A One-Eyed Man is King

So I didn’t exactly do everything I wanted to.  I came close though.  Close is good, right? 

I satisfied all of the requirements I set for this project with the exception of 1A which was NOT to need a Media Center PC to be running.  Since I have totally hijacked my own blog for this, I figured it was better not to sink any more hours into this and get back to our originally scheduled program. 

So here it is broken down for you in living color, my Media (not quite) Utopia.

At the end of this journey you will have:

• Ripped DVD content encoded to MP4 files encoded with H.264 at very high resolution
• A slick graphical Collection Management system
• Direct streaming from WHS to any Media Center PC
• Streaming from the WHS via a Media Center PC to the Xbox 360
• A (fairly) straightforward method for ripping your DVDs directly to the Home Server

I am assuming that you already have:

• Xbox 360 with latest updates, connected to your Media Center PC
• A functioning Windows Home Server
• At least one Media Center PC, joined to the Home Server
• Network connectivity between all of these devices (the faster the better)

1.  Download and install My Movies 3 for WHS on your Windows Home Server. I just opened an RDP session to the server (Start > Run > mstsc, then enter the IP or name of your server) and installed it that way. 

2.  While you’re RDP’ed into the server, make sure that the “Windows Media Center” Group has modify permissions to the folder D:\My Movies\File Storage or your 360 will throw a File Storage error.  (My Computer > D: > My Movies > Right Click FileStorage and then click the Security tab.  If you don’t see Windows Media Center in the Group or user names: box, then click the Add button and then type Windows Media Center and then OK.  Then in the Permissions for Windows Media Center box, click the Modify check box under Allow.)

3.  Open the WHS console and go to Settings > My Movies.  Enter in your Web Service account (you can create one at the My Movies forum) and make all of the service lights are green.

4.  Download and install the My Movies Client installer on your Media Center PC.

5.  Launch the Collection Management app on your Media Center PC, and then enter your WHS name or IP when prompted.  You’ll also have to enter your My Movies Web Service account again. 

6.  Make sure that your “Videos” share on the home server (or whatever share you are going to use to store the movies) has the Guest account set to “Read”. 

7. Now you’re ready to get some movies going.  Under the videos share, create a folder (it doesn’t matter what you call it, but I use the movie name) and copy an MP4 or a VIDEO_TS folder into it.  After just a minute you should see some additional files appear in that directory (if My Movies can identify it, that is).  My success rate has been pretty high so far. 

8.  Once the files show up, you can look at the info in the Collection Management app on the client.  If it can’t figure out what movie it is from the filename, then you can click the Change Title and Source button and either scan the barcode off of the DVD case (very cool) or manually search for the right title.

9.  At this point you should be able to launch Media Center on both the PC and Xbox and see the My Movies Menu option.

In the final (!) installment of this train wreck, I will show you how to use Handbrake to rip and encode your DVD’s right to your Windows Home Server. 

This is completely off topic.  It has nothing to do with business, and less to do with technology than my frustrations with getting my own junk to work.

I have this pie in the sky ideas about what my home entertainment system should look like.  Allow me to break it down for you.

The “Must Have” List:

1. It must store the media (music and movies mainly, photos are really an after thought for me) on a centralized, always on system. (Currently a Windows Home Server in my garage)
2. I must be able to use the content from:  My Windows 7 Ultimate PC, my Vista Slate, My Wife’s Vista PC, My Daughter’s Windows 7 Home Premium PC or the Xbox 360 in the living room.
3. The movie content will be displayed GRAPHICALLY, like with cover art, so that my illiterate children (5 year old and soon the 1 year old) will be able to select movies without shouting across the house “WHAT DOES THIS SAY MAMA?”

The “Would Be Nice” List:

1. The ripping process should be relatively painless.
2. Movie descriptions, ratings and cast info.
3. If the disk space could be minimized, that would be great.

So these are the things that I am after.  I have implemented some pieces of this system without having defined the whole, which has left me with a fragmented and disappointing solution.  I assure you that I know better, and to prove it, I’m going to chronicle my journey to accomplish the above.  Fasten your seat belts.

You can’t turn on the news without hearing it.  Unemployment up, spending down, cats and dogs living together…mass hysteria.  But seriously, things are definitely tougher out there for all kinds of business, not just the small ones.  The advantage that I see that small businesses have, much like those tricky prehistoric mammals, is the ability to quickly adapt to the climate.  Big business, like those overgrown lizards of prehistory, adapt slowly if at all.  (I was going to insert some jabs at a few of them here, but the list is too long to choose from.)  The point of all of this is to share some of the ways that I have seen small businesses SAVE MONEY.

1.  Cut out Ma Bell completely.  There are many options out there that can save you some serious money AND give you more options.  Skype is a great VOIP service that’s free to call from PC to PC (great if you have distributed employees or close partners) and just 2.95/month for 10,000 minutes to US and Canada (it’s 30 bucks for a year of inbound calls with a subscription, though).  You can buy a pretty sweet handset for about a hundred bucks that makes it so you don’t even need a computer to use it.  Gizmo5, and even Google Talk are other ways that you can stay connected (although not as slick as Skype).  Not only can you call in and out with these services, you can also do Conference calls, call forwarding, and voicemail.

2.  Free Financial Help.  Online financial services sites like Mint, GeoZeo, and Buxfer can help manage cash flow, notify you when balances are low and do budgeting and reporting for you.  The beauty of these services is that they’ll go get your transactions from your bank and attempt to classify them for you automatically.  It doesn’t always get them right, but it is very easy to correct and saves a ton of data entry.  You can even set them to send you an email or a text message with a summary of your status.

3.  Forget About Microsoft Office.  Don’t get me wrong.  I love Excel and Outlook as much as the next guy, but the prices that you pay (between $200 and $600, depending on the version) to get it are outrageous.  Check out Google Docs, Google Calendar and Gmail.  They allow you to easily collaborate with others, you don’t have to install anything on your computer, and best of all, they’re free.  These tools probably aren’t a fit for everyone (browser crashing while you work is a pain), but you can get an awful lot of mileage out of them.

Obviously I’m a big on using technology to increase efficiency, cut down on overhead and hopefully help the bottom line.  What are you doing to save money in these tumultuous times?

This one comes up every now and again.  How can I open EPS files?  These are files that are created by Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop.  They are both great programs, but they’re very expensive.  Many times your printer (you know business cards, yellow page ads etc) will ask you for your logo or ad in this format or even send you a file to proof in this format.  So is there a free program that can do this?  Not exactly, but if you have Microsoft Word installed, you can place the file in a blank document.  Just open Word, then go to Insert > Picture, then browse to the EPS file and click on the Insert button.  Word will then convert the file and you’ll be able to see it.  Anyone know of another way (that’s actually free) to open EPS files?  I think the GIMP is supposed to, but the plug-in kept dying when I tried to open the file on my Vista machine.

Setting up WordPress on my GoDaddy account was more of a challenge than I thought it was going to be.  I figured it would be a good place to start this blog.

1.  So first, you have to get yourself set up with GoDaddy.  I chose the Linux economy plan for 4.29/month.  After you go throught the Account Set-up wizard, it will tell you the status is “Pending” for a bit, and then after a few minutes, it will change to “Setup”.

2.  Click on the “Open” link under Control Panel on the Web Hosting Accounts.

3.  In the Hosting Control Center, click on Databases, then MySQL.

4.  Click the “Create Database” button, and then fill out the fields, taking note of the database name and password that you supply.

5.  The status on the Database page will say Pending for a bit, and then change to Setup.  Click the Open Manager Link that appears.

6.  Log in to the manager page that comes up with the username and password that you supplied in Step 4.

7.  Click on the “Databases” link, then take note of the IP address that appears near the top of the page.  It will look something like  “Server: 10.x.x.x”.

8.  Download the WordPress files from the site, extract them, and then rename the file wp-config-sample.php to wp-config.php.

9.  Open the wp-config.php file with a text editor.  Change the lines that look like:

define(’DB_NAME’, ‘putyourdbnamehere’);    // The name of the database
define(’DB_USER’, ‘usernamehere’);     // Your MySQL username
define(’DB_PASSWORD’, ‘yourpasswordhere’); // …and password
define(’DB_HOST’, ‘localhost’);    // 99% chance you won’t need to change this value

On the fourth line, it says you probably won’t have to change it, but you actually need to set it to the IP address that we got in Step 7.

10.  Upload (FTP) the WordPress source files with the modified wp-config.php file to your account.  Filezilla is a good open source FTP package.  If you want the blog to appear at the root of your site, ie. http://yoursite.com, just copy the files to the root.  If you want it to be in another directory,  ie. http://yoursite.com/blog, you need to create it in your FTP client and then copy the files to that directory.

11.  Now you just need to open a browser window and point it to:  http://yoursite.com/wp-admin/install.php (or wherever you copied the files). 

12.  If all went as expected, you will be asked a few questions to set up your new blog.  If something is not right, it will tell you in a fairly specific way.