This thread is a work in progress description of my migration from a Meedio based HTPC to a Plex/UnRAID based whole house media solution. Any comments, advice or questions are welcome. I will be updating the first posts to reflect the current status. I will not document comprehensive build notes until I have the solution solid enough. As I might hit a show stopper at any time, I will not yet make any guaranties about finishing this 
Index
1. The Goal
5. Screenshots
1. The Goal
1.1 Background
Me and my family have been using a Meedio based HTPC since 2005. Originally it was used for watching DVD-movies (TheaterTek), listening to music (built-in) and recording/playing OTA-DVB programs (DVBViewer). Main goal was to provide an integrated, remote controllable (Logitech Harmony), easy to use, interface which all family members would be able to use to play all media. The UI is based on the HDeeTV theme with some home made customisation and has been pretty much untouched since 2006. The secondary goal was to built it with AV-fidelity in mind so pixel-perfect display with proper refresh rates, 5.1 audio etc. were obvious requirements. Since 2005 the HTPC has been driving a Panasonic PT-AE700 projector and lately a LG LD450N TV. Third goal was to make it rock solid, or at least as robust as possible. This was initialised by using a "XPLited" Windows XP SP2 and rigorous control in what is installed/updated. Disk images were used in all update operation and roll backed if anything went wrong so the OS was kept "clean". Also all autoupdates were disabled, the only OS-update todate is SP3 and it was manually applied. The HTPC boot time has not significantly changed since initial install (which I cannot say for any other windows installation I've ever had)
As time went by new things came into picture like Blu-rays to be played with PowerDVD / AnyDVD HD. In 2009, pretty soon after starting to rip Blu-rays, emerged the biggest thing so far when I built an UnRAID server to store all my media. Before that most of the movies were on DVD-discs, after that everything, including Blu-rays were online. DVD Profiler has been used from day one to store all the meta data related to movies and the XML2Mee plugin to push it to Meedio. DVB recording do not have any additional meta data used except what can be parsed from the filename. TV-series covers have been manually managed with no other meta data. Quite a lot of manual work is required to make sure all the meta data is correct but since we have a lot of local or localised (Finnish) content there is no way around it even with magical scrapers.
I really like the media management, or actually better say media engine part of Meedio. One of cool things is the ability to define any media type and it's attributes simply by adding items containing those attributes. Of course you must then modify the theme to utilise the fields but you are definetely not stuck with a fixed set of attributes. The second thing is the View builder which enables you to define any kind of grouping, filtering and sorting on the media items. These views can then be called upon in the theme and without theme modification to be displayed. On the first look on Plex, I will be missing these features.
As some of you know, Meedio was bought by Yahoo in 2006 and further updates were not provided. MeediOS appeared quite soon but never really provided a replacement. So Meedio being discontinued I decided stick with it until I hit a brick wall like being unable to play some new media type. It's now 2012 and I'm yet to hit a brick wall. I've been semi-actively looking at alternatives like XBMC, Media Portal and Cinemar MainLobby. But nothing has really hit me big time. Well until Plex was recommended by a colleague of mine. At the time of writing this first post I have had three nights of Plex play time. And I'm completely sold, I've finally seen something which works vert nicely out-of-box and with quite some style too. It has some obvious imperfections but at least at the moment none of which could not be solved.
1.2 The goal
From the user perspective the goal is simple: provide all the media easily on all the wanted devices (pc's, Android phones, future devices). From the technical point of view the main goal is also simple: fulfill the user goal with as less work as possibly. Below is a more detailed list of primary and secondary requirements derived from these goals.
Primary requirements:
Secondary requirements:
Media content
We currently have ~1000 DVD and Blu-ray movies of which 240 Blu-rays and 350 DVDs are online. The amount TV-series episodes is ~500 and we have ~2000 songs. Everything is provided through the UnRAID "fused" user shares with the following directory structure:
Edited by henris - 7/9/12 at 2:48am
Index
1. The Goal
1.1 Background
1.2 The Goal
2. Building the solution
2.1 Media Server installation and configuration
2.2 Media Center Installation and configuration
3. Pending issues
3.1 Blu-ray ISO playback
3.2 DVD Profiler support
3.3 Remote control (Harmony)
3.4 Batch conversion of Blu-rays in ISO-format and DVDs in Video_TS-format to MKV using makemkvcon
3.x Other pending issues
4. Resources5. Screenshots
1. The Goal
1.1 Background
Me and my family have been using a Meedio based HTPC since 2005. Originally it was used for watching DVD-movies (TheaterTek), listening to music (built-in) and recording/playing OTA-DVB programs (DVBViewer). Main goal was to provide an integrated, remote controllable (Logitech Harmony), easy to use, interface which all family members would be able to use to play all media. The UI is based on the HDeeTV theme with some home made customisation and has been pretty much untouched since 2006. The secondary goal was to built it with AV-fidelity in mind so pixel-perfect display with proper refresh rates, 5.1 audio etc. were obvious requirements. Since 2005 the HTPC has been driving a Panasonic PT-AE700 projector and lately a LG LD450N TV. Third goal was to make it rock solid, or at least as robust as possible. This was initialised by using a "XPLited" Windows XP SP2 and rigorous control in what is installed/updated. Disk images were used in all update operation and roll backed if anything went wrong so the OS was kept "clean". Also all autoupdates were disabled, the only OS-update todate is SP3 and it was manually applied. The HTPC boot time has not significantly changed since initial install (which I cannot say for any other windows installation I've ever had)
As time went by new things came into picture like Blu-rays to be played with PowerDVD / AnyDVD HD. In 2009, pretty soon after starting to rip Blu-rays, emerged the biggest thing so far when I built an UnRAID server to store all my media. Before that most of the movies were on DVD-discs, after that everything, including Blu-rays were online. DVD Profiler has been used from day one to store all the meta data related to movies and the XML2Mee plugin to push it to Meedio. DVB recording do not have any additional meta data used except what can be parsed from the filename. TV-series covers have been manually managed with no other meta data. Quite a lot of manual work is required to make sure all the meta data is correct but since we have a lot of local or localised (Finnish) content there is no way around it even with magical scrapers.
I really like the media management, or actually better say media engine part of Meedio. One of cool things is the ability to define any media type and it's attributes simply by adding items containing those attributes. Of course you must then modify the theme to utilise the fields but you are definetely not stuck with a fixed set of attributes. The second thing is the View builder which enables you to define any kind of grouping, filtering and sorting on the media items. These views can then be called upon in the theme and without theme modification to be displayed. On the first look on Plex, I will be missing these features.
As some of you know, Meedio was bought by Yahoo in 2006 and further updates were not provided. MeediOS appeared quite soon but never really provided a replacement. So Meedio being discontinued I decided stick with it until I hit a brick wall like being unable to play some new media type. It's now 2012 and I'm yet to hit a brick wall. I've been semi-actively looking at alternatives like XBMC, Media Portal and Cinemar MainLobby. But nothing has really hit me big time. Well until Plex was recommended by a colleague of mine. At the time of writing this first post I have had three nights of Plex play time. And I'm completely sold, I've finally seen something which works vert nicely out-of-box and with quite some style too. It has some obvious imperfections but at least at the moment none of which could not be solved.
1.2 The goal
From the user perspective the goal is simple: provide all the media easily on all the wanted devices (pc's, Android phones, future devices). From the technical point of view the main goal is also simple: fulfill the user goal with as less work as possibly. Below is a more detailed list of primary and secondary requirements derived from these goals.
Primary requirements:
- Watch DVD and Blu-ray movies on PCs (3 x Windows 7)
- Watch TV-series on all PCs
- Watch DVB recordings on all PCs
- Subtitles on all non-Finnish video content
- Listen to music on all current devices (PCs and Android phones)
- In PC environment use Harmony (or other) remote as the main control mechanism
- Automatic creation/scraping of movie, music and tv-series meta data
- Manage movie metadata in DVD Profiler and combine it's information to scraped one (online movies only)
- Store all media on an UnRAID server
- Ability to customise the UI and content views to our needs (filter, sort)
- As few software used as possible, preferrably only one for playback
- Sufficient AV-fidelity when in local network environment (1080p24, atleast DD5.1 or DTS, no transcoding)
Secondary requirements:
- Media playback on selected new devices either direct support or DLNA (iDevices, standalone boxes/TV's)
- Offline media support (DVD Profiler Slot/Location somehow indicated to end user and disc play capability)
- Automatic creation/scraping of DVB recordings meta data
- Use UnRAID as the Plex Media Server
- Proper DVR-solution (eg. using Elgato streaming units)
- Remote control PC-based Plex Media Centers with Android PlexApp
- Parental controls to limit childrens' access to rated content
- Multi-user support for watched-flag (eg. family members watching same TV-series separately)
- Full AV-fidelity (HDAudio etc.)
Media content
We currently have ~1000 DVD and Blu-ray movies of which 240 Blu-rays and 350 DVDs are online. The amount TV-series episodes is ~500 and we have ~2000 songs. Everything is provided through the UnRAID "fused" user shares with the following directory structure:
Code:
\\unraid1\blu-ray\
movie1_name.iso
movie2_name.iso
\\unraid1\dvd\
movie1_name\
video_ts\
dvd_files
\\unraid1\tv-series\
tv-series1_name\
season 1\
tv-series1_name_S01E01_Episode_Name.avi
tv-series1_name_S01E01_Episode_Name.srt
\\unraid1\dvb\
Date_Time_Channel_Programname.ts
Date_Time_Channel_Programname.txt (meta data in non-xml format)
\\unraid1\mp3\
artist#1\
year - album1_name
song1.mp3 (with proper ID3 tags)
Edited by henris - 7/9/12 at 2:48am
