Recently I picked myself up a PS3 (Ok, so I bought it for the “kid” for “christmas” ;)), and wanted to serve my video files to my 42″ HDTV. Now, I think there are three kinds of people when it comes to watching videos on these HDTV’s. You’ve got those that want a film to be stretched to fit width-wise, maintaining it’s aspect ratio, and just adding the black borders to the top and bottom as filler. This preserves the “look” of the video so that nothing is misproportioned. Then you have those, like me, that don’t mind if people get a little taller and skinnier, but just can’t stand having half the screen be wasted black space. The third is those that don’t care. There’s always a group for those that don’t care :D.

So anyway, google didn’t turn up a readily available solution to the problem either. It’s been asked a few times on the ps3mediaserver forums but the answers I saw either didn’t understand the question, or said the only way is to use “zoom” on either the PS3, or your TV. That’s just silly.. you lose portions of the video on the left and right. May as well have a standard non-widescreen tv in that case. The other ones suggest to use -vf scale, which didn’t work for me (as it turned out, was only half the answer). Or using -vf crop in conjunction with -vf scale, which still doesn’t work for me because I am streaming videos of all sizes and types and I don’t know where to crop (most of my encodes have the borders removed in the original anyway and there is nothing to crop).

So, playing with mencoders transcoding settings I’ve come up with this simple little addition inside the Transcoding Settings->Video Files Engine->MEncoder->Expert Settings : Codecs Specific Parameters:

:: -vf scale=1920:1080,dsize=1920:1080


Note the beginning “::” as that is telling the ps3mediaserver to apply it to ALL videos. Obviously, you’ll replace the 1920:1080 with whatever your television resolution is. 1920×1080 is standard 1080p.

Anyway, this forces the encoder to fill your screen and not lose the left and right edges of the screen like “Zoom” does. You get the full picture, but if you line it up side by side with the original version you’ll see the people are a little stretched, etc. Also note, that if your original has the black borders encoded into the film (watch it non fullscreen on the PC with something like mplayer, if there’s black borders it’s probably in the video.) then this won’t work. You’ll need the above with a crop to crop the borders off the original so you’ll have to figure out whether mencoder has an autocrop feature for that. Mplayer does, just not sure about mencoder. Previously, I had to use my own scripts for that.

So, the option is out there for those of you that want to do it. For those that don’t, why did you click the link? ;)

Happy Streaming!

It’s been a few months since my last post.. I’ve definitely let my blog go by the wayside.  It just seems I’ve been running out of things to tinker with.  But, when I do get around to doing something that I can’t find much information on while googling I try and document it somewhere.

Recently, I acquired a 1TB drive for my Gaming Desktop.  I wasn’t able to afford additional hard drives when I purchased that system and as such have just been running with a 2GB swap, 20GB root, and ~478GB for a home.  No fault tolerance, and no way to add more space when my home gets full aside adding a new drive and making a new partition and mount-point.  So, when I got the 1TB drive I came up with the best I could do under the circumstances (I believe).

Optimally, you want the same size hard drives for a RAID array.  However, with linux software raid it’s really irrelevant as it just uses partitions of a drive, not whole drives themselves.  So I should be able to RAID 1 a 500GB partition on the 500GB drive (whole disk) and a 500GB partition on the 1TB drive (so half the drive) and put an LVM on top for future expansion.  Now, googling for LVM on Raid for Ubuntu will invariably get you lots of results, like this one or this one.

Unfortunately, almost all of the documentation is old with 9.04 or previous being the ones setup on, and typically using LILO if true LVM on Raid or having a /boot outside the LVM for grub and most using the alternative installer CD.  With 9.10 and up getting grub2 by default it’s supposed to have support for booting directly to LVM partitions now negating the need for a separate /boot or LILO.

I wanted to know if it would be possible to manually setup my drives using the standard mdadm and lvm2 commands, and then use the graphical installer to select my LVM’s, install, and boot.  This is what I did.

I know I’ve been missing lately; I have gotten myself pretty busy between WoW, setting up an HA/LB (High Availability/Load Balancing) web and database server(s) for a client and just time with the family.

If you haven’t seen it before, Ultra Monkey is quite a simple and nice set of tools to manage an HA/LB configuration – and it has several good example configurations to get you started.

If you have read my previous articles you may have seen that I have an N810 internet tablet.  There is a new device out now that is the successor to that, the N900 cell phone.  I have written a small PyQt4 application for the N900 called pyPianobar.  Because this is PyQt4, if you grab the deb and extract it on your Linux Desktop (such as Ubuntu), you can actually use it there too! (You’ll need to install pianobar first)  This gives you Pandora Radio on your desktop, or your N900 :).

I’m currently trying to save up for an N900 so I can do some more tinkering, but also been waiting to see what will come of the new MeeGo (what a horrible name) that spawned as the result of an Intel (Moblin)/Nokia (Maemo) drunken one-night stand.

I’ve setup and been using Moblin on my Acer Aspire One – and it’s not too bad.  It’s childish, but so is everything now days (ever seen an iPhone? Ugh.)  Once I see for sure that the community will get a decent MeeGo port over to the N900 that is likely to be my next phone, even if it is $500+.  Yes, I’m saying it’s worth it :).

I don’t want the next Nokia device because they’ve already said it will be a capacitive touch screen like the Android and iPhone mess and capacitive is just not as accurate as resistive.  I also like using a Stylus when I want to be particular.  As an example, watch this – specifically the very last 30 seconds of the video or so.  It shows a very nice Avatar drawing done with the default Sketch app on the phone.  I just don’t think something like that is possible on capacitive.. and I don’t need multi-touch.

On the WoW front, I’ve written a small addon for Feral Druid’s that uses the Faceroller mod.  It will show a decent kitty rotation for high-DPS making it quite a bit simpler to keep track of everything.  The next update, which hopefully will be soon, will include a minor prediction system and a bear rotation for tanking.

As you can see, I keep myself entertained :).  I never can just “do” something, I have to toy with it – code something for it, tinker with it… eventually break it :D.  I still haven’t gotten the hang of the whole Blogging scene though and as such my blog tends to fall by the way-side.  There’s already so many out there on any given topic that it’s usually just a waste for me to add yet another reference or complaint for XYZ in yet another blog.

Anyway, hope you enjoyed the update – check out the N900, WoW and Ultra Monkey someday :).

I realized that I have been somewhat neglecting my blog of late.  I have a very valid and perfectly acceptable excuse however – I have re-addicted myself to WoW.   World of Warcraft has, of course, become a perfectly acceptable reason to miss work, ignore your spouse, neglect your kids, and make new “real” friends that are approximately the size of my pinky.

Personally, I’ll never quite have the character or personal fortitude and dedication that my fellow (WoWites?  WoWers?… Idiots?) have.  While I will admit to sometimes being sucked in and staying awake until 2 AM in the morning… somehow I manage to pull my lazy ass out of bed at 6:30 and still make it to work on time.  Every night, somewhere between the hours of 6-8 pm, I even manage to get off the computer and go sit with my wife and kids around the dinner table and eat something so I don’t wind up being found dead at my computer from starvation.

Maybe it’s just me… but I seem to be perfectly capable of leading a normal, everyday, life outside of Azeroth.  It’s called self-control people.

Unfortunately…. my blog did suffer :).  So, while my real life has remained in tact, my online life has shifted from re-compiling software, breaking internet tablets, reloading ATI graphics drivers on my Gamer for the millionth time, and blogging… to looking at the ass of a cartoon character running around pretending to be bad as hell.

To add a note and further nerdify myself I shall say that I actually preferred Everquest 2 to WoW; but unfortunately everyone I know plays WoW and I’ve heard that saying “When in Rome…” and all that.  Guess I’m becoming a conformist.

On a more serious note, I have managed to switch myself to HandBrake instead of using my custom mencoder scripts mentioned in some previous articles – but it required compiling the SVN version as the released version doesn’t support Karmic Koala.  Or at least didn’t… it appears that they now have a 9.10 deb available and ready on their download site.  Mayhaps I’ll try it.  Anyway, HandBrake has proved quite easy in selecting my MKV specifications and ripping movies.

I missed the update last month to the ATI drivers, hard to keep track now that Ubuntu has permitted me to be a lazy bastard and get my drivers direct from the Karmic repositories.  No more compiling or manual installing hassle anymore.  That also means though that I no longer have to keep refreshing ATI’s website waiting for the “next release” to fix some glitch.  For the past couple months my Gamer has been running flawless…………. playing WoW :).

Oh, I don’t think I blogged this so I shall mention it here:  I finally got a stable overclock with my Gamer that I am content with!  After many, many, many….. and many more…. reboots changing between every possible combination of FSB, voltages, and Memory timings (since I do not have an AMD Black Edition processor) that I could think of I finally got it.  Initially I was *very* conservative about my CPU voltages which was causing my instability problems.. I did not want to go too far into the “red” according to my motherboard on the stock cooler.  I feared I’d cause some real damage.

I broke down and to ease my mind I bought a Xigmatek Dark Knight with an AM2 Type-X Adapter to allow me to mount it horizontally on the processor.  After this I cranked up the voltages.  I ended up with a FSB of 250@1.5v, the cpu multi dropped to x14.5, my memory set to 1333mhz with 6-6-6-24 timings giving me a 3.625ghz.  So I basically have an AMD Phenom II 945 acting as a 965 but without the Black Edition.  Probably should have just bought the 965 :).  My temperatures now never break 40c, even under a torture test.  It gives me great joy just thinking about that :).

Let’s see.. is there any other nonsense that most of you won’t care about anyway?  Oh, I wrote a small “Texts from Last Night” RSS app for the Android phone I have, but I haven’t added any finishing touches to it or published it to the market yet.  All it is currently is an RSS feed that pulls only from TFLN, may as well get a normal RSS feed app and just add TFLN’s URL to it :).  It was more of a proof of concept for me anyway, as I haven’t fully decided if I want to get into the whole mobile phone development scene.  So much work, all my stuff would be free so very little profit, and… I got WoW to play damnit!

So there we have it… I easily could have filled 3-4 whole blog posts with each of those topics individually if I was truly an attention whore… but I’m not completely.  Honest.  So instead we get a single blog post spanning several completely unrelated topics and jumbles together into an incoherent mess!!!  I blame WoW…. everyone else does!

Go play WoW!  Maybe you too can join the thousands of people that seem to ruin their lives over a damned game!

In the last article regarding firewalls I gave you the links and some basic information regarding three different firewall options.  I had intended to try all three and let you know how it went but I was enjoying messing with the Endian firewall too much to lose it!  Well, I recently got bored and decided what the hell – time to try something new.  So I went to the next in the list:  pfSense.

So in this article I’ll give you a brief overview of what pfSense can do.  This article is going to be a lot more technical than the last article because to be honest – pfSense required me to be more technical than either Endian or IPCOP for what I needed.  If you do not run a DMZ at your house and are just looking for a quick, cheap firewall to turn your old computer into something useful – pfSense can do that with not a lot of work on your part, and the majority of this article will not be for you.  If you do run a DMZ – you’ll need to read this :).

So I downloaded the LiveCD installer option, printed out my port configuration page from my Endian setup, and rebooted the firewall.  It booted directly into a fully working system in just a few minutes – which is expected when using a “LiveCD”.

In the pfSense documentation it recommended to configure the firewall before installing to the hard drive so I did just that.  I logged into the website, which in my opinion is a fairly professional and clean interface, and started configuring my network cards and subnets.

Everything went pretty smoothly at the beginning and eventually I got to the point of installing to the hard drive.  This was again, totally uneventful and worked perfectly.  The installation was a little more difficult, or seemed to be, than the others I have tried (Smoothwall, IPCop, Endian) because the installer wouldn’t really do anything for you (like partition the hard drive).  I’m not too surprised by this, as this firewall is based on a BSD kernel and not Linux – which in my experience the BSD distributions tend not to be as user-friendly as their Linux counterparts.  BSD derivatives make up for it, however, (again in my experience), by being a little more stable and secure out of the box than Linux is.

To be fair, that’s usually because out of the box a BSD system has less 3rd party software, which leads again to the non-user friendliness :).  Anyway, back on point, after selecting my options for the installation I ejected the CD and rebooted into pfSense.

As advertised, it saved all my configuration details and most of my LAN worked as is.  Now I got to the point of the more difficult things like checking the firewall port forwarding and setting up my DMZ.  This is where pfSense got to be a little more difficult..

In IPCOP, it automatically asks you if you have/want an Orange interface, and then automatically configures you a nice default set of rules that allow pretty much anything out to the internet but not to your Green or Blue networks.  This works well, is point/click easy, and takes all of 10 minutes to start forwarding your ports to your DMZ and off you go.

In Endian, it also wants to know if you want a Orange network, and it also automatically configures a nice default set of firewall rules that are much more restrictive than in the IPCOP defaults.  This is good for security, and requires the admin to open up only what he or she wants.

In pfSense.. it wants to know why you want to use a third interface and tells you to go stick it.  Well ok, not really.  It is however much less intuitive.  During installation it will ask you for a LAN interface, fair enough, then it asks for an internet interface, good good, and then it just goes on to ask for “Optional Interfaces” that it duely names “OPT1, OPT2, OPT3.. etc” until you decide you’re done adding interfaces.  Once the interface is then added, you have to go into the web interface and actually enable it (because.. you may have just been adding random nonexistant interfaces for fun) and then you go to the firewall rules area and find…. nothing.  This is great for just being annoying :).

Under the pfSense firewall rules you have different tabs per interface and you do have of course a tab for the new interface but NO default rules are added.  No DNS, no web, nada.  So you get to add everything you need, including basic “make this subnet work” rules by hand.

On the other hand.. pfSense does have a rule that Endian opted to skip: The Any->Any Allow rule for your LAN network.  You know, that’s the easy rule I described in my last article that makes ipcop a great new or inexperienced user’s firewall setup.  You don’t have to mess with anything to get all of the internet at your fingertips, while securing the malicious traffic from the outside. Again this is a complete trade-off on how you want to setup your network: Access control for employee’s or children, or easy configuration with minimal fuss.

Now, Endian and pfSense each take a different road by default, but can each be made like the other due to support for bi-directional (incoming and outgoing traffic) firewalling… IPCOP on the other hand takes the easy road, with no default options to change it.  With IPCOP you have to install an addon that allows you to block outgoing traffic – again solidifying IPCOP’s role as the user-friendly easy firewall with limited advanced options (without addons).

Like IPCOP, however, pfSense comes with nearly no additional software beyond your default firewall/router/nat configuration.  It does have some advanced things: Loadbalancing with another pfSense firewall, PPoE server, etc.. but no Proxies, anti-virus, content filters, etc.  Endian came default with these.  Unlike IPCOP, however, the pfSense package/addon interface seems much simpler.  It’s already there in your menu, ready to go, just click “install” on any particular addon and it automatically fetches, installs and configures it.  Using these you can add all the missing functionality you need.  In IPCOP, this requires you to install the basic addon interface first (via a command line in SSH), and then you can browse to “Addons” in the web interface, pick an addon where you have to go download the package to your computer, then go back to the web interface and “upload” the package to IPCOP.  This whole procedure breaks the “easy” that IPCOP’s entire foundation lives on.

Going back to the port forwarding in the DMZ, I was presented with a different problem.  First, what was obvious to me but may not be to some (or most?), was that because the firewall interface is broken up by interface (LAN, WAN, DMZ) you can’t just create one bi-directional rule for port forward, but instead have to go create one rule on the WAN to allow it coming in, and one rule on the DMZ to allow it going out.

Normally this would create double the work, if it weren’t for a hidden specialty that pfSense has and I will get to in a minute.  Second, after spending an hour banging my head against the wall and searching through pages of forum posts online trying to figure out why my port forwards still weren’t working for my DMZ.. I found a post that explained you needed to actually add specific NAT rules for each port as well.

Holy Hell pfSense, so let’s get this right: what you can do in one rule in Endian and IPCOP, takes 3 rules in 3 different pages for pfSense?!? One in Firewall->NAT, one in Firewall->Rules->WAN, and one in Firewall->Rules->DMZ – AND they are all different.  So basically, if I have 20 rules in Endian for 20 ports I need to forward – then doing it this way would have taken 60 bloody rules!  To be fair, if you do the NAT one first it has a checkbox that will automatically create a rule for the WAN – but still, that’s just nonsense!

Now, not all servers need this: Web servers for example don’t need to get “out” port 80 due to the nature of the stateful firewall – it allows “responses” from your webserver to the client; however mail servers on the other hand obviously need to get “out” port 25 to talk to other mail servers – my example of 60 represents a “worst case scenario”.