Tech Corner

[jaylach]

Hey, here is one I use a LOT. How about an Excel spread sheet set up as a media menu? Oh, click on a title and it plays. I just enter a new title and highlight the title text Then just right click on the highlighted text and link it to the video file.

Here is a tiny portion of my media menu using Excel.

 

[MaloK]

That is pretty cool,

I prefer to use Emby Server, they have made great progress and you can have your own media server accessible word wide... For free absolutely 0$... There's a paid edition that is more powerful in transcoding because it offers GPU processing... But there is no limitation to media and libraries. With a beautiful web and phone client. The server can also initiate air play and cast everything on anything that part is really amazing, it can also broadcast pictures to intelligent photo frames. With a little tweaking it can also be used to serve comic books. you can also make thumb drives to use full theater client on smart tv's... It's like Ali Baba's Cave, filled with treasures...

Only problem is the time you'll have to dedicate to get it up running. But once done, I have been running it since 2016 and never lost the database I bought a lifetime emby premiere to be able to use it a full capacity. And I just drop a movie in my library and the server take care of the rest.

The whole rig holds a 5 gig database and a little over 12TB of media and it contains a massive numbers of movies, TV shows, music of all kind.

It's a really fun server software that has many capability and top grade presentation.

 

[jaylach]

I thought about using box covers as movie titles but with well over 1000 movies I think it would be too much.

I've never used it but my Belkin router will act as a media server, just have to enable it and, I guess, connect a drive to the router's USB.

 

[MaloK]

I thought about using box covers as movie titles but with well over 1000 movies I think it would be too much.

I've never used it but my Belkin router will act as a media server, just have to enable it and, I guess, connect a drive to the router's USB.

It's about 1mo per video media, 500k for music and a DB couple gigs big. Still requires a decent computer, but can run on any i5 2-3 gen. Still adding a plugin for statistics will take many days to compile initial data, after that all is good.

My rig contains a little more than 1300 movies, around 12k tv shows, over 33k music files. And a good 20k of that is the best rock ever. 30K comic books and thousands of pictures. Over 130K of scanned books and even more A ridiculous number of magazines for whooping 5TB. Many scans of book really hard to get... I'm a digital collector.

Last time I copied the media folder over, was really tough, long. And it's coming my way.

So... Since many of these titles are impossible to get a hand on today... I'm remagnetizing these again before they get lost.

And add a lot more space.

 

[jaylach]

I don't worry much about losing media as I have a complete duplicate on a second desktop. Blow a drive and just replace and copy. I even have a SATA data and power cable running outside my main system case that I can connect the new drive, or other, to help speed things up a bit.

 

[MaloK]

I have power and sata hanging behind my towers too, but this is way beyond having a copy for... I have the books and comics. photos... But no videos None of them are that important.

So it still worth maintaining in shape.

 

[jaylach]

I DO have some stuff that could possibly be hard to replace such as Jethro Tull doing piebald without Ian Anderson on flute and an audio book of Contact with Jodie Foster narrating.

 

[MaloK]

I DO have some stuff that could possibly be hard to replace such as Jethro Tull doing piebald without Ian Anderson on flute and an audio book of Contact with Jodie Foster narrating.

I seen Ian in a private concert with tickets won on chom fm, don't remember the exact question. But the answer was Cross-Eyed Mary...

 

[seangee]

I seen Ian in a private concert with tickets won on chom fm, don't remember the exact question. But the answer was Cross-Eyed Mary...

Ah what a character he is

 

[MaloK]

Today's the day of the file transfer.

Cant wait to see how long it's going to take. The raid is a little shy from 178K files for 11.5TB.

How many wont make it ?!?

 

[MaloK]

Outch !!!

It's going to take 6 days, maybe more.. Then I remembered the last time I copied it, I used PrimoCache to accelerate things up. So I stopped the copy, I use UnstoppableCopier, so copy process can be stopped and resumed.

I installed The new primo with my old reg# and activation completed.... I configured a task that prefetch on source and lazy write back on destination With 8 gig of ram.

Restarted the copy... While Unstoppable reports a lower MB/s speed, I can see the cache writes already racked 3 times as much in 20 minutes than all morning

But at this beat it's going to be completed today Darn this software is awesome !!! Just using it with modest parameters can save a good 25% and more of disk activity on OS drives and speedup even the fastest SSD's with ram cache, and can also use ssd's as secondary cache for spinning disks. If you have a good old hd as boot drive and ram to spare,try it, it's shareware.

This is a real life saver in large windows stuff migration, I like to replace the whole raid array at once and write back all data on them. Old raid 5 that rebuild many times are surprisingly full of errors when copied. And mainly prefer to aggregate mirrors instead of using parity strips.

Atm I lost one bugs bunny episode.

 

[seangee]

This time around I did all 4 in the home machine and 2 in the office. Much smaller systems but I could not get replacement 3Tb disks so put 4 4Tbs in at home and moved the good disks to the office. I just did the mutliple rebuild route, took a couple of days but zero down time. Home is raid 5 4 which took a couple of days. Office was much quicker as that is raid 5 3+1, and of course 2 of the disks stayed where they were. For the office I used the spare first remotely. So when I got around to going in it was a 5 minute job to pull out 2 drives and replace them.

 

[anewbie]

I have a lot of computers - they are all linux based but one which is windows 10. From 96 till around 05 i used freebsd which required non ide drives. Then apple hired Jordan to do their micro-kernel (using freebsd).

I'd like to upgrade my windows 10 box to windows 11 but i need to make a recovery disk first which i will one day. The hardware supports tp whatever for secure boot but since i started with windows 7 (or was it 3.1) and upgraded through 10 the boot drive is currently non-secure which windows 11 requires. To be honest 7 was the best and all this transition is just bullcrap by a bullcrappy company but patches are mandatory in these days even if the machine is only on when i play games (i use it like a ps4 but kb/m only).

For linux i run zfs so i use ubuntu since i got tired of building my own kernel (which i did before ubuntu provided zfs with the install). zfs is the best - when we made a raid system @ work it was pretty neat since the raid was distributed across a cluster and as long as P+1 disks didn't fail we could keep serving data if machines crashed or disk died (and disk died a bit more often than they should but when you have several many 10's of thousand disks a few will die every couple of days. Sadly we couldn't take any of the disks home for personal usage

 

[MaloK]

Agree, business is business, but that's personal stuff and can suffer extended down time. And I want to know every file that has not been readable.

On the other hand, I have no iptv, no radio, nothing atm. If I find the tv remote before the copy is over, I can try to stream radio from my phone to my living room sound system...

But I must be able to switch to another input to have the auth # on the TV...

loll... Timing is good because I wont use it for a while.

But while it's a lot faster I still expect a good vacation because the slow downs randomly occurring during some reads are quite noticeable and that's not inviting.

They have a tendency to become worse passed the center of the plates.

 

[seangee]

I have a lot of computers - they are all linux based but one which is windows 10. From 96 till around 05 i used freebsd which required non ide drives. Then apple hired Jordan to do their micro-kernel (using freebsd).

I'd like to upgrade my windows 10 box to windows 11 but i need to make a recovery disk first which i will one day. The hardware supports tp whatever for secure boot but since i started with windows 7 (or was it 3.1) and upgraded through 10 the boot drive is currently non-secure which windows 11 requires. To be honest 7 was the best and all this transition is just bullcrap by a bullcrappy company but patches are mandatory in these days even if the machine is only on when i play games (i use it like a ps4 but kb/m only).

For linux i run zfs so i use ubuntu since i got tired of building my own kernel (which i did before ubuntu provided zfs with the install). zfs is the best - when we made a raid system @ work it was pretty neat since the raid was distributed across a cluster and as long as P+1 disks didn't fail we could keep serving data if machines crashed or disk died (and disk died a bit more often than they should but when you have several many 10's of thousand disks a few will die every couple of days. Sadly we couldn't take any of the disks home for personal usage

These days they are all just tools of the trade and TBH there is no better or best. I quite like Windows 11 - of course not the ads but it doesn't bother me enough to shell out for the enterprise version so I can get rid of them completely, and now you can have embedded Ubuntu its even easier when using the CLI. And powershell doesn't care if you use / or \ and even recognises commands like ls (but you still have to use Windows style switches). For servers I have been Ubuntu for a long time (although at work its predictably all RHEL) and Mint for desktops. Obvious choice because I was quite early onto the Debian bandwagon. I went off Apple because I lost a couple of Macbooks to the famous fried GPU issue which Apple persistently denied existed.

I honestly don't care what you put me in front of, and my personal storage is set up so that I can be up and running with all my own stuff within minutes on any OS. My only constraint is that I need WIndows for Photoshop and Lightroom - and I never replaced my last Macbook when it committed suicide.