- A good walkthrough on what you’re going to be doing.
- Download Software for your version of Media Center.
- Media Center Extender FAQs (it does a great job detailing what you’ll need to do).
- The Xbox360 PC Setup instructions For Vista.
You’ll want to use the download software link above to make sure you download the correct version of the Media Center Extender Software on your Media Center desktop. If you have Vista you don’t need to install anything at all and can follow the Vista Setup Instructions. Now, you may get a warning that your network won’t support standard or high definition video stream. You’ll want to play with the network and settings and even if you don’t get a strong signal give it a try, you might find it works fine.
Setting up Amazon Unbox for the Xbox360
This is a slam dunk, it just works! Download an Amazon Unbox video to your PC using their viewer tool. There’s a number of free downloads available right now and some special $0.99 rentals on the weekend. If you need more information on this Amazon has some instructions.
Watching a Movie over the Xbox 360.
This just works. Now if your Xbox doesn’t have the option to show movies you probably didn’t enable videos because of a poor network signal, you’ll want to adjust that. On the Xbox go to Media Center, then select My Movies and select the Amazon Unbox folder to pick one of your movies.
How’s the Movie Experience?
It’s great! I honestly couldn’t tell the difference on a video streamed across the Xbox and standard definition TV and I have a 50″ plasma so it should have showed some pixelation. Now the movie I watched was We Are Marshall which is a pretty good movie and it was only $0.99!
I noticed Amazon Unbox has a blog and on their blog they have a post talking about the different video details:
Below are some technical details about our most common video and audio parameters.
DVD-quality PC File
- Video Encoding Type: 2-pass bitrate VBR
- Video Codec: Windows Media Video 9 Advanced Profile
- Video Bitrate: 2500 kbps avg, 6000 kbps peak
- Video Frame Size: 640×480 (4×3 content), 720×408 (16×9 content)
- Video Frame Rate: 23.98, 29.97 (same as source)
- Video Keyframe Interval: 4 seconds
- Audio Encoding Type: 2-pass bitrate VBR
- Audio Codec: Windows Media Audio 9.1 Professional
- Audio Bitrate: 192 kbps avg, 1000 kbps peak
- Audio Sample Rate: 44.1 kHz, 48 kHz (same as source)
TiVo “Best Quality” File
- Video Encoding Type: 2-pass bitrate VBR
- Video Codec: MPEG-2
- Video Bitrate: 2800 kbps avg, 6600 kbps peak
- Video Frame Size: 640×480 – all 16×9 content is letterboxed
- Video Frame Rate: 23.98, 29.97 (same as source)
- Video Keyframe Interval: 4 seconds
- Audio Encoding Type: 2-pass bitrate VBR
- Audio Codec: MPEG-2 Layer 3
- Audio Bitrate: 192 kbps avg, 1000 kbps peak
- Audio Sample Rate: 44.1 kHz, 48 kHz (same as source)
Portable Video File
- Video Encoding Type: 2-pass bitrate CBR
- Video Codec: Windows Media Video 9
- Video Bitrate: 600 kbps
- Video Frame Size: 320×240 (4×3 content), 320×180 (16×9 content)
- Video Frame Rate: 23.98, 29.97 (same as source)
- Video Keyframe Interval: 6 seconds
- Audio Encoding Type: 2-pass bitrate CBR
- Audio Codec: Windows Media Audio 9
- Audio Bitrate: 96 kbps
- Audio Sample Rate: 44.1 kHz, 48 kHz (same as source)
Another great reason to test out Amazon Unbox right now is that they have free video rentals on the new TV series that are launching this season (I’m downloading the Bionic Woman at the moment but without atleast cameo of Lee Majors it just won’t be the same).
It does have a few drawbacks.
Now, it’s not all roses and peaches. I did run into a problem with the unbox video. I’m downloading at 6Mbps on my cable modem and started watching the movie on the Xbox when it was at 10%, after about 20 minutes I ran out of movie and it ended. I waited about another 30 minutes and I ran out of movie again! UGH. So I’d say if you’re going to watch a movie give yourself atleast a 60% complete download before you start watching the movie. I was looking for HD quality video downloads but couldn’t find any hopefully some will be available soon. Another cool thing about Amazon Unbox is that they have partnered with Microsoft to create a site createspace.com. Createspace.com is for indie film makers to get their movie out in HD DVD format and available on Amazon Unbox, this should be pretty exciting for independant film makers and I can’t wait to see what new and exciting films come out of this project.
So that’s Amazon Unbox and the Xbox 360
So that’s all there is to that. You can configure the xbox to talk to your media center PC using the links provided for instructions and software as needed, you can signup for amazon unbox and rent some pretty cool movies, dirt cheap and have them delivered to your PC (and xbox) immediately and then stream them over to your xbox 360.
I’m excited about the prospects of what Media Center and the Xbox 360 as a media platform have and am excited about the upcoming projects I’ll be planning around this. My next project is going to be ripping one of my own DVDs and playing it across to the xbox. If I get some time this week, I’ll also post some pics of the movie playback on the xbox 360 so you can see how well it looks.
High availability broadband network via a wireless mesh
Sep 20th
This week I started playing with sveasoft.com‘s talisman wireless mesh firmware at home. What this firmware does is allow you to re-flash your wireless routers and enable many other features in your router. The firmware I opted for allows me to take multiple broadband routers and create a wireless mesh network out of them. What a wireless mesh is basically is a wireless network that gives each router multiple paths to the uplink connection so that if one router fails the entire network still works and can still get to the uplink. At home I have both DSL & Cable and the big problem has been how do I fail over easily from one to the other. An option has been to replace my router with a router that has this functionality built in, but then where’s the fun in that.
My setup is composed of two routers, one connects to DSL downstairs and the other to Cable modem upstairs. They both have an uplink and if one uplink fails the routers realize this and begin routing traffic over the other uplink transparently. Pretty awesome right. Not only do I have a high availability network at home now with multiple uplink connections but I’ve also gained better wireless coverage throughout the entire house.
The downside I’m finding is that it takes the routers about 1-2 minutes to realize a connection is down and then another 1-2 minutes to update DNS and I’ve experienced this myself. It took about 2 minutes for my router to realize the uplink was no longer connected and to allow pings out the other router (but it did work) and then another 2 minutes for it to start doing DNS queries and resolving URLs. Total time according to the developers is a max of 4 minutes with the norm generally being around 2-3 minutes. They’re working to get this down to the 1 minute range if all goes well which would be ideal. Now the routers that do this all for you in one box I’m told do it within seconds so they have an edge at the moment but the tradeoff for that is you wouldn’t have the improved wireless coverage which was an issue in my house before this setup.
I’m just now starting to play with this but will post more once I have it all setup and fully tested but if you’re like me and love to tinker with this type of stuff and are the type of person that has to open something up to see how it works, I highly recommend this one, it’s easy to setup and opens up a wealth of coolness.
The great migration is now over .. I have returned to wordpress
Sep 17th
A long time ago (okay about a year ago) when I first launched my wordpress based blog I stated one of the nice things about Windows hosting is that you can run a mix of applications. If a PHP application is the best blogging engine available to fit your needs, you can run it while still running an ASP.NET e-commerce application for your main site, maybe a ASP based app for your livechat. Well, as it turns out for my particular blogging needs, a PHP based blogging engine is the best fit.
DasBlog is a wonderful blogging application and I’ll use it elsewhere for other blogging needs but for my personal blog it was lacking features that I needed.
Why the conversion?
Sometime back a competitor posted a pretty nasty google adwords campaign against our brand and I took offense, I ended up blogging about this and one morning realized although I was proudly boasting how superior we were for not lowering ourselves to that level, my own blog posts were actually doing just that. I marked those blog posts as private and left them hidden for the world to never see. Well, the migration to dasBlog suddenly had those blog posts public! dasBlog lacked the ability for me to go in and edit those posts, mark those posts as private or hide those posts. This meant I had to either hunt down these posts in my XML files and nuke them there, shutdown my website (which I did until I could decide what to do) or leave those posts public. So I shutdown the site, removed those posts and reverted back to wordpress. Fortunately, I only had 3 blog posts (most of my time has been spent blogging on the appliedi blog to build up it’s own content) so this wasn’t a great loss.
When it’s all said and done, I’m still a very big advocate of wordpress and simply found myself lacking many features that I knew were available to me in wordpress, so I’m back.
24 Hours with dasBlog .. reviews from a wordpress refugee
Sep 11th
So I’ve spent the past 24 hours with my blog converted to dasBlog. I’m pretty pleased with the blog but I have to say it’s got a long way to go if it’s going to match the power of wordpress. Here’s my take on it so far:
Features in WordPress I find myself missing in dasBlog
Now alot of these features were found with plugins and not built into wordpress so the playing field is not level. I have no doubt if I dig around I’ll find some of these features for dasblog or be able to implement them easily.
- Ability to manage categories – This seems like a no brainer but I don’t see a way to edit category titles within the admin section. This is going to cause problems as I tend to change up my categories after I post them to make them more SEO friendly.
- Themes – Yeah, I was clearly spoiled by wordpress and the hundreds of themes available there. I spent 30 minutes last night converting to dasblog and two hours trying to find a theme.
- Ability to hide a category from the homepage – This was actually a plug-in in the old blog but it’s very useful and a functionality I’m going to have to figure out how to recreate in dasblog.
- Ability to edit the theme from within the admin section of the blog. This made quick edits fairly painless.
- Umm Google Analytics? – I would think this would be built into any web app these days defacto but it’s not in dasBlog.
- Better control over the permalinks – My permalinks in wordpress were very SEOized. In dasBlog you three options, none, it’ll do and well okay here’s another option since you twisted my arm.
- Lightbox javascript effects for images.
Features I’m enjoying in dasBlog
- Akismet built in. Every blog engine should support Akismet.
- Content Filters – You can define certain regex expressions and text strings and have them replaced on the fly. dasBlog does this out the gate for dasBlog. I had this in wordpress as a plug-in
- Gravatar built in
- cocomments and ajax comments, these are cool!
- Daily email activity emails. These are cool I get to see who’s linking to me, what searches are being done and all kinds of other cool stuff.
- NO DATABASE! Nuff Said.
- BlogML support. If you’re wondering how I converted from wordpress to dasblog so easily. This is how. I’ll post a write-up soon enough on my adventures there.
- This is going to sound goofy but it’s ASP.NET based.
- All these crazy services and apis I have in the back end. I love to tinker and these are just begging for me to go learn about them and tinker the heck out of them.
- A pretty cool developer community. I’ve been lurking in their mailing list and these guys love this app and are some pretty well known developers that tinker on this thing in their free time. Really helpful and open. This is the main reason for the move.
- Windows Live Writer Support. I just can’t imagine editing a blog without.
Okay, so it’s been 24 hours and I’ll admit I’m not 100% sold on the move to dasBlog yet. Will Platnick (http://willplatnick.com) did point out one thing though. I never enabled feedburner correctly on my wordpress blog so I had to update my RSS feed url in the url rewrites that I’m trying to get away from. But now I have feeds.jesscoburn.com setup as the new RSS feed and will figure out how to update the blog to include them as the links by default as soon as I can. You’d think this would be an option in dasblog’s back end too.
