Plex Media Server Startup soci_error

A good friend of mine recently ran into an issue where Plex Media Server running on Fedora would not start up. After multiple times trying to start\stop it, deleted pid files, removing subsys lock files, discovered that /var was full, so it couldn’t write something during startup which was causing it not to start.

Receiving an error similar to this:

Starting PlexMediaServer: terminate called after throwing an instance of 'soci::soci_error'

Searching Google wasn’t much help, just a bunch of guys saying to optimize sqlite and\or reinstall Plex.

Started looking at the filesystems and found that /var was filled up. This was causd by another process filling up the space. After freeing up space in /var/log it and allowed Plex to start no problem.

How To Retrieve and edit MOD Movies off Panasonic Camorders

There are days that there is something you see makes you just scratch your head and go What?? Well one of those came to me when I was given a Panasonic Camcorder in which there was no software just the device and USB cable and asked to retrieve the movies and make a DVD.

Upon connecting to the device I found files with the .MOD extension. Since I am running VLC I was able to double-click and was able to watch the videos. With a bit of digging I found that .MOD extension is used by JVC, Canon and Panasonic on various models of their camcorders. Here is a list of some of the models saving SD (Standard Definition) with .MOD extension.

Canon FS100
Canon FS10
Canon FS11
JVC GZ-MG30
JVC GZ-MG70
JVC GZ-MG37
JVC GZ-MG77
JVC GZ-MG50
JVC GZ-MG130
JVC GZ-MG155
JVC GZ-MG255
JVC GZ-MG555
Panasonic SDR-S100
Panasonic SDR-S150
Panasonic SDR-S10
Panasonic SDR-H18
Panasonic SDR-H200
Panasonic SDR-H40
Panasonic SDR-H60
Panasonic SDR-SW20

I found many posts of confused users on what to do with the files and how to play and convert. What .MOD file extension really is just a standard MPEG2 file, so really all you need to do is just rename to .MPG and you can edit the files with you favorite editor. To get to the files with a Windows Vista / 7 system you only need to connect the USB cable to the PC and put the camcorder in the correct USB connection mode. With the Panasonic camcorder set the camcorder to play mode and select PC\Recorder for the USB connection type and Windows will install the drivers and show a selection of what to do with the recently discovered device.

Navigated to the directory on the camcorder that has the MOD files and copy them to a place on your hard drive and just press F2 or right click, select rename and replace .mod with .mpg and that’s all.

Next step is to use your favorite editor (Sony Vegas, Adobe Premier, Kdenlive, and many others) and chain the files together into one. For details on doing that refer to the documentation and posts by others for the program if you don’t know it already. Also look for future posts here on the subject.

Hopefully this will help to clear confusion on .MOD file extension!!

How to install Plex Media Server 0.9.6.6 on CentOS / Fedora / RHEL

In an earlier post we covered installing Plex Media Server 0.9.6.3 on a Windows 7 system. In this post we’ll cover how to install and configure on a Linux system, CentOS 6.2 to be exact, but this process can be used on Fedora / and RHEL as well.

First make sure you meet the system requirements.

System Requirements:

1.6 GHz processor (2.4 GHz dual core for 1080p transcoding).
256 MB RAM
Gigabit Ethernet recommended for HD streaming.
N.B. Flash and Silverlight video playback is not supported on Linux.

Installation is very simple. It is just a matter of adding the repo to the server and importing the key.

Create the plex.repo definition in /etc/yum.repos.d with the following contents.

[PlexRepo] name=PlexRepo baseurl=http://plexapp.com/rpmrepo/release/$basearch/ enabled=1 gpgcheck=1

Import the GPG key

$ rpm --import http://plexapp.com/plex_pub_key.pub

Then install it with this command:

$ yum install plexmediaserver

Now start the Plex Media Server

$ /etc/init.d/plexmediaserver start

Once the startup is completed open a browser and goto http://localhost (or systems ip):32400/manage/index.html

Click on any of the Add Media to you Library icons to add your content for the devices to see. Change preferences from the many options available.

Look for future posts on customizing Plex Media Server and adding DLNA profiles for some of the many devices that can connect.

Currently Plex Media Server runs off older init scripts. there is a post in the Plex forums with a way to use the newer systemd here http://forums.plexapp.com/index.php/topic/43464-clean-systemd-scripts-for-fedora-17/

Plex Media Server v0.9.6.6 / Plex v0.9.5.4 / Plex for iOS v2.5 Released

Great News !! Plex Media Server v0.9.6.6 / Plex v0.9.5.4 / Plex for iOS v2.5 has been released and here is the laundry list. You can download it here http://wiki.plexapp.com/index.php/Downloads and look for a future post on installing and configuring on Linux as well as some custom DLNA configs!

If you’ve experienced an issue with TV scans missing posters or other artwork, somewhat randomly, this has been fixed; we’ve been experiencing increasingly heavy traffic with all the new users, so we had to bulk up our infrastructure!
Movie matching should be more accurate and much faster; we now have a fully automated system which improves the agent matching over time based on the anonymous data sent back. Pretty cool, right?
We’ve pushed quite a few updates to the agents to fix non-ASCII poster/subtitle filename issues on Linux, metadata for personal show scanning, and a number of other issues.
We released a new version of Plex for Android, with fixes and a few new features. The update for Google TV is coming shortly!
We’re in the process of pushing a new release of Plex for iOS today to Apple, should be available in a week or so. Fixes and goodies abound, and to be nice, here’s a full list of changes you have to look forward to:
NEW: Home screen sections can be re-ordered or hidden. Yay!
NEW: Background art while browsing. Pretty!
NEW: Easier to read list view when browsing by folder. Useful!
FIX: High bitrate content will correctly transcode instead of attempting Direct Play (thanks, majortom!)
FIX: Media deletion & progress reporting works when using myPlex without publishing servers.
FIX: Network addresses are resolved earlier to make playing media on remote clients more reliable.
FIX: Easier method for adding friends.
FIX: Crash when attempting to set a user rating for an item with no community rating.
FIX: Crash marking a show (un)watched.
FIX: A few layout & graphical issues.
We also have a new Plex Media Server release for you, with a number of improvements, which can be downloaded from the usual place (and shortly from auto-update):

NEW: Added (advanced) preference for specifying location of Aperture/iPhone XML paths. The preference is ApertureLibraryXmlPath for Aperture and iPhotoLibraryXmlPath for iPhoto. Yes, we’re going to have an easy way to get at these advanced preferences soon.
NEW: (Linux) Allow syslog logging via environment variable PLEX_MEDIA_SERVER_USE_SYSLOG. This has been requested for ages.
NEW: (API) Massive performance improvement for players that ask for paged data (e.g. for Roku). If you have large library sections, you’ll notice a big change; with 1000 items, the page requests are 6 times faster.
NEW: (API) Added /library/sections/X/{sorts|filters} endpoints for advanced filtering.
FIX: Sidecar (e.g. SRT) subtitle files work again. Sorry, that was a bad regression.
FIX: (Windows) Upload speeds from the server were artificially slow in some cases. We’d gotten sporadic reports over the months that upload speeds seemed limited, and we finally managed to track down the issue. The upload speed will now max out your connection, and will take much less CPU as well.
FIX: A crash when scanning for plug-ins when permissions are wrong.
FIX: (Mac) Fix some Aperture photos not displaying properly.
FIX: Library timeline could generate blank items occasionally.
FIX: Web interface didn’t show added and deleted items properly when scanning.
FIX: Don’t pass back bogus blank content ratings.
FIX: (Linux) DLNA icon and server name were missing on some platforms.
FIX: When overwriting plug-ins, files that don’t exist anymore are deleted.
FIX: Handle 302 as well as 301 redirects in the image transcoder.
FIX: When scanning files that had already been scanned, they didn’t end up with thumbnails.
FIX: Certain image formats (TIFF, BMP, PCX) didn’t get thumb nailed.
FIX: Fixed sleep prevention, OS X (and possibly Linux) should sleep now.
FIX: (Windows) Fixed a crash on start.
FIX: (Synology) DLNA to PS3 wasn’t working.
FIX: (DLNA) Memory leak in DLNA server process.
FIX: (DLNA) Fixed PS3 audio dropouts by transcoding to stereo for now in the profile.
FIX: (DLNA) Fixed evaluation of limitations.
FIX: (DLNA) Fixed AAC audio not playing to PS3.
FIX: (DLNA) Build-in profile now supports Samsung SmartTVs (thanks, holzi!)
We also have some fixes in a new release of the Plex Laika desktop client:
FIX: Update RTMP to 2.4
FIX: Fix for connectivity issues when PMS isn’t running locally (thanks to elwertk).
FIX: Playback of interlaced H.264 content (MBAFF) was broken (thanks to elwertk).
FIX: Use the same user agent as earlier in Plex/Nine.
FIX: Add the Plex language and version headers.
FIX: When forced transcode was enabled, playback could fail for local files.
FIX: Support for chained indirects in channels.

Gramps 3.4.0 Released

This is a bit passed due but the Gramps project has released Gramps 3.4.0 The “always look on the bright side of life”. If you are interested in Genealogy and looking for an OpenSource solution, then you owe it yourself to check out Gramps. If you are a seasoned Gramps user then you owe it to yourself to download the latest version.

Version 3.4.0 of Gramps! The “always look on the bright side of life’“, a feature release.
Lots of changes and bug fixes to every part of Gramps, including XML

import/export, image handling, gedom handling, Gramplets, date handling,
citations, reports, more!
Some platform-specific fixes (Windows, OSX, Linux)
Many translation updates

If you are new to Gramps check out my post on installing Gramps. Happy hunting !!!

Creating EPUB documents with LibreOffice Writer

With all the ereaders and tablets available it is now easy to take your documents with you everywhere, be it a book technical manual, etc., but what about stuff you write or company documents. With LibreOffice Writer you can create your own by using the Writer2epub extension for OpenOffice / LibreOffice Writer.

Writer2epub can b downloaded at http://extensions.openoffice.org/en/project/Writer2ePub/ and is easy to install by opening Extension Manage > click Add and browse to where you downloaded the extension. Close Writer and you will now have three new icons on the toolbar.

Simply press the first icon, and an ePub will be created in the same folder of the original file.
The icon with the blue mark is useful to add or edit the metadata information (title, author and so on).
The last icon with the red mark is to modify the preference. In a normal use you don’t need to modify these settings.

According to the developer here is what Writer2ePub is and isn’t.

What is Writer2ePub?

W2E is an ePub creator. Simply write your document with the OOo Word Processor and W2E will make an ePub file using the best traditional typographic rules, by applying a predefined style sheet (CSS). If you need a good ePub document and you can use the OOo Writer Word Processor, W2E is your tool.

What Writer2ePub is not?

W2E is not a simple file converter. It does not just convert an existing document to ePub. If you need to obtain a pure WYSIWYG ePub file, W2E is not for you. Please look at Calibre http://calibre-ebook.com/ or other OOo extensions available on the Internet to do this kind of jobs.

Neither is W2E an ePub editor, please look at Sigil http://code.google.com/p/sigil/ or other similar product if you need to edit and modify an existing ePub.

Writer2ePub is exactly what it says it is, it takes a document created in Writer and creates a perfectly formatted ePub document. Just click on the ePub icon on the toolbar and a MetaData dialog will appear asking for information.

Title (required)
Author
Language
ID/ISBN
Publisher
Publishing Date
Original Title
Tags
Description
Cover (image, no image)

The document will be saved and you now have created an ePub document out of your Writer document. What is so nice is now you can edit the original document and recreate an updated ePub with a simple click.

Your Own Media Server using Plex Media Server

Recently I found a need to add the ability for my Roku XD box to be able to access my home movies and other media on my NAS, also looking for an all in one solution to stream to Asus Transformer TF101, iPod Touch, Sony Bravia TV and iPhone. A good co-worker recommended Plex Media Server which does all the above and more.

Plex Media Server is the solution for local and online media. According to the site:

” Plex Media Server seamlessly connects your Plex clients with all of your local and online media. The combination of centralized library management, streaming of online content, and powerful transcoding functionality provides an unrivaled level of flexibility and ease of use.
Plex Media Server runs on your Mac, PC, or compatible NAS device and serves your media to all of your Plex clients including Plex-enabled mobile devices and 2011 LG Smart TVs.”

Plex uses apps (iOS and Android) to connect mobile devices, channel for Roku and DNLA settings to connect to PS3, xBox and TV’s. There are also forums where users have submitted working DNLA configurations for other devices.

Things look good and sound good to me, so first need to download Plex Media Server from http://wiki.plexapp.com/index.php/Downloads and install Windows or Fedora. At the time of this posting Plex Media Server 0.9.6.4 was available. !!!Update!!!! Plex Media Server 0.9.6.5 has been released. Download it from here.

For my use it will be on a Windows 7 Professional.

Once the file has been downloaded just double-click and accept the defaults for Windows installation. For Fedora add the repo and use yum to install the package.

Create the file /etc/yum.repos.d/plex.repo and insert the following contents.

[PlexRepo]
name=PlexRepo
baseurl=http://plexapp.com/rpmrepo/release/$basearch/
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1

Import the Plex GPG key:

$ rpm --import http://plexapp.com/plex_pub_key.pub

Then install it with this command:

$ yum install plexmediaserver

After the installation the Plex Media server will be running. Next we need to define a folder on the NAS that is attached to the Windows 7 system. The steps are the same for adding to the Linux system as well. Open the Media Manager interface with Mozilla FireFox, Google Chrome or Opera, Internet Explorer is not supported.

To open the Plex interface click on the plex icon in the toolbar and it will open your default browser and you will be introduced to the Plex interface. If you are using Linux open a browser and goto http://localhost:32400/manage/index.html

Now we can add movies or home movies. Click on the link and a box will appear. Click Add and browse to the location on your NAS or hard drive to the location of the movies. Once done click Add Section and Plex will scan the drive and add what it finds.

At this point you can add photos, music, TV shows and other movies. Now you have content ready for you to attach devices you have.

Attaching Roku XD

Adding access to the Roku to Plex Media server is as easy as using the Add Channel feature on the Roku and add Plex. When you start the Plex channel on your Roku, it will try to discover your Plex Media Server(s) automatically. Unfortunately, discovery may not work, depending on your network. You can add the server manually by going to Preferences -> Plex Media Servers -> Add Server Manually. On that screen, enter the IP address of the Plex Media Server. Verify that the server is running and you have the right IP address by opening a browser and going to http://[ip_address]:32400/. If it’s working, it’ll show some XML. If you get an error message from your browser (e.g. server not responding), then either your Plex Media Server isn’t running, or you have the wrong IP address. Once it’s working, enter that IP address into your Roku.

Asus Transformer

To attach the Asus Transformer to Plex Media Server you just have to purchase the app from Google Play and install it. Just as the Roku open the app and it will attempt to find your Plex server and if not add it the same way.

Sony Bravia

As for the Sony Bravia TV I am still working on creating a DNLA profile for the TV to discover the server. Newer Sony Bravia TV’s (2010 – 2012) have profiles that work, but since mine is a 2009 it is taking sometime to get a working profile. With the help of the Plex forums I don’t expect this to be a big hurdle.

I hope this will help you to look at another way to deliver your content to your connected home.

GIMP 2.8 Released

After a long wait GIMP 2.8 has been released. GIMP has always been my favorite graphics editor and it is free! I have always liked the fact that it is a cross platform app that I can use no matter what OS I have chosen to complete my task at hand. GIMP is the alternative to Photoshop which is great but very expensive product.

Long-anticipated features such as layer groups, on-canvas text editing, advanced brush dynamics and the much desired optional single-window mode.

Source code is available for downloading from a plethora of mirrors, a build for Windows will soon be available, and hope to see a build for Mac OS X released as well. Look back here for a list of links to the various installers once they become available

VLC v2.0.1 Released

The all-in-one VLC (Video Lan Media Player) has released a bugfix version of the best free cross platform player available. You can download it from here. This is my goto piece of software on Windows and Linux for playing all types of media. Many fixes available in this release.

Changes between 2.0.0 and 2.0.1:
——————————–

Access:
* fix and improve the CDDB information retrieval
* fix the samba module compilation
* fix UDP / RTP multicast stream reception on Mac OS X when using the 10.7 SDK
* multiple fixes for HLS support, notably on Win32 and for encryption
* multiple fixes for Bluray discs playback
* fix for DVD decryption on some RPC-I drives

Codecs:
* Support for MXPEG files
* limit auto-detected threads to 4 in avcodec module
* fix quicktime audio codecs in RTSP streams

Demuxers:
* Fix multi-file splitted RAR archive support
* Fix a crash when seeking in mka
* Improve MKV multi-video tracks support

Muxers:
* Fix ogm header creation

Audio filters:
* limit spatializer filter distortions
* Use fastest SinC algorithm for samplerate module

Audio output:
* Fix S/PDIF passthrough with ALSA.
* Remove flawed ALSA channels autodetection. The available ALSA channels MUST be configured now (stereo by default).
* Fix delay when changing the volume on Mac OS X

Video filters:
* Fix gradfun unloading on Windows platform

Mac OS X interface:
* allow to hide the playlist to get a small controller window
* allow to hide the sidebar
* disable Lion fullscreen mode by default, since its behavior is misleading – this fixes fullscreen video output on a secondary screen
* noticebly faster launch time
* correct a few visual glitches and accessibility support
* re-enable visual feedback on seek and volume changes
* improve track synchronization panel
* fix fontconfig cache dialog, closure of the interface and numerous crashes
* fix crop, aspect ratio handling, DVD (no menu) support and Open subtitle menu

Qt interface:
* allow a native seek slider instead of the blue one
* fixes in the playlist, the addons dialog, the menus, the main toolbar the open dialogs, preferences and customization dialogs
* fix for fontconfig cache dialog, when rebuilding ASS fonts

Skins interface:
* fix for menus display
* Addition of $R to display current playback speed
* documentation update

Web interface:
* fix mobiles display for remote control mode
* support for .drc and .3ga extensions

Service discovery:
* fix SAP discovery, where an item was added multiple times
* fix SAP discovery on Mac OS X when using the 10.7 SDK
* Update Jamendo selections

Miscellaneous:
* fix DBus crash
* fix build issues on BSD, Linux/PPC and Linux/Sparc
* fix a crash on VLM close

Security:
* Update libpng to 1.5.9 (CVE-2011-3026)
* Update freetype to 2.4.9 (CVE-2012-1126 up to CVE-2012-1144)
* Fix MMS stack overflow (SA-1201)
* Fix RealRTSP heap overflow (SA-1202)

Translations:
* Update of Czech, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish and Walloon translations

Data Crow for Collection Cataloging

Recently I took on the task to catalog my video and music collection. This need was driven by the fact that I was purchasing duplicate movies. The criteria was simple. It had to be able to use a barcode scanner, handle movie and audio collections, more if possible and have connections to access IMDB, Amazon and others if possible and able to run on different OS’s. And lastly the cost had to be reasonable or free. If free then a donation to the developer was in order.

After searching I found several options to try but ended up on looking at Data Crow. Data Crow is the ultimate media cataloger and media organizer. Always wanted to manage all your collections in one product? You want a product you can customize to your needs? Your search ends here! Using Data Crow allows you to create a huge database containing all your collected items. You can use the excellent online services to retrieve the information instead of typing all the information yourself.

A few features:

Platform independent and completely portable
Highly customizable and feature rich.
Audio, software, book, movie and photo collection cataloger
Retrieve information from services like Amazon.com, Imdb.com, Softpedia and MusicBrainz.
Optional internal web server and web GUI.
Import file information (mp3, divx, xvid, ..)
Loan registration.
PDF and HTML reporting.
Create new modules to, for example, maintain your stamp collection.
Available translations: Italian, German, Dutch, English, Spanish and French.

Data Crow is 100% free and 100% free of ads, viruses and spyware. Data Crow runs on any system where Java 1.6 (or higher) from Sun is installed.

The barcode scanner is an Adesso Nuscan 1000u which is a low cost USB scanner that will work well for the job and is supported by Data Crow. The nice thing about the Adesso barcode scanner is that you plug it in and it works, no drivers needed.

Installation is simple for Windows just download , unzip it and run the installer. One note for the Windows installation is to change the installation directory to c:\Data Crow instead of c:\program files\data crow. the reason for the change is due to an issue with directory and file restrictions that can cause issues with Data Crow.

Installation on Linux and MAC is just as easy. Download and unzip the program. To start the program change to the extracted directory and run datacrow.sh.

Now that we are installed lets start it up and get started adding movies! Start up Data Crow and you will be greeted by a simple interface.

At start up you will be ask to select the modules. For my choice I selected all and after a few quick moments I was on my way. Select the module you want to add, in this case I am adding a DVD using the barcode scanner.

Click on Item Wizard and you will have several selections to choose from to search in the drop down next to Search For window. If you do not have a barcode scanner you can type in what you are looking for and select the appropriate category to select from in the drop down. If you do have a barcode scanner select UPC barcode and scan the barcode of the movie.

At this point you can select a different server to search from or accept the default of Amazon and click on the Find button.

Select from one of the search findings and click on Next. At this point Data Crow will connect and download any information retrived from the search. Click Finish to add the data into your collection.

Not to bad, easy to use and with a barcode scanner it will take little time to add the collection.

I have only covered the basic of this powerful collection application. Please download and try the application and hopefully you as I can quickly and easily add your collection. Look for future posts on more you can do with Data Crow.

Life of a Geek Admin

The Daily adventures of a true geek administrator

Category Archives: Multimedia