pruperting

Server Migration Complete

So, I am now hosting this site with JustHost.com as I got tired stressing about keeping my own server up and running and not being able to upgrade it and mess with it in case I mess anything up.

Hopefully things will now be more reliable and I shall see if I can add any more services.

If you want to use JustHost.com’s services, click the small advert below and I’ll earn $60 apparently!

Make Your Own Video Baby Monitor

I’ve been quite quiet on the blog front lately, mostly because my Wifey is pregnant and we’ve only got one month to go! Being a through-and-through geek, I am always looking for ways to make my life easier or to do something cheaper through a clever technical hack and I plan to make my, my Wife’s and my baby’s lives as easy as possible through the power of the geek!

One thing I planned to do was to make my own baby monitor, rather than dropping up to £150 on some pre-built device. I wanted to be able to see as well as hear my baby when it is asleep upstairs, but those devices are very expensive. I thus thought I would try to make my own device using things lying around the house already. It actually wasn’t too difficult in the end, but I was lucky that I had the right equipment lying around. The first and most important piece of equipment is a Webcam. There are loads of options out there, but I wanted to use one that didn’t need to be connected to a PC to use. I had a Dlink DCS-2120 IP Webcam, that can connect to a Wireless network and doesn’t need a PC to run, it perfectly suited my needs.

Dlink DCS-2120

The DCS-2120 includes some built-in features that are very useful, but I’ll mention that later. You can use other Webcams, even just simple USB versions, but you’ll need something to handle the video feed. If you don’t want to run a PC all the time, you could use something smaller, like a Fonera 2.0 router, that allows you to plug a USB Webcam.

So, next, you need a wireless network. Now, I didn’t want to carry around a huge router just to get this system up and running, because after all, this system should be portable enough to take to other people’s houses when we go travelling with the baby, so I chose to use the smallest WiFi router I could get my hands on. Luckily, I had one of the smallest routers already, a La Fonera. I already had another La Fonera installed and connected to the excellent free WiFi-sharing FON network, so I didn’t mind using this router for my own devices. Since the firmware (the software that runs on the router) that comes pre-installed on the router isn’t suitable for use as a normal router, I had to install (called flashing) some alternative Firmware. I chose to use DD-WRT, since it is fully supported on the Fonera and is very flexible. I used the guide from here that had some very detailed instructions on how to install DD-WRT on the Fonera. I shall summarise it here:

1. Enable SSH access to the Fonera using a special web page hack.
2. Enable the Redboot boot loader (allowing you load alternative firmware on the Fonera).
3. Copy over the DD-WRT firmware and flash it on the Fonera.

It isn’t that simple, there are lots of steps involved, but the guide is very clear and easy to follow. Once I had DD-WRT installed, I now had a cool mini router, that I could then set-up to use with my IP Webcam.

La Fonera

Finally, I had to figure out how to actually view the feed. I wanted both a portable and a static solution. The Webcam I was using provides a feed using the rtsp protocol, so I needed a video player that could handle the rtsp stream. For my portable solution, I decided to use my Nokia N82 mobile phone, that has built in WiFi and can run the Core Media Player, that supports rtsp streams. For my static solution, I decided to use my laptop, running VLC on Ubuntu Karmic. In fact, because the Webcam just sends out the stream, any client that can access the wireless network and can play an rtsp stream will work. So, I can view the stream on my Windows Desktop upstairs, using VLC, whilst my wife can view the same stream on her Ubuntu Karmic netttop downstairs (yes Jobsworth, nettops can be useful).

I set-up the Fonera router, so that it provided a WiFi network with the same name (SSID) and security credentials as my main WiFi network at home. Thus, the Webcam automatically connects to my WiFi network when at home and my phone connects to it automatically also. Then, if I take the baby elsewhere, the Fonera replicates the WiFi network, so as far as the Webcam and phone is concerned, it is connected to the same network (this is very useful, because, the only way to change the wireless connection on the Webcam is through a wired interface, which is a bit of a complicated pain).

The real advantage of using this set-up is that you can have as many clients connected as you want to the video feed. The Webcam features a powerful microphone, so you can hear as well as see that the baby is ok and finally, the DCS-2120 includes some handy additional features, including the ability to take a photo at set intervals and upload them to an FTP server. Thus, I will be able to create one of those cool time-lapse movies of my baby as it sleeps and grows over time. I also chose the Fonera, because you can connect alternative aerials to it, most noticeably the La Fontenna, so this set-up should even work in my parent’s old house that has 12″ thick solid stone walls.

Since this whole system is meant to allow me to check up on our baby whilst it sleeps, I wanted to make sure it doesn’t look quite so scary and also allow it to be quite versatile. I thus bought a little teddypig, put the Webcam inside and used a Gorillapod camera stand to keep the Webcam in place (and also so I could attach it to pretty much anything).

It might look a little freaky, but I think it looks much less scary than the Webcam on its own.

Finally, here is a quick movie of the WebPig in action, alongside my laptop and mobile phone, showing it all working. The Core Media Player isn’t the best app in the world, so the video feed on the phone occasionally breaks up, as the video shows, but in general, it works very well.

The WebPig

Automount a drive in Ubuntu

I wrote this as a post on XBMC forum, but I thought I should share the wealth. The following is a guide to automounting a drive in a minimal install of Ubuntu with no GUI or desktop, only CLI access.

To manually get a minimal install of Ubuntu to auto-mount a USB drive at boot:

First off, you need command line access (also called The Terminal) to your installation and also you need to boot WITHOUT your USB drive connected. So, shutdown your box and then disconnect your USB drive. Now restart the box. Then, when XBMC has loaded, press Alt and F7 together, which should bring up a new Terminal screen with a log in.

Then log in using your username and password that you set up when you installed Ubuntu.

Next you need to type the following:

tail -f /var/log/syslog

This basically prints out the system log as it changes. Once you have typed this, plug in your USB drive. You should see a load of new stuff being printed in your terminal, this is the Ubuntu system recognising and loading your USB drive (though not mounting it). You should see something like this:


Jan  8 13:13:34 xpuntu kernel: [ 1671.616121] usb 2-2: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 5
Jan  8 13:13:34 xpuntu kernel: [ 1671.750917] usb 2-2: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
Jan  8 13:13:34 xpuntu kernel: [ 1671.752477] scsi6 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
Jan  8 13:13:34 xpuntu kernel: [ 1671.752815] usb-storage: device found at 5
Jan  8 13:13:34 xpuntu kernel: [ 1671.752820] usb-storage: waiting for device to settle before scanning
Jan  8 13:13:39 xpuntu kernel: [ 1676.753513] usb-storage: device scan complete
Jan  8 13:13:39 xpuntu kernel: [ 1676.754606] scsi 6:0:0:0: Direct-Access     WDC WD16 00AABB-56PUA0    7H00 PQ: 0 ANSI: 2 CCS
Jan  8 13:13:39 xpuntu kernel: [ 1676.755793] sd 6:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg2 type 0
Jan  8 13:13:39 xpuntu kernel: [ 1676.756402] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] 312581808 512-byte logical blocks: (160 GB/149 GiB)
Jan  8 13:13:39 xpuntu kernel: [ 1676.757163] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] Write Protect is off
Jan  8 13:13:39 xpuntu kernel: [ 1676.757171] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] Mode Sense: 00 38 00 00
Jan  8 13:13:39 xpuntu kernel: [ 1676.757176] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through
Jan  8 13:13:39 xpuntu kernel: [ 1676.761108] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through
Jan  8 13:13:39 xpuntu kernel: [ 1676.761119]  sdb: sdb1
Jan  8 13:13:39 xpuntu kernel: [ 1676.774572] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through
Jan  8 13:13:39 xpuntu kernel: [ 1676.774583] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] Attached SCSI disk

You want to look out for the reference to “[sd*]“, in my case it is [sdb]. This is the name that Ubuntu has given to your USB drive.

Next stop the tail command, so press:

Ctrl and C

This stops the tail command, then type the following:

sudo blkid

You will have to enter your password. This should give you something like the following:

/dev/sda1: UUID="1024B74F24B73696" TYPE="ntfs"
/dev/sda5: UUID="015273a3-e1a8-4d53-867f-ffec83b3df60" TYPE="swap"
/dev/sda6: UUID="50b2512a-4d07-4a83-860e-be608a5b2cb7" TYPE="ext4"
/dev/sdb1: LABEL="" UUID="48D3-B1C9" TYPE="vfat"

What you see should be different from this. This basically lists all the drives attached to your system, alongside two important pieces of info, the drives UUID number and what the drive is formatted as. You need to find the reference to the “sd*” that you found out earlier, so in my case it is /dev/sdb1. Then, make a note of the UUID number and the TYPE as well, in my case it is vfat.

So, now we know where our USB drive is and what it is called.

Next, we want to tell Ubuntu to automount it each time it boots.

So, you need to edit the /etc/fstab file that tells Ubuntu what drives to mount at boot. Be careful here, don’t delete or change anything that is already in this file, since it will stop your device from booting. It is ok to add new stuff to this file however. To be safe, we shall make a backup of the /etc/fstab file, just incase we mess up. If we do mess up, simple copy this backup over the /etc/fstab file and reboot and everything will be back as we found it. So, to make a backup simple type:

sudo cp /etc/fstab /etc/fstabackup

This copies the /etc/fstab file to /etc/fstabackup, which we can use as a backup.

To edit the /etc/fstab file, you need to use the command line Text editor called Vi ([url]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vi[/url] and [url]http://www.cs.colostate.edu/helpdocs/vi.html[/url]) I would recommend reading about it first, since it is a bit of an arse to use in Terminal mode.

Start Vi to edit your file using:

sudo vi /etc/fstab

Use your arrow keys to move down to the very end of the file. Then press “a” to Append stuff to the end of the file. Press Return to start a new line and then type the following:

UUID=YOURUUIDNUMBERHERE /home/xbmc/usb vfat defaults 0 0

Add your own UUID number after the = and change the TYPE if yours wasn’t vfat. /home/xbmc/usb is where you will be mounting your USB drive, this can be anything you want, but to make your life easy, since XBMC defaults to showing your home directory in the file browser, put it under your home directory, so in my case, the main user on my box is xbmc, so I use /home/xbmc/usb.

Press Enter again after typing that, then press Escape, then press and hold Shift and press Z twice, this saves and exits Vi.

Next, you need to make the folder that the drive will be mounted in, so type:

mkdir /home/xbmc/usb

Replace /home/xbmc/usb with whatever you put in the /etc/fstab file earlier.

Finally, that is it. Hopefully, if all went well, you can now simply reboot, with your USB drive attached, and the drive will be found at /home/xbmc/usb which you can navigate to from XBMC.

Best of luck!!

Backup Backup Backup – Updated

So, my main storage drive failed yesterday. Admitedly I have been having problems with it over the past few months, with fsck throwing errors on reboot, but yesterday it totally died. One minute it was happily sharing my music out via samba, the next, everything had gone Luckily, I run a good backup solution, so all I had to do was get myself a new drive (upgrading to 1TB in the process) and copy over my backed up files.

Simple, but if I wasn’t running my backup solution, I would have been screwed – bye bye to my music, photos and work files.

Thank you rsback and rsync….

(Update)

What is even more awesome, is that since Linux regards everything as a file (so all drives are effectively referred to as files (via the UUID) in Linux (in my case Ubuntu)) swapping out a drive with a new one is very simple. I just updated /etc/fstab with the UUID of the new drive, and then copied over my backed up files to it.

As far as Ubuntu is now concerned, it is the same drive, now only bigger. So all my samba shares and rsync folders all work as before.

God I love Linux.

MythTV Recordings: Rename, Move and Delete From The Database

So, I have been using MythTV for a while now and it is a.w.e.s.o.m.e.. However, I had one problem, since I transcode and store all my videos on my Ubuntu server and not my MythTV box (which is off most of the time via mythwelcome) I had to manually transfer recorded files to my Ubuntu server via mythweb.

I thought this was a bit of a hokey solution, so I asked around if there was a script that allowed you to rename MythTV recordings (to a more human readable version), move them to another location and remove them from the MythTV database. There were some solutions out there, but they all involved the recorded files being kept in the MythTV database.

So, I wrote my own script. This script renames the MythTV files to a nice human understandable version using mythrename.pl, it then moves the recordings to a folder of your choice (in my case a mounted samba share on my server), it then uses myth.find_orphans.pl to delete the moved recordings from the mythTV database (I don’t know if it will still remember that these files were previously recorded so it doesn’t rerecord them or not, I guess time will tell).

So, without further ado, here is the script, in lovely Bash (the script is called mythtvremodel (mythtv REname MOve DELete, geddit?):


#! /bin/sh
### BEGIN INIT INFO
# Provides: mythtvremodel
# Required-Start:    $local_fs $syslog $remote_fs dbus
# Required-Stop:     $local_fs $syslog $remote_fs
# Default-Start:     2 3 4 5
# Default-Stop:      0 1 6
# Short-Description: rename, move delete recordings
### END INIT INFO
# script to rename files recorded from mythtv and then to move them and delete them
#made by prupert.co.uk
#creative commons licence, whichever is the most FREE (as in beer)

#lets put in some variables so others can use this
#location of log file, you can choose anything and any name
log=/path/to/mythtvremodel.log
#this is the full path to mythrename.pl
mrename=/location/to/mythrename.pl
#this is the full path to your recordings folder
record=/var/www/mythweb/data/recordings/
#this is the extension your recordings are stored as, usually mpg or nuv
ext=mpg
#this is the full path to where you want your files moved to
dest=/path/to/folder/to/move/recordings/to/
#this is the full path to myth.find_orphans.pl
morphan=/path/to/myth.find_orphans.pl
#mythtv database password for myth.find_orphans.pl
pass=yourmythtvdatabasepassword

# first, run mythtvrename to get nice names for the recordings
echo starting mythtvremodel on `date "+%m/%d/%y %l:%M:%S %p"` > $log
perl $mrename --underscores --format %T-%S-%d%m%y >> $log
# use find to search for all recorded files in the recording folder and move them to the TV folder
find "$record" -name "*.$ext" >> $log
find "$record" -name "*.$ext" -exec mv {} "$dest" \; >> $log
# use mythorphan to remove the now missing recorded files from the database
perl $morphan --pass=$pass --dodbdelete >> $log
#that should be it
echo stopping mythtvremodel on `date "+%m/%d/%y %l:%M:%S %p"` >> $log
exit 0

And there you have it. Now, since I run mythbuntu, I have put this script in /etc/rc0.d (thats rc zero . d) and have named it K03mythtvremodel, thus it is run when my system shuts down, but before all the samba shares and drives are unmounted. As I said, since I use mythwelcome to shutdown my machine when idle, this seemed like the best solution.

Hope it helps someone!

MediaCenter: PS3 No, XBMC YES!

So, for many months I have been slaving away with my PS3 and server, getting Mediatomb to work well and finding a setting for ffmpeg that my PS3 will like. What a waste of time!!

The fact that the PS3 only supports UPnP or locally stored videos is a joke, I mean, come on Sony, Windows Shares are where it is at. Mediatomb is great at what it does, but the interface of any UPnP device is just SO horrible.

However, the interface on XBMC is just liquid gold, that can be further customised via skins like Aeon or Mediastream. Both look truly beautiful and put the PS3 to shame. I would dearly love to run XBMC on my old Xbox, but sadly it just hasn’t got the processing power to play my .x264 encoded mp4 videos, so I will use it just as my Music player (still using XBMC on it though). Thus my HTPC, which primarily runs MythTV will now also be used to view my videos via XBMC. It seems rediculous to me that a machine as powerful as the PS3 comes with such an ugly and limited Media Player interface as the UPnP protocol. I guess because Sony are shortly to release Video Store to stream and download Videos, they want that to be the main way PS3 users access videos, and not ones they already own. At the end of the day, it is all about new revenue streams

Still, all I can say is that XBMC rules, and I wish I had an Acer Revo with the new Nvidea Ion platform to truly appreciate the full power of XBMC without worrying about messing up my MythTV set-up

Fix the Dell Mini 10v Touchpad

So, my lovely Wife recently got a rather cute Dell Mini 10v.

It comes with a horribly stripped down version of Ubuntu 8.04 from Dell pre-installed. Luckily, however, that can be ripped out and a nice new install of 9.04 can take its place and it all works wonderfully….except the touchpad. To save space, Dell has used a horrible touchpad that integrates the two left and right mouse buttons into the touchpad itself, so when you go to click on something, you actualy end up moving the mouse at the same time. I was amazed that no one mentioned this in any of the reviews about the mini 10v, I guess everyone was embarrassed since they thought it was just them and they had fat fingers! Luckily, the Open Source Ubuntu community being what it is, there is a fix out there.

If you follow this post there is a clear step-by-step guide telling you how to download some specialised drivers for the touchpad that disable the lower portion of the touchpad, so that it works just as a left and right mouse button and not as part of the touchpad. THANK YOU. My Wife was getting ready to throw her netbook out the window until I found that fix. Be warned though, it only works on the 9.04 (and hopefully later) versions of Ubuntu and not on the version of Ubuntu that comes pre-installed, so you will have to install a new normal version of Ubuntu from their website first (though this is a simple process). I hope this helps some one else and allows them to love their Mini 10v, not hate it!

Tags: Dell, Hacks, mini10v

Stop snort detecting local traffic

I use the rather excellent and Open Source snort to help monitor and protect my network. However, it was causing muchos havoc with my VNC, SSH and samba connections. I found out this was all down to (as is sadly normal for most opensource projects) confusion related to the configuration.

In the snort.conf file, you are meant to set you home network (the place you are protecting, but don’t want to detect), using

HOME_NET XXX.XXX.X.XXX

And then your external network (the place where attacks might come from and do want to detect) using

EXTERNAL_NET XXX.XXX.X.XXX

Now, the method the configuration and snort documentation tells you to use is, to basically tell snort that anything that isn’t in your home network is in your external nework, so

EXTERNAL_NET !HOME_NETWORK

The exclamation basically meaning NOT. However, if you put an IP address string as your home network, for example (as is suggested in the configuration)

HOME_NET 192.168.1.1/24

for some reason, using !HOME_NETWORK for your external network doesn’t work and snort will happily go and detect all traffic coming from your local network…GRR. Luckily, after some Googling I came across this message and found that the way to get EXTERNAL_NETWORK to work correctly was to use

EXTERNAL_NET [!192.168.1./24]

Finally, snort no longer goes ape about my local traffic and now only finds the retarded script kiddies from Russia and China and the Netherlands (since that is where most of the attacks I get come from) and blocks them. Thanks mailing list, no thanks snort.conf….

Tags: hackers, security, snort

How To Use FFMPEG To Transcode Video For The PS3

So, it seems my last post actually wasn’t the best solution. Although using Mediatomb and VLC worked some of the time, often I found that the audio and video was out of sync, making it impossible to watch the movie.

So, I looked for another alternative. I already use HandBrakeCLI to transcode my videos, but that is essentially a front end to ffmpeg and x264. They are moving away from providing decent support for transcoding videos on the Playstation 3, so I decided to use ffmpeg directly. I used this guide to install the latest svn versions of ffmpeg and x264 on my Ubuntu 8.04 server. I then spent about two weeks trying to find an up-to-date command to actually use ffmpeg to create a PS3 compatible file. It seems most of the instructions on the web are way out of date and use commands that ffmpeg no longer accepts. Finally, after lots of trying I finally asked on the IRC channel #ffmpeg. This very nice dude called relaxed suggested the following:

ffmpeg -t 120 -i $input -vcodec libx264 -level 41 -vpre hq -crf 24 -threads 0 -acodec libfaac -ab 128k -ac 2 output.mp4

Sadly I had problems with this code, since the .mpg files I was using (I am now using MythTV instead of MediaPortal, but that’s another post) were not accepted by the libfaac codec.

However, with a little modification, I got the perfect command. So, without further ado, the best command I have found to convert ANY video accepted by ffmpeg into a PS3 compatible file using x264 that is good quality and low file size is:

ffmpeg -y -i "$1" -vcodec libx264 -level 41 -vpre normal -crf 24 -threads 0 -acodec libfaac -ab 128k -ac 2 -ar 48000 "$1".mp4

Obviously change $1 into your input file and “$1″.mp4 into your output file. If you want to send the command line output to a log file so you can see what is going in, use:

ffmpeg -y -i "$1" -vcodec libx264 -level 41 -vpre normal -crf 24 -threads 0 -acodec libfaac -ab 128k -ac 2 -ar 48000 "$1".mp4 > /where/you/store/your/logs/ffmpegprog.log 2>&1

Now, when I first saw this I thought, hey, its got hardly any switches (all the -XYZ stuff), therefore it must be cack.  However, the key is the “-vpre normal” switch.  This tells ffmpeg to use some of its built-in presets, or in this case built-in x264 presets that are created when you build x264 from SVN. I was initially told, as you can see from above, to use the “hq” preset, but I found this resulted in files that were quite big. Using the “normal” preset seemed to produce files that were of great quality compared to my original source (SD DVB-T transport streams in MPG format) but much smaller files size, for example, a .mpg transport stream movie that is originally 2.5GBs in size gets reduced to around 650 MBs, awesome.

So, this is the command I now use to convert all my videos. I also use comskip run via Wine to check for commercials and mp4box to mux in the chapter markers from comskip. Weirdly, I do find that when playing these resultant files via VLC they appear to have their audio and video out of sync, but on the PS3 they are fine. Whether this is due to me using an old VLC or my PC being too slow to play em, I don’t know, but hey, if it works.

So, if you are looking for the best ffmpeg command to transcode video files for the PS3 using ffmpeg and x264, I am pretty sure this is it.

As an aside, I also built HandBrakeCLI from SVN and it now also has a basic preset, called Normal, that also produces PS3 compatible files. I will play with them to see how they do, though I find that occasionally HandBrake can crash, and get stuck, so I try to avoid it. Sadly though, the HandBrake dev’s wont help you with this, since you are using the HandBrakeCLI and it is not the CLI that is crashing so they wont look into it for you. In fact (<rant>) I am really shocked at the rudeness and arrogance that the HandBrake devs demonstrate on their forum. I have read so many well worded and polite posts from confused people on their forums, where the devs (mainly a guy called jbrake) just answers back incredibly sarcastically and very rudely, providing little to no help. Maybe they get loads of annoying whiny posts from people who haven’t RTFM, but still, there is no need to be rude about it. In fact, that is the main reason I don’t want to use HandBrake, since I don’t like the attitude those guys have (</rant>).

Anyway, hope this awesome command for a recent SVN ffmpeg and x264 version to convert video files for PS3 works for you!

UPnP, PS3, Transcoding and MediaTomb

For quite a while I had been using PS3MediaServer to provide access to my Video files from my PS3. The problem was, I was getting huge problems getting it to support anything other than the files that the PS3 natively supports. I had previously messed around with MediaTomb but I couldn’t get it’s transcoding features to work. But then I came across this post and it sorted all my problems out. I simply followed the tutorial there and made some minor adjustments, which I will describe below.

MediaTomb

The quickest way to follow the tutorial is to cheat and just copy and paste the config.xml that is kindly provided. However, I have found that copy and pasting the whole config.xml doesn’t work. I am pretty sure it is to do with the <udn>uuid= part of the config, since I guess this aligns and individual config to an individual MediaTomb installation. Thus, simply copy and paste all the stuff after and including this line:

“<protocolInfo extend=”yes”/><!– For PS3 support change to “yes” –>

and you’ll be good to go. Next, since most of my files are in the MKV container, I needed to add some extra stuff to support MKV files and the transcoding of them. So, I added the following two lines to their respective places (you can tell where they should go by looking at their format and looking for other lines that look similar). I added these two lines:

<map from=”mkv” to=”video/x-matroska”/>

<transcode mimetype=”video/x-matroska” using=”vlcmpeg”/>

And awesomely, it worked straight out of the box. Nice one Mr Pyke! There are a few more things to add, like adding thumbnail support, which I understand you can do by using a script and app called thumbnailermpeg, but that’s about it. I have found that using MediaTomb and VLC to transcode files puts much less strain on my server than using PS3MediaServer ever did. HTOP shows MediaTomb and VLC when streaming an MKV file pushing the server to around 15% CPU usage on my dual core Pentium4. Doing the same thing for one of the few supported movies by PS3MediaServer shows CPU usage maxed out at 100% on both cores full time. Ouchy! So I have saved some energy and prolonged the lifespan of my server by doing this too. I know that at the moment MediaTomb doesn’t do all the fancy things that PS3MediaServer does (like AC3 pass-through and stuff) but I can live without that. I am sure there was a lot I was missing in PS3MediaServer that it can do and it is updated much more frequently than MediaTomb, but I just couldn’t agree with the huge resource usage it entails.

I now have full streaming of all my recorded-off-the-tele MKV movies and I am a happy bunny, so thanks RobertPyke and thanks MediaTomb!