Attaching old hard drives

I have a draw full of old HD's ranging from 4-80GB. All from old PC and repairs over the last few years. I was thinking of getting a caddy so I could plug them in to check what was on them, but found an even better bit of kit. It's simply a USB cable with an adapter on the end that plugs in to SATA, 2.5 IDE or 3.5 IDE drives, plus a power supply. So I can plug the two cables in to the bare drive, plug in to the USB on the PC - Linux auto mounts, and hey presto, I can get all the old data off, and shred as necessary.

A very well spent £10, from Ebuyer IIRC.

HandBrake and DVD::Rip

Up to now I've been using DVD::Rip to rip DVD's for playback on my media streamer. It's worked fine, but have had various sound sync issues, and for the life of me cannot get H264 encoding to work.

Now I'm using Handbrake, which is pretty good. Not quite as friendly as DVD:Rip (or maybe I'm just not used to it), but have been able to encode to H264 (via x264) which means that's the way I'm going for the moment.

LibreOffice vs OpenOffice

Just installed LibreOffice on my Ubuntu box, and have been very pleased so far. Certainly starts up very quickly when compared to OpenOffice. Did it via a PPA rather than a package install, all worked well. Used the instructions here Ubuntu Wiki

Not seen any issues yet, but I'm not a heavy user. The better MS compatibility should be a boon, and the further away from Oracle's grubby mitts the better!

Getting old Inventel Wireless adapter to work on Ubuntu Linux

I've had an old Inventel USB adapter (UR054g)hanging around for a while, and previous attempts have failed at getting it to work in Ubuntu. I think this was supplied when we first had a LiveBox from Freeserve (bought by Orange - may be wrong was a while ago)

However, latest effort has gone very well! I'm using Ubuntu 10.10, and the following process seems to have got it working. The device is auto loaded by Ubuntu when you plug it in, but the important step is to make sure you have the correct firmware that is loaded to the stick when it is plugged in.

I used the instructions from here...http://wireless.kernel.org/en/users/Drivers/p54

which basically boil down to download the right firmware, in my case the chip inside is a isl3887usb, so I downloaded from http://daemonizer.de/prism54/prism54-fw/fw-usb/2.13.25.0.lm87.arm, rename the file to isl3887usb and copied it to /libs/firmware (you need to do this as root).

You can find out the chip used in the device by using lsusb in a terminal, and one line shows something like :

Bus 002 Device 008: ID 1435:0427 Wistron NeWeb

I then used the device ID 1435:0427 in Google and found out it was the isl3887usb.

Restart the driver by

modprobe -r p54pci

modprobe p54pci

Add hey presto, it all starts working.

Transcoding DVD to AVI on my Ubuntu box

I have a Sumvision media streamer, and have been transcoding all my DVD's to AVI so I can use them on the streamer. I have been using DVD::Rip which seems to do a great job, with the underlying Transcode app doing most of the hard work. However, I had done a load when I found that that on lots of the results the sound was out of sync. Now I need to try with transcode options -M [0..4] to see which gives the best result on a subset of the frames (i.e -M 2) before I code the entire movie. It's a pain, but not found another way of doing it yet.

Another pain is that for some reason I cannot encode to H.264 so am having to use mpeg, which means the files are quite a bit bigger than they need to be.

Mame on Ubuntu 10.10 (Meerkat)

Well, I recently took the plunge and upgraded to Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat). The upgrade to 10.04 had been slightly problematical as the wireless networking stopped (see a previous post), so was hoping for a better experience this time.

And so far its been pretty good with one exception. Mame stopped working. Now previously I had been using SDL Mame as this was the only one I found that displayed correctly, although sound wasn't working. Now, using the GMAMEUI it wasn't running the executable as all, with an odd byte order error.

Turns out (I think) that SDL mame has been merged with normal Mame, so by uninstalling SDL, ensuring basic Mame was installed, and pointing GMAMEUI to the Mame executable, it all started working. And I do mean ALL - the sounds as well. Hurrah!

The only other issue with 10.10 I have found is that F-Spot Import seems to be very very slow. Will post when I figure that one out.

Sumvision Cyclone MKV

I've wanted to try out some sort of media streaming for a while. My television has a USB socket, and will play music or show slideshows, but no video. My DVD player on the TV upstairs has a USB socket and will play back HD files, but not all of them - it fails on DivX5.

What I really wanted was some sort of cheap box that could wirelessly stream media from my Linux box to a TV.

So, some searching later, and I purchased a Sumvision cyclone MKV streamer - the one without the internal harddisk. About £65 or so from Ebuyer. Also went for the USB wireless N adapter to go with it at about £15. This device can play back almost anything up to 1080P via the HDMI connector - although the cable is NOT supplied which is a bit cheap.

First thoughts are how tiny it is. Not much bigger than my hand. Plenty of connectors on the back and side, but I just needed power, somewhere to plug the adapter and the HDMI. The picture quality of the GUI on my 1080P is really good, and playing back HD video from the SD card adapter showed the playback quality was also very good.

The wireless network was easy to set up and worked first time - my network is G so not getting the benefit of the N adapter though. Running MediaTomb on my Linux box and I could stream files easily over UPNP. The main problem was that ISO images would not run - they gave an invalid file error. This I think is down to network speed. Running them from SD card worked fine, but over the network they bombed. Probably the streamer needed to download a lot of the ISO before it could run it, and it timed out before it could load enough. I have now directly connected the box to my router as they are only 1m apart, to reduce the wireless traffic, but won't have that option when I put another of these boxes upstairs

So, my initial plan of using ISO images failed at the first hurdle, but I think this may be a good thing. Instead I have been slowly ripping my DVD collection and transcoding to MPEG4 instead of leaving as ISO. This means I am going to use up a LOT less disk space but I lose the DVD menus - and to be honest not so worried about those anyway.

I'd prefer in fact to transcode to H264, but so far have not persuaded my Ubuntu box to do that. I'm using DVD::Rip which works really well, but I get an error on h264 encoding. I have some ideas what the problem may be so will write them up if successful fixed.

So in precis, the streamer works fine (although it does run very very hot) when wirelessly connected as long as you don't use ISO images. It's easy to just select what you want to watch from a list on the screen rather than digging through a cupboard of DVD's

Transcoding the DVD's is going to take ages though - two weeks and I have only done the children's DVD's so far! Still, as long as my backups work, I won't have to do it all again!