David Woods

The most painful and time consuming part of this project has been digitizing our DVD collection. I thought it would be as simple as downloading a program and rip it is done…. not so much in the end. Most mainstream companies are avoiding the area of DVD digitization due to potential issues of the legality of ripping DVDs. Another issue came down to encoding support in the software I tried (most were doing h.246) which would not play on some of my lower powered devices. The other issue is that there are SO many options and settings to tweak that it takes a long time to get them just right. I started ripping only one chapter of a movie and then watching that on different devices and then tweaking settings.

To start with there are many different ways to digitize your DVDs. The first thing I tried was using VLC media player which (unkown to me) has an option to save a DVD to disk. I found that most outputs it put out was distorted and had lots of green blocks all over. I also tried DVDFab which I could not get the quality I wanted and it was trial software. Handbrake is another popular software but it does not do decryption so you have to install other software (I triewantd AnyDVD which worked awesome) in combination with Handbrake. Handbrake only supported H.246 or MPEG4 and I found the MPEG4 quality was too low (and I could not seem to get it any better).

What I finally got to work is a two step process. The first step was to rip the contents of the DVD to a VOB file using DVDDecryptor which takes about 20 minutes. A VOB file is the raw video/audio/subtitiles from the disk which some programs can read in and convert. The next step was to feed the VOB into a program called MeGUI which is a UI wrapper around AviSynth that works quite well. I found it takes 2-3 hours to encode a video using MeGUI.

Now if you have a lot of movies then you need some automation to this process. What I did was gather up 5 spare DVD roms and combined them into a computer so I could backup 5 DVDs at a time. I then wrote a bit of code (I may publish it later) that starts DVDDecryptor on the command line, rips the disk, ejects the disk, then monitors for a new disk. This allowed me to just walk by and see the ejected trays and then insert new disks which worked well. My big issue was that the raw DVD is about 5 GB so you can fill up storage quick so I moved a lot of the raw files to other computers as the drive on my ripping computer filled up.

Once I had my movies ripped (or my hard drives filled) it was time to compress them down to save some space using MeGUI+Avisynth. When you install the software it asks if you want to download some presets which I did. In the end I used XVid-Balanced to do my encoding. Then I used the one click encoding tool in MeGUI and queued up all my VOB files. As this process takes 2-3 hours (depending on CPU power) I ran it on multiple computers. Many of my computers are multi-core and MeGUI has the option to spin up multiple worker threads but I found that it crashed so I just ran one worker (which still used multiple cores).

The next step in providing digital content is being able to share your existing media out to the home. There are several ways to do this.

The first thing I want to talk about though is the codec issue. Video and audio can get quite large and there are many different ways to encode media to shrink its size down. In order to play a video you need the proper codec installed (a codec is a bit of code that properly decodes encoded video). The #1 issue with video playback has typically been that you don’t have the right codec installed. Normally when you are missing a codec you go out and download the codec and install it on your computer. When you have a device connected to a T.V. though it may not be possible to add the codec you want (I ran into this with my XBOX 360 for instance).

Simple File Share
Most computers and devices can access file shares quite easily. On your media server just right click and goto sharing and then select the users. There are many tutorials out there on how to share a folder so I wont dig into the basics but there are a few key tricks to it.

Most shares require the user to authenticate upon attempting to access a shared folder so that it can grant or deny access to that share. Now unless you have setup a domain controller for your house, it will not know who you are and want a username and password that has been setup on the computer sharing files. A neat trick is that if you have the same username/password setup on both the client and the server then you will automatically be authenticated. Otherwise it will prompt you for credentials. If you have children then it is adviseable to have a folder for family movies that allows the kids credentials and then a higher rated folder that requires an adults credentials.

The other debate is what type of access the share should have. I typically have shared folders that are read only and one folder that allows write so that new content can be dropped in from any computer and then sorted into the proper readonly folder.

The cons with this is that you need credentials, not all devices work over a file share, not all devices can play all types of media (due to the codec issue). For instance my xbox 360 does not access fileshares so this technique does not work)

Windows Media Sharing
I believe that starting with Windows Media Player 10 is an included service that allows you to share media out that is added to your Media Player library. I think that this solution works pretty good for the scenario where a user has one computer running a client operating system (i.e. XP/Vista/Windows 7) with their media and share it out. I have not tried it as I have a hatred for the bloatware that is Windows Media Player but it may just work for you.

From my quick read it does appear to overcome the codec issue via transcoding. This means that the media player on your computer converts the video on the fly to a format the remote device knows how to play. Again I have not tried this but I leave it up to you to experiment.

Windows Media Center & Media Center Extenders
Media Center is a chunk of software that ships with some editions of Vista and Win7. It allows you to access all your media, photos, and more via a client. The XBOX 360 ships with just such a client so I tried it out. It was horrible. It could not play a lot of the videos I had (due to codec issues), it was slow to navigate, and I found the video was choppy a lot of the time. Granted, I tried this a few years ago and they have probably made improvements but I have moved on to other technologies. I also don’t believe that you can have Media Center on a computer running a server OS (but again, I could be wrong)

Transcoding Server
I have found the best thing for me has been using a transcoding server called TVersity. The app converts video on the fly and streams it out to my devices just fine. The really nice feature is that you can also add internet feeds to the TVersity library. What this means is that I can take a show that published a feed and have my computer download that data, transcode it, and stream it to my xbox 360. I can now watch internet TV… on my TV! There is a lot of neat stuff you can do in this area.

The biggest issue I have found with TVersity is that the service will not respond sometimes and requires me to restart the service. Friends of mine have had no problems but I have had the issue on two separate installs now.

Network Considerations
For all of these solutions you will need to have the appropriate exceptions in your firewall to allow the services that share media to be accessible. Bandwidth can also be an issue with wireless networks. I currently have my server connected  to the router via regular cat 5 cable but the devices I consume media on are wireless. This works fairly well but media sharing is a bandwidth intensive operation so the quality of wireless signal you get may have an effect on streaming. If you can use a hardwire connection then I would recommend it as it is much more reliable than wireless.

We have a lot of disparate sources of media around our home. DVDs, CDs, VHS, downloaded content, mp3s, etc. I find it to become more and more of a hastle running around finding the media I want, and then finding the device that can play that. Plus with 3 kids running around it is inevitable that their (and sometimes my) optical media gets scratched or damaged.

To that end I have decided to try and go completely digital in our home and felt that documenting it may be of help to others.

Infastructure:
Wireless network (802.11g)
3 televisions
2 original xboxes
1 xbox 360
1 server (more on this later)
multiple client laptops

Goal:
-Have all media centralized
-Have a backup of all media (if I had to do this all over again I would cry)
-Have different media available from different terminals (kids television should not be able to watch adult shows)

Requirements:
The first step here was to get a central computer that will store all the media. This computer should have the following:
-Lots of storage
-A DVD and or Blue Ray player
-Have some sort of hard drive redundancy
-Enough CPU power to convert videos on the fly (A Pentium III 700Mhz is the bare minimum you would want)
-Enough techincal knowhow to install an operating system, install software, and install hardware into a computer.

To do this I took an old server I had (but a desktop would work just fine) and installed two 2TB drives into it (at the time of writing they cost only $150 each). I also installed Windows Server 2008 R2 onto it but any OS of choice should do.

The biggest difference between my setup and the average user is that my media server has a builtin SATA raid card which I configured to mirror the drives (so I only have 2GB of storage but when (not if, when) one fails I can plunk in another and be on my way). If you don’t have hardware RAID and don’t want to purchase it you can actually setup a raid in software. Setting up a software raid can be a bit tricky but I found a great article about it. The only thing I would change is to give more than 10GB to windows / programs (at least 40GB nowdways I would think). Trust me in that running out of room on a partition is one of the most annoying things to happen to a person.

Once you have the system setup and running I like to make sure that the drives are actually redundant. I have never ever found that a mirror is not actually working after I set it up but I just like to make sure. To do this I take each hard drive out and slave it into another computer and ensure that they both have the same data on it (just a quick check to make sure that the folder structures are copied to each). Once that is done I put them both back in and ensure the mirror is functioning (sometimes it may detect they are out of sync and need to resync the array). The other way to do this is to remove one drive from the server, turn it on, make sure it works, then repeat with the other drive. This process will require a resync of the array which is time consuming. It took at least 15 hours to resync my 2TB array.

That is about it for now. In the future we will talk about software on the server, ripping DVDs and CDs, and how to watch/listen to this stuff on you TVs and computers effectively.

On our current project we are using MSBuild to build our application. This is my first time using MSBuild other than just tinkering and I have found it…. challenging to say the least. A lot of my challenges are lack of knowledge but the other half is the language itself.

The most recent challenge I wanted to write about was calling a target multiple times. Our scenario is this: We have to generate a batch file for each environment we are going to install in with environment specific settings. The issue I had was that for each environment we had that we were copying and pasting the steps and changing values for each environments. While this worked, as the number of environments grew the size of the build task grew and got harder to modify as requirements changed.

Ideally what we would have is a task that would generate a batch file based on a set of parameters that we could just call out to so I built this:

   <Target Name=”BuildBatchFile “>
    <Copy SourceFiles=”install.bat”
                 DestinationFiles=”MyApp.Setup\Release\install.$(BATCHENV).bat”
                 ContinueOnError=”false” 
                 SkipUnchangedFiles=”false” />
    <FileUpdate Files=”MyApp.Setup\Release\install.$(BATCHENV).bat”
                           Regex=”{ENV}”
                           ReplacementText=”$(ENV)” />
    <FileUpdate Files=”MyApp.Setup\Release\install.$(BATCHENV).bat”
                           Regex=”{VDIR}”
                           ReplacementText=”$(VDIR)” />
    <FileUpdate Files=”MyApp.Setup\Release\install.$(BATCHENV).bat”
                           Regex=”{INSTALLDIR}”
                           ReplacementText=”$(INSTALLDIR)” />
  </Target>

So this copies my template install.bat to install.[ENVIRONMENT[.bat and then does all the string replacements on it.

The issue is how to invoke this task with different sets of data. My first thought was this:

<CallTarget Targets=”BuildConfigFile” />

Unfortunately, there is no way to pass parameters to a target. The only way to do that is to call MSBuild and set the parameters passed to MSBuild (this does feel wrong but I am not sure of a better way to do it so far)

<Target Name=”BuildDeploymentPackage”>
    <MSBuild Projects=”$(MSBuildProjectFile)”
                      Targets=”BuildBatchFile “  
                      Properties=”BATCHENV=ALPHA;ENV=ALPHA;VDIR=PASIPrep;INSTALLDIR=C:\inetpub\wwwroot\MyApp;” />
    <MSBuild Projects=”$(MSBuildProjectFile)”
                       Targets=”BuildBatchFile ”
                        Properties=”BATCHENV=SYST;ENV=SYST;VDIR=MyApp;INSTALLDIR=C:\inetpub\wwwroot\MyApp;” />
    <MSBuild Projects=”$(MSBuildProjectFile)”
                       Targets=”BuildBatchFile “ 
                       Properties=”BATCHENV=TRAINING;ENV=TEST;VDIR=MyApp;INSTALLDIR=C:\inetpub\wwwroot\MyApp.TEST;” />
  </Target>

The above target calls MSBuild to call its own build file and run the BuildBatchFile target with a set of parameters.

Hope this helps (or someone shows me a better way to do it)!

One common issue of team development is sharing configuration files. If a developer is testing something out and changes a value and then accidentally checks that file in it affects all developers.

There are a few approaches to solving this issue:
1) Be very careful and disciplined.

2) Have a web.config.template under source control that developers copy to web.config and not include in source control.

3) Have a build script task to generate a config file on demand.

4) What we are trying. Unit test the configuration to make sure it is correct.
+web.config is under source control
+changes are caught by a test. If it is meant to be distributed to all developers then the test should be updated as well
-have to write a test for the configuration (not a big minus in my opinion)
-If you have different config settings for the test project than the actual project then this will not work

In order to test a config file though we need to be able to load that config file! In our case we are testing a web.config and nunit is expecting a app.test.dll.config file. The easy way around this was to copy the web.config from our application to the proper folder and name with a pre-build event:

copy $(SolutionDir)\App.Service\web.config $(ProjectDir)\bin\App.Test.dll.config /y

Now my tests use that config file to assert that the settings are proper. The big downside to this approach is that it will overwrite the app.config file that you may already have for your test which may not be desirable.

Alternatives:
1) Parse the XML of the config file you want to test and verify
2) Load and unload and external config file in a test (I started with this and could not get it to work)

One of the great things about continuous integration is that we can increment our assemblies version number with each build. For our project we also apply a label to our source code repository every time we build a deployment package. This allows us to get the version of source code from the exact point in time that the msi was built.

One of the issues we ran into was that we have three build configurations:
1. “CI” This gets run on every checkin of code
2. “Deploy – ALPHA” This is run manually to deploy to our alpha test environment
3. “Deploy – ALPHA & BETA” This is also run manually and this deploys the same version to both the alpha and beta test environments

The issue we ran into is that each configuration has its own build number that is incrementing so if we ran “Deploy – ALPHA” 10 times we would have v 1.10.0.0 in ALPHA. If we then ran “Deploy – ALPHA & BETA” for the first time suddenly ALPHA now has v1.1.0.0! Obviously this is not very intuitive. In the end we added in the version number from our source code repository into our build numbers for both deploy configurations. Now we get build numbers like this: 1.46347373.0.0

The way we did this was by using the vcs variable in team city: 1.{build.vcs.number.TheNameOfVCSRoot}.0.{0}. The last digit is still an incrementing counter in case you re-run the build that something still increments even though the version in source control has not changed.