Greg's Notes

Adding DRM plugins to Calibre Ebook Manager

2011-12-25T06:36:00.000-08:00

Use this command to add a DRM plugin to Calibre

1. First download the plugins from here. http://apprenticealf.wordpress.com/2010/02/11/hello-world/

2. You can add a plugin by opening a terminal window switching to the plugin directory and then typing

calibre-customize -a /path/to/plugin.zip on the command line.

Of course substitute the name of the plugin.behind the slash.

3. You will then need to customize the plugin with your account informaiton

Home Theatre using MakeMKV, Handbrake, gFTP and the Popcorn Hour Media Tank A210

2011-10-03T12:39:00.000-07:00

Cable TV or Direct TV can be expensive ours used to run around a hundred dollars a month. You are not given many options with either its just one package of random channels or an even more expensive package of channels that are somehow supposed to be better than what you have already.

I decided to take the plunge and go Cable / Satellite free and started looking at my options for a scratch build of a Home Theater server.

While researching which motherboard, cpu and case would be suitable I read a review on the Popcorn Hour Media Tank A-210 for $199.00 dollars. Just add the hard drive of your choice, I found a Samsung terabyte on sale at Newegg. I like to shop online at Newegg for computer parts and have never been unhappy with their service.

The more expensive C200 media tank has the LCD panel on the front, optional cdrom drive and uses a radio frequency remote and looked like the one to get but I decided to skip the bells and whistles this time and ordered the A210. Provided are HDMI , component and composite video / audio and optical audio out.

Having had the A210 for about six months I do not regret making the decision to save a hundred dollars. In short we love the performance and stability of the A210 the only time I have seen it lag was when I copied over the Bergensbanen train video a 26 GB file of the scenic train ride between Bergen on the Norwegian west coast, crossing the mountains to the capital of Oslo.in HD.
The convenience of copying all of your favorite videos to the Popcorn hour then sitting down with the remote and watching a move without all of the trailers is awesome.

Which lead us to the next part of this posting, copying and transferring your videos to the Popcorn Hour. You can with most Linux distos just connect to a samba share on the popcorn hour.

However I did not want to browse to a share but just transfer a file so I started the FTP server on the popcorn hour. When starting the FTP service you should also go ahead and change the default usename and password which by the way is NMT and 1234 on the A210 media tank. Also whenever starting any kind of a server service on you local network make sure the firewall on your router is enabled which should be the case but you never know.

gFTP is available with just an 'apt-get install gftp" at a terminal window.
Once installed launch gftp and then enter the ip address of the popcorn hour, then the username and password. Hit enter and you will see the sata drive / video directory.
Highlight the movie or video you want to send to the Popcorn Hour media tank and click send, usually takes just a few minutes for the transfer.

Backing up your DVDs.
MakeMKV and Handbrake are both excellent video transcoders with MakeMKV being the fastest of the two but producing a larger file in the MKV container.
See my posting here on how to install MakeMKV for linux as the installation instructions can be hard to find.

Handbrake will produce a smaller file using the MP4 container which is playable on any of the apple hardware like Apple TV or iPhones and of course the Popcorn Hour media tank. See my post on how to install Handbrake for Debian if you are a Debian Squeeze user.

DISCLAIMER: The DMCA prohibits the ripping of DVDs that have DRM or any form of DRM on it like CSS, so make sure you only rip DVDs that don’t have content protection. If you decide to proceed with ripping a DVD, you can use this process at your own risk.

Making a launcher or shortcut for MakeMKV

2011-10-02T06:07:00.001-07:00

Right click on Desktop select 'Create Launcher"
Name: MakeMKV
Command: makemkv

The reason I posted this HOWTO as the icon for MakeMKV is hard to find, you have to browse to where you downloaded MakeMKV. Click on the generic icon and browse to where you downloaded and extracted the MakeMKV files. In this case its under Downloads/makemkv_v1.6.14_oss/makemkvgui/src/img/64

Instructions for MKV install for Debian.

2011-10-01T16:08:00.000-07:00

Instructions I used to install MKV on my Debian Squeeze system. you will find here the HOWTO for Debian Squeeze as I used to run Fedora up until Fedora 15 went with Gnome 3. I really like the rolling releases that Debian uses anyhow. These instructions are from the MKV forums.

The linux release includes full source code for MakeMKV GUI, libmakemkv multiplexer library and libdriveio MMC drive interrogation library. Please use this forum for an up to date download and setup instructions. You need to follow the steps outlined below to compile and install the application and all libraries.
Download both binary and source packages:
http://www.makemkv.com/download/makemkv ... bin.tar.gz
http://www.makemkv.com/download/makemkv ... oss.tar.gz

Make sure you have all required tools and libraries installed. You'll need GNU compiler and linker and header and library files for following libraries: glibc, openssl-0.9.8, zlib, qt4. You may use the following command to install all prerequisites on debian-based system like ubuntu:
Code:
sudo apt-get install build-essential libc6-dev libssl-dev libgl1-mesa-dev libqt4-dev

Unpack both packages and starting from source package do the following steps for each package:
Code:
make -f makefile.linux
sudo make -f makefile.linux install

The application will be installed as "/usr/bin/makemkv".
Open a terminal and type in makemkv.

Install Handbrake for Debian Squeeze

2011-10-01T15:33:00.000-07:00

The Handbrake package is not available for installation unless you make a change in the Debian Squeeze sources.list. located at etc/apt/sources.list
It is however available for apt-get install if you make a temporary change to your sources.list as shown here.

###### Debian Main Repos
deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ stable main contrib non-free
deb-src http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/stable main contrib non-free

###### Debian Main Repos
deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ testing main contrib non-free
deb-src http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ testing main contrib non-free

As we only want to install Handbrake you must go back and change testing back to stable.

The following is Handbrake running on Debain Squeeze.

How To - Install MKV ripper on Fedora 14

2011-04-16T06:34:00.000-07:00

These instructions as found somewhere on the MKV forum have never failed to work, just copy and past into a terminal window. Credit to the original poster whoever that was...

1. Install all the software that is required to build this program.

Become SuperUser

su -l
yum groupinstall "Development Tools"
yum install openssl-devel qt4-devel

2. Dowload the Makemkv programs which comes in 2 parts.

http://www.makemkv.com/download/makemkv_v1.6.5_bin.tar.gz

http://www.makemkv.com/download/makemkv_v1.6.5_oss.tar.gz

3. Unpack the downloads.

tar -zxvf makemkv_v1.6.3_bin.tar.gz

tar -zxvf makemkv_v1.6.3_oss.tar.gz

4. Build the software.

cd makemkv_v1.6.3_bin

make -f makefile.linux

sudo make -f makefile.linux install

Repeat for the other directory.

cd makemkv_v1.6.3_oss

make -f makefile.linux

sudo make -f makefile.linux install

5. Start the program by opening up a terminal and typing :makemkv.

Debian Stable multimedia setup

2009-04-28T11:54:00.000-07:00

Debian-multimedia is hosted at http://www.debian-multimedia.org . The best way to install codecs and applications for multimedia such as lame for playing mp3s and libdvdcss to play DVDs on your computer.Well worth a donation also as this site is invaluable to any Debian user.

The first package to install is debian-multimedia-keyring. First download the debian-multimedia-keyring package using the following command

wget http://www.debian-multimedia.org/pool/main/d/debian-multimedia-keyring/debian-multimedia-keyring_2008.10.16_all.deb

Install this .deb packge using the following command

#dpkg -i debian-multimedia-keyring_2008.10.16.deb

I will edit the sources.list file by opening a terminal window then switcing to root by typing 'su' and the root password and then launching 'gedit' as root. This way you have permission to make a change to the sources.list at etc/apt/sources.list. Then add one of the following lines if you are running Squeeze or stable.

deb http://www.debian-multimedia.org lenny main

or

deb ftp://ftp.debian-multimedia.org lenny main

or

deb http://www.debian-multimedia.org stable main

or

deb ftp://ftp.debian-multimedia.org stable main

Save and exit the file then update the source list using the following command

#apt-get update