This time I mostly followed some online directions for installing a bare-bones Ubuntu media server running MediaTomb and modified things only slightly to get a result that more closely matched my requirements.

It worked (the third time I tried actually).

I celebrated my success by watching Without a Clue streamed to my PS3 directly from the new media server I had just finished configuring (plus I had time to kill while copying everything over - who knew 100gig took a while to copy).

Instructions are saved for posterity below the cut (more for my reference than yours).

To install webmin in three simple commands enter as root:

wget http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/webadmin/webmin_1.470_all.deb

dpkg -i webmin_1.470_all.deb

apt-get install -f

Once all is done, point your browser to https://ip.of.box:10000 and you will be greeted with the webmin console. You can login as root and nose around.

Enough with webmin for now, we’ll revisit that later. As root, on the command line, you will need to install several additional packages. These packages piece together your new server and contain the necessary components to start serving media to your devices across your network.

To install MediaTomb, perform these steps, we’ll worry about configuration later:

As root:
apt-get install mediatomb vlc ubuntu-restricted-extras samba

This command installs the MediaTomb software, VLC, and all the restricted extras that include many codecs for handling various media such as MP3, mpeg, etc. VLC is used by MediaTomb to transcode certain files as necessary on the fly as they are being accessed from your MediaTomb system. Samba makes it possible for you to create an SMB share to a directory which you’ll create to hold all your stuff. On my system, I setup the following directory:

/vol1

To do the same just:
cd /
mkdir vol1 && chmod 777 vol1 && chown uid:gid
(where uid and gid is the name of the user ID and Group ID of a particular user)

If we do an ls command on my vol1 here’s what it looks like:

drwxrwxrwx 6 john john 48 2009-05-25 18:15 vol1

Next, you can use the Samba webmin module to set up read/write access to everyone on the vol1 directory. This lets anyone on your network upload media files to your MediaTomb server. Once the media files are uploaded, you just need to tell MediaTomb where your media is located. This is done via any web browser on the network. Since all my media is in vol1, I have a few directories under vol1:

drwxr-xr-x 21 john john 4096 2009-05-23 17:21 music
drwxr-xr-x 58 john john 4096 2009-05-23 18:28 photographs
drwxr-xr-x 2 john john 16 2009-05-23 16:49 playlists
drwxr-xr-x 3 john john 4096 2009-06-01 18:59 videos

Once I tell MediaTomb that all my media lives under /vol1 recursively, it will then scan that parent location at regular intervals to add new media automatically as you add it later on. You only have to do this part once.

Now let’s get MediaTomb configured so it will be up and running & you can tell it where your media directory is.

The MediaTomb config file is located at:
/etc/mediatomb/config.xml

Search for and make changes to the following lines:

When done, save the file. Now restart MediaTomb by issuing the command:
/etc/init.d/mediatomb restart

Once restarted, point your web browser at:

http://ip.of.server:49152

You will see the web based control panel for the MediaTomb engine. Log in with the username and password you set in the config file.

Once logged in, click “Filesystem” at the top left of the window to generate the filesystem view. After you see the filesystem folders, click the parent folder that has all your media goodness in it. In my case it’s /vol1 so I highlighted that. Now in the right pane, click the + symbol with the circling arrows around it (near the top right).

This will tell MediaTomb to regularly rescan and add new media as you add it automatically. Now with all that done, simply copy your media goodness to the SMB share you created and shazam! it appears soon in the index when you browse the server from a PS3 console or other UPnP media playing device.

Here, we show you how the PS3 console browses content stored on your server:

I’ve decided that I will install Mediatomb on the computer (once we’ve covered a period of time running both DVR systems to make sure the new one is reliable) allowing for streaming video for UPnP devices on our home network, but for the televisions NOT equipped with UPnP I’ll be adding a cludge to allow us to access a library of movies and music from any TV in the house.

The plan is to make use of remote desktop features of Ubuntu, playing movies or music on the “server” will allow me to pipe the monitor (and audio) feed along another custom channel (like our surveillance system feed) and thus any TV in the house can whatever media is selected.

Truly MeTV. It won’t be as user friendly as I would like and will rely heavily on laptops/desktops to get the movie/music started, but once it’s rolling it should be easy enough to enjoy, no?

Someone have a better idea? I’m all ears.

The adventure culminates in a loud crash from the second floor, followed by a particular sort of howl that indicates this owee may require more than a quick kiss to set right.

Initially we figured it for a sprain as there was no swelling or bruising, but a call from the school this morning suggested that the wrist had started to swell and Jilly was still favoring her right hand.

A quick departure from work followed by a trip to our GP, then to the General Hospital pretty much killed the day and resulted in a hot pink cast for poor Jilly.

She’s recovering well, as the photo indicates.

I have some numbers in my head, but I want some sort of official confirmation.

I call the mortgage broker recommended by my Mom, turns out the mortgage broker is now working for one of the big five banks. No biggie, I’m not ready to apply for financing yet, so I warn her that this is a meeting to discuss hypotheticals and to confirm my numbers, we’re not interested in proceeding further than that at this time.

No problem. We’ll see.

The day arrives and we attend the bank branch for our meeting. We’re kept waiting 15 minutes (for no readily apparent reason) and as we settle ourselves into a spartan office we’re asked for our bank cards.

Me:“Oh, we’re not customers of Mega-Uber-Bank. We’re more like financial mercenaries, dealing with a variety of Financial Institutions.”
Mortgage Guy:“We do reward customer loyalty…”
Me:“I already receive completely free banking through my credit union, lets move on to the mortgage.”

Now. I had given advance warning that this was to be a hypothetical discussion as to mortgage size, bridge financing and all sorts of other little housy related stuff.

MG:“I’ll just need to get your authorization to check….”
Me: “No. I’m not prepared to generate more inquiries on our credit reports, I can tell you our credit scores and we can proceed on that basis.”
MG:“It’s not really a credit hit, we use Transunion which is hardly used for credit reports”
Me:“True. Just little companies like yours, American Express, MBNA and a few other wee financial outfits. No, no credit check. Sorry.”

The conversation proceeded from there, I told him our credit scores and gave him our current obligations, agreed that lying was singularly pointless and further agreed that this was a hypothetical number crunch as there was no file created.

In the end we had my numbers confirmed (although I had overestimated the available equity in our present home, failing to consider 80% LTV would be the max they would advance).

Ok, so now we have our ballpark, it’s time to prep our place for sale.

When we bought our current house we crunched the numbers, and figured out our maximum “affordable” price. We figured this was the number we could afford if we were both reduced to minimum wage jobs AND would still leave us off the “house poor” category.

Sound pessimistic? Yeah, probably, but that’s the way we roll.

Now, recently we had agreed amongst ourselves to explore the housing market and see if we could find something a little larger that we could occupy for years and years and that would address some concerns we have with our current home. My participation was a little reluctant as I love our current home and am loathe to pay closing costs and realtor fees.

The ceiling on cost was expanded for this exercise, although all calculations were made based on our present mortgage expense (changing our present accelerated bi-weekly extra to principal mortgage payment for an identically priced single monthly non-accelerated non-extra to principal mortgage payment) which increased the ceiling on purchase price approximately 100K from our present home.

Seem logical?

At the end of the day our mortgage payments would remain the same, but we’d be paying for 10 years more than with our current house (which presently has 12 years in payments left at the current rate).

Ok, so the basics had been thought out, next I needed professional verification or “proof of concept” to set my mind at ease. This meant meeting with a mortgage salesman, er…professional.

The highlights are that my brother is visiting, we’re in the process of hunting for a new house (a long story in itself), we just bought a new TV (wow, 1080p really does make a difference!) and my brother gave me a toughbook in the hopes that it might encourage my blogging efforts (so here we are).

There has been lots and lots of mucking around with technology, but as is customary we’re going to be headed for the range and hopefully I’ll be posting some gun pron instead of this sort of babble in the near future.

Thanks for your patience folks!

The final product is pretty slick. All the stuff tucked nicely out of the way and next to main electrical service, everything in the house wired to the nines so I don’t really see much need for expansion (although we have some room for it with one extension for both the telephone and television unused).

I’m proud of the finished result, but I am glad it’s done.

The good news is that the new extensions and wiring function perfectly, so I get to spend a little while pulling the old wires out and removing the surface mounted outlets.

Another consequence is that the wiring in the basement is becoming considerably less complicated.

Cool, huh?