The dreaded SMART failed email

My NAS emailed me about a 3 weeks ago telling me that a drive had failed.

This email was generated by the smartd daemon running on:

host name: shank-nas   
DNS domain: dhcp.theshanks.net   
NIS domain: (none) 

The following warning/error was logged by the smartd daemon: 
Device: /dev/sdc [SAT], Self-Test Log error count increased 
from 0 to 1 For details see host's SYSLOG. You can also use 
the smartctl utility for further investigation. Another 
email message will be sent in 24 hours if the problem 
persists.

I ignored these messages for a while, after all, this drive had just been replaced. It was part of a 2-drive enclosure that I purchased from woot a few years ago. The enclosure starting stalling on data reads in November of 2012 and I sent it in for RMA repair. They send me a new unit with supposedly new drives. Less than 1 month later, this one starts failing. Go Hitachi.

Home NAS

I've officially exceeded 500 titles on my HTPC and recently had a scare in which one of the drives in the LVM array started exhibiting errors. I decided it was time to separate the disk from the front-end and put some redundancy in-place. I checked out some of the turn-key solutions like Synology and QNAP. It seemed steep to spend $650 for an enclosure with no drives so I set out to build my own.

Cutting Credits with EDL in XBMC

MythTV has been serving me wonderfully for years. It's an incredible system and is still my primary media solution to this day. Unfortunately, the tools provided for managing video metadata have fallen a little behind. I recently switch away from Boxee and gave XBMC a try. What a fantastic front end and the media management tools are perfect.

My wife and I watch Star Trek Voyager each night to fall asleep (I hear you snickering). A minor frustration is that I have to fast forward through the intro credits, and I also have to exit out at the end, select the next episode and then get through those intro credits in a few minutes. It's a really minor annoyance but one I am proud to say I have overcome with the build-in EDL (edit decision lists) that are supported by XBMC.

MythTV Lives On

About a week ago I took the plunge to upgrade my MythTV system to .22 using Mythbuntu. My original backed and bedroom front end were getting on in years and it was time to take advantage of the new package. In order to preserve as much as possible and provide quick back out in-case things went south, I purchased a new 500GB HD to put the OS on. It's overkill but space is cheap and I got a great deal on it.

The other big feature of MythTV .22 is support for hardware acceleration on certain NVidia cards. I looked up VDPAU and selected the least expensive card that supported all of the features. I found a great deal on a  PNY VCG8600GXXB GeForce 8600 GT on NewEgg for a mere $25 after MIR.

When everything arrived, I set aside a full day for the upgrade. I moved the whole MythBuntu install onto a USB flash disk using Unetbootin, backed up the old database and the etc folder, disconnected the old HD and installed the new HD. Booting from the flash disk worked fine and I was quickly into the setup. Installation was a snap and recognized all of the hardware immediately, a task that has taken many weeks before. I followed the steps from MythPVR.com to migrate existing recordings to a new server. There is a comment at the end of the article that if the database is different enough, you should add a -f option to the import which did the trick for me.

I pointed the storage groups for videos at my already installed media drive (640GB) and then hot plugged in the old 500GB HD (love SATA), mounted it and then copied the recordings to the new recordings path. I launched the frontend and recordings were up and running. I was a little bummed that the video metadata didn't come through but instead of going back to the original database, I used the included jamu script to gather metadata for all of my movies. It looked a lot nicer and the information was much more accurate and detailed than before.

I went into the Playback settings and set it for VDPAU+. The difference is amazing between the old video card and this one. It's not just the VDPAU but having a dedicated card that seems to make the difference. The one major problem I did run into was pixelation of anything that was in MPEG2 format (recordings). I finally tracked down a thread that this is a known bug on certain motherboards and they are working on a fix. In the mean-time I have reverted to CPU Slim.

Overall I am very pleased with the new software and distribution.

How to Copy Series DVD's into MythVideos

One of the big benefits of Myth is on-demand access to any episode of your favorite shows. I have a few full-series on DVD's and wanted to find the most efficient way to copy them onto my Myth system. The first tool you need is something that can copy the DVD episodes individually to be processed into AVI's. DVD Decrypter fits the bill nicely although there are many tools you can use. The big time saver is a nice little batch file called DVD Decrypter Multiple Feature Ripper. DDMFRip is a simple menu driven process that will allow you to define the basic structure of a DVD through a series of questions and then create multiple subdirectories correctly named for the series you want to copy. You can get a copy and a more in-depth guide here. I made one small change to the ddmfrip.bat file that capitalizes the E for episode in the filename so that a step in the later process of inserting video metadata into MythVideo will work correctly.

My MythTV Setup

I have made a few large changes to my home services in the last year that I wish I had taken the time to document. It's hard to have something working and remember all of the tricks you had to do in order to get things working right. I won't say that setting MythTV up was easy but the result is fantastic.

I have been a die hard TiVo fan from the start. I won my first TiVo in an essay contest with an essay on why every pregnant woman needs a TiVo. The TiVo was great to begin with, it was provider agnostic, Linux based, configurable, upgradable and with a few additional codes you could enable some of the anti-commercial features like 30-seconds skip. When I switched over to DirectTV and purchased a DirectTivo, I noticed that each version of the software that came out provided less and less end-user features and more provider features. It is the sad fate of most companies that they must first service their stock holders and then their retail customers. I wanted to get into a series 2 TiVo but then DirectTV decided they could do it better and abandoned the TiVo platform altogether. I was also looking in to HD and I realized I could either use money or brains to solve the problem. It was time to take control of my PVR and try to provide TV recording, on-demand viewing of my DVD collection and some integrated web services like weather and browsing.

Guided Setup via Broadband for TiVo Series 2

Apparently, there isn't an intuitive way to use your broadband connection to do the initial setup on the Series 2 TiVo's. I just confirmed that changing the dialing prefix to ,#401 will let you do it. TiVo's FAQ says that I am wrong, but who can argue with completed setup. Make sure to use one of their supported adapters.