DVD Server using XBOX Media Center (XBMC), DVD Profiler, and IMDB (Pictures galore) - Page 6

Great thread, lots of info.
I'm running the Oct build of XBMC - guess I'd better update mine to 1-24-6. I have just started my setup of the XBMC xml file.
My question concerns the DVD Image/CD Image that is displayed on the XBMC. Is the info downloaded from IMDB into a file on the Xbox? I have put CD images labeled "folder" in the CD album directory, but they do not show up on XBMC. Nor does XBMC retain the artist/album info after I retrieved it. Soooo I'm feeling inept here -- any clues?

That's unfortunate. I realized that HD was not a possibility with this configuration but I failed to realize that, duh, my home movie content is in HD. It will be inconvenient, but I think the only way for me to do this will be to store:

a) a full copy of the original video content and edited videos. This serves as a backup to my tapes and also a source of editing.
b) a transcoded copy of original video content and edited videos. This serves as a point to view the content via Xbox/XBMC. Ideally, this process of transcoding would double as a transcoding process to enable video content (home movies and other content) to my Archos Multimedia.

Thanks for the software advice!

I haven't tested a ton, but I think I'm seeing a similar situation with lack of retention WRT artist/album info. I believe my "folder.jpg" files are showing up in XBMC, however.

By Ja Phule: "Thanks. I'm working on fixing up the program so that other people can use it easily. Right now it just takes the movie title and cover from dvd profiler and it will get the movie info from IMDB. I will post it up here whenever it is ready."

Is it ready yet? Thanks

Does anyone want the bash script that I've been using to rip dvds? (not transcode them, just a straight iso rip).

Also, I'm using abcde and lame to rip my audio cds... It's pretty simple.

Sure. Mine's something like:

Still debugging, though. Mine is used to create ISO's. Two input parameters, one for the name of the final iso (minus the "iso") and one for the target hard drive on my NAS (e.g. hda4, hdd1, etc). As it is above it creates just the feature and chooses 16x9 over 4x3 if both exist on the disc.

I think my "issues" have to do with testing on my limited-space laptop and filling the thing up. If not, then there are issues with creating an ISO with mkisofs from feature-only VOB's created by dvdbackup. Anyway, I just need to get time to square it away - but currently I'm more focussed on a script for my NAS symlink farm.

I'll need to find an audio option for ripping to FLAC later. I like grip, but bash scripts are so convenient.

And then a script for transcoding those home movies...

Mine's a little more sophsticated... and I've got one for two disk dvd sets.

A couple things I'd recommend to you is put double quotes around your $movieName (and any paths that have it in there) because if the movie name has spaces you'll get issues. Also, if you screw up like me, you can end up passing no parameters and delete your boot partition with an rm -rf (doh!)

I'll post it when I get off the vpn (can't ssh into the server while vpned to work).

Good points. Although to pass in a movieName parameter with spaces, I would think it would need to come in with double quotes in the first place otherwise the parameter list would be parsed incorrectly. Unless, of course, the double quotes are pulled off when the variable is brought into the script.

With the remove, I should probably just throw a conditional around it.

Look forward to seeing your script.

Yeah, your command line would looks something like:

./rip "The Fast and the Furious"

then in your script to make a directory would be (this is from my script):

mkdir "/mnt/raid/media/Video/DVD/$1"

Of course, all the above aside since I'm working with Linux I'd prefer not to deal with spaces at all. But it's a good tip I'll implement to keep things a little more robust.

I use spaces, since in XBMC, the spaces look nicer... plus most of the clients are seeing the files over Samba and are newb's so spaces look nicer for them

Also, these are ripping the entire disk (-M) rather than just the title set...

I rip to ~/dvdbackup and then mkisofs to my raid, mounted in /mnt/raid. All my dvds are in /mnt/raid/media/Video/DVD in their own folder. I go back in later and add the folder.jpg for them to show up in xbmc.

Here's my rip script:
And my rip a 2 disk set:
I tried to get the return value from dvdbackup, but my shell scripting skills are weak... I've ripped 40+ disks using these scripts and have been pretty happy so far.

Edit: there was a bug in the scripts

Original Xbox - check
Modchip installed - check (Xecutor3)
BIOS updated - check
Evox Dashboard installed - check
X3 comes up OK - check
Can boot to MS Dash - check
Can boot to Evox Dash - check
Games still play OK - check

OK now I'm getting ready to tackle XBMC and have what may be a silly question or 2 (or 3)

1) Do I install XBMC as a dashboard and launch to it when I want to do vids, music, etc?
2) Is there a better way to do this and still be able to play games?
3) Does installing XBMC mess anything up relative to playing games?

Guidance is appreciated and yes I've been to XMBC and Xbox-scene websites. I'm having some trouble figuring the next step out.

thx,

Thanks Ja Phule.

If I make XBMC my main dashboard:

1) Most of my games are on DVD (did not put in a larger hard drive). Do I have a parameter to set them to autostart like with Evox in the evox.ini?

2) How about getting to the master settings of the modchip. Right now that's what comes up and then I boot to the other dashboard(s)

thx

I would recommend loading XBMC as a secondary app launched off you existing dashboard at first. Get familiar with it but once you do I have all my xboxx booting straight into XBMC. Make sure you have FTP enabled boot CD incase you mess something up. XBMC is great as a dash and with xlink-kai has some unique features for online gaming....

Good Luck,
Sean

Still Need some help setting up my 7,000 tracks on itunes (its library & playlists) via SMB on XBMC.

Ok I can access my music files easily but no playlists or library info. I usually go (in XBMC) to ..... My Music.....WORKGROUP (SMB) NETWORK ....RAIDERS....Public....Our Music....Itunes, then from there I see the 100's of folders of artists. Then open each to play thier albums. But I want to be able to access the Itunes library file.....took weeks to put together.

I have my all music files along w/ the itunes music library.xml file and itunes library database file located here on my SMB Network drive (comp is off) ...............

smb://RAIDERS/Public/Our Music/Itunes/

According to the XBMC itunes share you can use.......


iTunes Network Share (DAAP)

daap://192.168.1.100


No how would I tell XBMC to look in my path? And read the playlists and library info stored there and use it as its main library and playlists? According to the DAAP your only supposed to use an IP address, enabling sharing getting the shared files off an IP comp.

Thanks for anyhelp.

Jonathan

Thanks Ja Phule:


Maybe right now I can ony do it by reading the shared itunes info off a connected comp. Seems like it would be a good option to be able to do it off a SMB, playlist, library and all w/o having a comp on all the time. I'll try tapping into and use the ip address & path of the SMB tonight, maybe it might work. Who knows.


Jonathan

I've managed to get iTunes working through DAAP with a recent build (< a month old). Keep in mind that in order for this to work, you need iTunes open on the computer that you point XBMC to. It works well. The only thing that annoyed me was the pause between tracks.

Thanks for sharing, goofygrin. I will definitely borrow some of your ideas. A couple issues I've been having.

1) mkisofs doesn't seem to be able to handle any rip that doesn't contain a VIDEO_TS.IFO file. Since a feature-only rip with dvdbackup will not create this file, but only the IFO file for the Title that was ripped, I'm a bit annoyed. You ever have any luck creating feature-only ISO's with mkisofs? If not I will probably just give in and backup whole DVD's, but really I almost think feature-only would be the way to go because 90% of the time I just want to watch a movie and digging through annoying previews, etc, is, well, annoying.

2) My OS install is on a pretty small partition and since /home isn't a mount-point for some larger partition, I'm pretty limited in my user directory. Unfortunately, full user read-write access is necessary for this scripting to work reasonably conveniently. Is there a way I could define a all-user read-write access to a folder on a larger partition so I can easily store my temp files there during this process? Or if I ran the script with "sudo" would that cover any needed access for the entire script execution?

Thanks for your time!

Thanks Bohbot16:

Yeah I was trying to access everything of a network drive, connected ethernet to the xbox, have the playlist, library, everything show up. Maybe just have to wait till they add that feature.

Hey by the way found out a lil cool customizing feature.....

Go to F:/Apps/XBCM/Language/English/strings.xml

You can change the Text on the main Menus and orders they're layed out.....( My Music to Tracks, Albums) .....whatever. Before hand I thought you had to do this in the xboxmediacenter.xml. But after altering it noting changed. Going to play w/ it alil later.


Jonathan

And the most major problem. mkisofs will only create an ISO of 2.0 GB for me. No larger. I've tried about four DVD's now. I get a "File size limit exceeded" error. It's a reiserfs partition and I'm not aware of any file size limits there. I can find old posts on the Internet about Samba having a limit of 2GB (the output of mkisofs is a samba share for me), but I just assumed this limit had been overcome. Perhaps I'll need to go to XFS? And if I leave for a Windows ripping machine I'll be SOL.

Dunno... I've got enough space (for now) that I'm just ripping the whole thing...


you can always just chmod 777 -R /dirname and that'll give everyone rights to that directory to do anything.

I'm using ext3 for my boot/root and xfs for my raid... not sure if it makes a difference.

A quick google show there to be some chatter about reiserfs having a 2/4 gb limit depending on what version you're running.

When I said "xfs" I should have said "nfs" as in "maybe I'll need to use nfs rather than smbfs for my Linux-to-Linux activity." I was hoping to avoid duplicate permissions, but...whatever.

Anyway, I just ran the entire process on my isolated machine and I have no problems with size limits. Across the network seems to be an issue. To save time I'm probably going to have to try to write directly across the network, though.

Thanks for your help!

Here is a little tutorial I wrote for softmodding an Xbox. I don't do hard drive upgrades because I don't like console gaming and I would not use an Xbox to store any files that were not backed up as if the Xbox ever crashes the hard drive will not be accessable. Feel free to comment on this tutorial and advise changes if needed. Thanks


As far as being able to stream music, videos, photos, and movie trailers (and lots of other stuff using the built in download plug-in installer) a soft-modded Xbox is ideal. If you want to add a large hard drive to play games (including just about every emulated console game ever made) then you would have to either go to more extremes or buy a chip. Playing games is really the only reason to use a mod chip to hack an Xbox as a softmod is identical in nearly every way to a chipped Xbox mod. This tutorial is for the installation of the softmod only and does not cover adding a bigger hard drive. Actually, there is enough room on the original Xbox's hard drive so that once the soft modding is complete you can load one Xbox game at a time and when you tire of that game you can delete it and load another.

The softmod we will be using is Krayzie's nDure Installer. This is a small software package that is in the form of a game save. The Xbox has, on it's game pad controller, a place to put in a memory card for game saves. This is how we get the Xbox to run our little modding package.

Tools Needed for a Softmod
1. An exploitable game. Mech Assault works great. Buy a used one so there is less chance of getting one that may have been fixed, I do not think that they ever bothered to fix it. Alternately you could just rent it as you only need it for an hour.
2. An Xbox memory card with a USB cable. Despite the rumours, the Action Replay cheat memory card available at Wal Mart and Circuit City plus many other retailers will work fine, you just have to "fix" it in the middle of the procedure. The Action Replay does corrupt the file but there is an easy workaround for that.
3. An FTP program. FlashFXP is the perfect FTP program for Xbox use. Just Google it to download a trial version or pay $25 for it, it is worth it.
-If you want to know "What is FTP?", it is simply a way to see the files on your hard drive in a list on one side of the screen and see the files on your Xbox on the other side. Then you just click on any file you wish to transfer from your computer to your Xbox and click the transfer button. FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol.
4. A computer with a network. You don't have to have a home network. You can buy a network cable that says "Crossover" on the package. Then just connect the crossover cable to the computer and the Xbox. There may be more to it but really, a home network is easy to set up and very useful so I won't go into it any further here.
5. A copy of Krayzie's nDure Installer. This is not a legal product so it could be a little hard to find it. However, if you bought the Action Replay memory card and installed the software CD-ROM that came with it, you can use that software to see a list of downloadable gamesaves from other users. The Krayzie's nDure Installer can be found in that list of downloadable cheat game saves. However it may be called "Run Linux". There will be many copies of "Run Linux" under the Mech Assault game saves, try to find the one that is the biggest. But you still might get a bad copy, just be prepared to download another in case the first one doesn't work.

A note about UnleashX: UnleashX is a Xbox Dashboard. (A Dashboard is what you see when you turn on the Xbox. The Xbox's original dashboard shows up when you turn on an unmodded Xbox with no game in the CD drive. There are several dashboards for modded Xboxes) a modified version of UnleashX is contained within the Installer and is used automatically at one point for backing up certain vital files that are on the Xbox. UnleashX happily includes an FTP server so once it loads you have the wonderful ability to access the Xbox via FlashFXP FTP even though the Installer has not completed the modding process yet and in fact has made no changes to the Xbox yet at all.


Once you have assembled the tools and have an hour to spare you are ready to go. I am going to assume you are using a home network. Find out the "IP" addresses your network uses. This will be a string of numbers. Usually it is 192.168.0.1 or 192.168.1.1. The last number (the 1) usually is the address of the router itself. Every device (computer, Xbox, or anything else that connects to your network) is assigned a number (usually starting at 2 then 3 etc.) automatically by the router The first three numbers (the 192.168.0) will stay the same. Only the last number will be different for every attached device. The router will keep up with these numbers for you and if you type the routers numbers into your web browser's address bar you can go to a little web site looking page that belongs to your router. There are many options there but don't mess with any settings unless you know what you are doing. There should be an option to see all the devices connected to the router with their corrisponding IP address listed. This is very useful information.

Ok, if you have read all the above info and are now prepared to start here are the steps.
1. Get the Krayzie's nDure Installer (also known as "Run Linux") copied to the memory card by using the cable that came with it to transfer it to the card from your computer.
2. Before inserting the memory card into the Xbox's game pad, first start your Xbox with no game in the CD drive. Then go to the Memory section and delete any and all Mech Assault game saves. You do not want any there when we start or the installer may not load. Turn off the Xbox.
3. Put the Action Replay memory card into the Xbox's game pad. Turn on the Xbox (still with no game in the CD drive) and go to the Memory section. Now figure out how to copy the "Run Linux" game save (which is really our copy of Krayzie's nDure Installer) from the memory card to the Xbox's internal hard drive. Once it is done copying open the CD drive and insert the Mech Assault game. Then turn off the Xbox and remove the memory card. Keep it handy in case you downloaded a bad copy of the Krayzie's nDure Installer and need to get a different one.
4. Now turn on the Xbox with the Mech Assault game inside. Wait for the game to start and take you to the selection screen. Here you will click on "Campaign" Now select "Run Linux". This will load the Krayzie's nDure Installer. The first thing it will have you do is make a back up. IMPORTANT: this will be the part where we "fix" the Installer itself that was corrupted by the action Replay memory card. Even though the AR memory card corrupts Krayzie's nDure Installer, the installer will still start up and get us where we need to go.
5. Select the first option to back up the "eeprom" this is where we fix the corrupted file. At this point the installer program will actually exit and load a program called UnleashX. See above for info about UnleashX. When UnleashX is running open FlashFXP on your computer and find the Xbox on one side of the program. On the other side, on your computer, find your saved copy (uncorrupted by Action Replay) of the Krayzie's nDure Installer for Mech Assault. It will be in the folder heirarchy MA Save->UDATA->4d530017. It is the 4d530017 folder that we want. Go to the Xboxes side of the screen and go to the E drive. Look in the UDATA for the 4d530017 folder and delete it. Now transfer the 4d530017 folder from your compurter over to the UDATA folder on your Xbox. Now you have an uncorrupted copy of the nDure installer on your Xbox. On the Xbox, after backing up, select the Return to Main Menu or some such that takes you back to the Krayzie's Installer. Now turn off and restart the Xbox. Do the Back Up step again, this time omitting the copying of the Installer over to the Xbox.
6. After that it is easy to just follow the steps as they are listed in the installer. When complete you have a modded Xbox.

Ready to install Xbox Media Center? That will have to be another tutorial.