nowalmart
11-18-07, 02:06 PM
I am a new user here at AVS Forum.
My current set up is an EyeTV 250 hooked up to my main machine, a Core Duo iMac with about 1TB of attached storage for the eyeTV archive, stored movies and music.
I recently lost the Mac Mini I had hooked up to my HDTV. Prior to that I had the eyeTV and the storage hooked up to the Mini, with the Mini serving up content to the other machines in the household. With the loss of the Mac Mini, though, I had to figure out something else.
I bought a Buffalo LinkTheater PC-P3LWG/DVD, a UPnP player that I got pretty cheap (~$100) and figured I would give that a try.
The LinkTheater works for most of my media (although it obviously does not work on iTMS media), but I did run into one issue: For some reason most of my media was recorded using 44.2 kHz sampling rate and the LinkTheater really did not like that. Going to 48 kHz sees to fix that issue, although my older media cannot be changed.
Some issues I ran into with UPnP on OS X:
1) EyeConnect, el gato's UPnP server, was using up massive amounts of real RAM, even while not doing anything. I am talking about between 500 and 600MB of RAM. el gato support got back to me with a fix (delete and recreate "iTunes Music Library.xml"), but that only got it down to about 200MB. By that time I had already purchased TwonkyMedia anyway.
2) MediaTomb had the right price (OSS), but I could just never get it to work correctly. It kept not seeing my mp4 files as MPEG files, so my LinkTheater would never play them.
3) TwonkyMedia, which I ended up purchasing, works fairly well although it definitely has limits to its documentation. The layout, for example, seems to be customizable, but there seems to be NO documentation on what the different options do.
TwonkyMedia also did not like the layout of the eyeTV archive. eyeTV saves its recordings as packages - for example, "House - Ugly.eyetv" is a package containing between one and four different files, one of them being the actual .mpg recording with a random name like 0009egh8.mpg. Since TwonkyMedia sees this as a folder containing an .mpg file, viewing "All Videos" in TwonkyMedia would show about 200 video files with random names attached, making it impossible to navigate to the correct show.
Last night I sat down and churned out a quick script to go through the eyeTV recordings and create a new folder full of symlinks (aliases) to the actual .mpg file, but with the name of the package containing the .mpg.
So the folder now has "House - Ugly.mpg" in it, pointing to the file 0009egh8.mpg inside "House - Ugly.eyetv" I changed TwonkyMedia to instead look inside the new folder, and everything now works as it should. I also set up a launchd script to run and update that folder (and tell TwonkyMedia to rescan) whenever the eyeTV XML file changes.
Next up is to see about creating automating playlists from eyeTV into TwonkyMedia. TwonkyMedia supports video playlists, but the documentation is really poor for that. We will see.
Feel free to drop me a line with getting a UPnP device set up on OS X.
My current set up is an EyeTV 250 hooked up to my main machine, a Core Duo iMac with about 1TB of attached storage for the eyeTV archive, stored movies and music.
I recently lost the Mac Mini I had hooked up to my HDTV. Prior to that I had the eyeTV and the storage hooked up to the Mini, with the Mini serving up content to the other machines in the household. With the loss of the Mac Mini, though, I had to figure out something else.
I bought a Buffalo LinkTheater PC-P3LWG/DVD, a UPnP player that I got pretty cheap (~$100) and figured I would give that a try.
The LinkTheater works for most of my media (although it obviously does not work on iTMS media), but I did run into one issue: For some reason most of my media was recorded using 44.2 kHz sampling rate and the LinkTheater really did not like that. Going to 48 kHz sees to fix that issue, although my older media cannot be changed.
Some issues I ran into with UPnP on OS X:
1) EyeConnect, el gato's UPnP server, was using up massive amounts of real RAM, even while not doing anything. I am talking about between 500 and 600MB of RAM. el gato support got back to me with a fix (delete and recreate "iTunes Music Library.xml"), but that only got it down to about 200MB. By that time I had already purchased TwonkyMedia anyway.
2) MediaTomb had the right price (OSS), but I could just never get it to work correctly. It kept not seeing my mp4 files as MPEG files, so my LinkTheater would never play them.
3) TwonkyMedia, which I ended up purchasing, works fairly well although it definitely has limits to its documentation. The layout, for example, seems to be customizable, but there seems to be NO documentation on what the different options do.
TwonkyMedia also did not like the layout of the eyeTV archive. eyeTV saves its recordings as packages - for example, "House - Ugly.eyetv" is a package containing between one and four different files, one of them being the actual .mpg recording with a random name like 0009egh8.mpg. Since TwonkyMedia sees this as a folder containing an .mpg file, viewing "All Videos" in TwonkyMedia would show about 200 video files with random names attached, making it impossible to navigate to the correct show.
Last night I sat down and churned out a quick script to go through the eyeTV recordings and create a new folder full of symlinks (aliases) to the actual .mpg file, but with the name of the package containing the .mpg.
So the folder now has "House - Ugly.mpg" in it, pointing to the file 0009egh8.mpg inside "House - Ugly.eyetv" I changed TwonkyMedia to instead look inside the new folder, and everything now works as it should. I also set up a launchd script to run and update that folder (and tell TwonkyMedia to rescan) whenever the eyeTV XML file changes.
Next up is to see about creating automating playlists from eyeTV into TwonkyMedia. TwonkyMedia supports video playlists, but the documentation is really poor for that. We will see.
Feel free to drop me a line with getting a UPnP device set up on OS X.