The story would end here if we didn’t want to access the media collections also from TV. This brought me to learn about DLNA technology and to get a DLNA-compliant media player, as well as to install and configure special media server software.

The media player

The device is Samsung BD-C5500 Blu-ray player that serves a home theatre setup in the living room (40″ LCD TV and 5+1 Dolby system). The player is compliant with UPnP/DLNA standards and it means that being connected to a network it looks for DLNA-compliant Media Server instances and automatically connects to them.

In the time when I purchased it (summer 2010), my knowledge about this kind of hardware was close to nothing and I had no any specific requirements in my mind. All what I needed was something that should play as many formats as possible, have a digital output and an Ethernet port.

Though my choice was somewhat random, Samsung turned out to be ok: it’s true Full-HD with a nice crisp picture through HDMI, friendly to seemingly all common A/V formats and can browse and play media from DLNA servers, external USB and, um, the disks, of course.

As a bonus, the player connects to internet to show online content like YouTube videos, Google maps, Picasa albums, Twitter and Facebook pages and so on. Sadly enough, the Twitter widget still isn’t aware of OAuth authentication (and therefore, is broken) and the available set of apps lacks such essential thing as a simple web-browser, so there is no way to view the random webs on TV with it.

Another sad thing about the player was WLAN support I’ve rashly bought into. On the rear panel, you can find a USB slot for an external wireless adapter, but don’t expect that any WiFi dongle in the world would work — this is for special Samsung adapter of which I know nothing but that it’s an exotic beast. Out of curiousity, I tried one of DLink dongles and it was (predictably) ignored by the device. There is however, a newer model of the player with a built-in WiFi adapter on board and all in all,  it was not a big problem to lay another Ethernet wire and plug it into the player.

The media server

I considered two DLNA media servers: Serviio and MediaTomb and finally have chosen the latter because it looked simpler, lighter, configurable and has a web-interface to manage media collections.

A gothic look of the user interface makes me sick but the way it works is simple and intuitive. You only need to select a directory in the server filesystem and MediaTomb will crawl it to find all supported media files and add them to the database. After a directory is added, it is monitored for updates to be synchronized with the MediaTomb DB. As soon as you upload new file to a monitored directory on the server, it appears in the MediaTomb collection and hence, in the player.

A good thing about MediaTomb is that it is scriptable — there is straightforward server-side JavaScript one can edit to implement custom collection structures based on metadata extracted from media files. Note that MediaTomb from Ubuntu repositories recklessly lacks scripting capabilities: if you want to enable this feature, download the sourcecode and build it yourself with JavaScript support.

Video

The video collection has a loose ad-hoc structure in the server filesystem, created manually: movies/series/animations/whatsoever, occasionally subcategorized by genre or by a director, etc. I liked to preserve that structure in the MediaTomb database and the import script modified like in this example does that.

Audio

MediaTomb does a good job on categorizing music using common ID3 tags by default: author, album, year and genre. I am happy with that taxonomy (this is what I’m used to see in AmaroK) and have not changed anything there.

Photos

The photo collection is organized in MediaTomb with date-based subalbums. It can read EXIF tags from photos but it’s not too useful: maybe someone wants to see his shots sorted by camera model or by aperture value, but not me. I would better want MediaTomb to be able to read the keywords from XMP/IPTC metadata written by digiKam but I have no idea if it’s possible.

Links

Some manuals and articles that helped me a lot in MediaTomb configuration and customization:

• http://mediatomb.cc/dokuwiki/scripting:scripting
• http://my.opera.com/maurice118/blog/how-to-use-the-import-js-with-mediatomb-upnp-server
• http://wiki.flexion.org/InstallingMediaTomb012.html
• http://en.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/MediaTomb

I should say I hate disks. They are taking a lot of space, cluttering all around, getting scratched and getting lost sometimes. I am too lazy to stand up and find a CD/DVD on a shelf just to get a movie or a song. I already got all my music collection in the computer as MP3 files and used to grab every new audio CD immediately. I’d like to do the same with DVD movies – rip them from the disks, convert them to something like MPEG4 and provide shared access to the media collection in our home network.

Our home LAN is small and simple – there are only two workstations connected by an Ethernet cable. There are my main work machine running Kubuntu Feisty Fawn and the children room computer owned by my daughters. The last box runs XP Home Edition, it is weaker and got a smaller harddrive than the Linux box – so server/client roles in the media network were obvious.

As the Linux box already runs Samba, the solution for sharing the media files over the network was ready. I only created a Windows network drive on the client machine and linked it to the Samba share on a server filesystem. I’d like to have more sophisticated solution for media organizing – something like a specialized media server with advanced metadata/annotation/categorization features but found no one so far. All in all, simply movie titles and preview thumbnails are good enough, and my children have no problems to navigate over the movie collection.

Well, my only task was to rip the movies from DVD’s. My first try of ripping DVD using the familiar tools was unsuccessful. Strangely, K3b – a swissknife for all CD/DVD tasks in KDE – could not rip video DVD’s in Feisty. As it was turned out, it is Kubuntu-only limitation and I have no idea is it a result of that copyrights paranoia (though grabbing the audio CD’s works fine), or just a miss of packagers in Canonical. The people said it is still unworkable in 7.10 Gutsy. Of course, I might recompile K3b from sources but I decided to look for another ripping tool first.

There is a nifty command line utility: transcode. It can convert video from one format to another using lots of import and export codecs – and directly from a DVD too. In fact, you need to install it if you want to rip DVD’s with K3b, though it had no help in my case. Using transcode has only problem – you should be a video engineering guru to understand its manpage with lots of all transcoding options. I didn’t want to learn all that stuff – I only needed to convert videos from DVD into AVI/MPEG4 files with the same frame size and without visible loss of quality.

I finally chose dvd::rip – a GUI frontend to transcode written in Perl and GTK+. In Kubuntu, you can found it in multiverse/graphics repository section. If you want to get compressed MPEG-4 files, you will also need XVid codec (multiverse/libs/libxvidcore4) or another DivX/XVid library for transcode.

Ripping DVD with dvd:rip is an easy two-step process: at first stage it copies the selected titles from DVD to the harddisk and lets you clip and scale the resulting movie. The program allows to choose from few presets of movie format and quality with previewing the results. Video gurus can also get into all codec’s fine-tuning options, while others can just go to the next stage by clicking on “Transcode” button letting the program to do its job with defaults. The second stage is quite long and finishes with a MPEG4 file in a container of a selected type (AVI, OGG or MPEG).