DISCLAIMER: Do not use file sharing to download copyrighted material.

Not much to say here. I installed μTorrent so that I would have a way to download media off bittorrent. Transmission was also a great choice for bittorrent client.

UPnP Server

The coolest thing I’ve did with this project was setup a UPnP media server. The concept was simple: music, pictures, and videos are stored on the server and shared over the UPnP network protocol. Devices, such as a PS3, can see the content on the server and play it without having to download and save locally. There are several commercial products available that allows you create a UPnP server including MediaLink, EyeConnect, and Twonky. Being the person who liked to take the hard route sometimes I decided to skip all of those and go straight to MediaTomb, the open source alternative.

1. Install the XCode Development tools from Apple
2. Download and install MacPorts
3. Open a Terminal window and run all of the following commands as either “su” or “sudo”
4. port selfupdate
5. port install mediatomb
6. Wait for MediaTomb and all of its dependencies to finish compiling
7. Once compiling is complete you can start MediaTomb by running the command “mediatomb” (no su/sudo required)
8. The output from the command will give you the web address to MediaTomb’s web interface. Using Safari or your browser of choice you can select what content you share with your media devices

For my setup I wanted to stream content to my PS3. To do that there was a change I had to make to MediaTomb’s config file that was located in ~/.mediatomb. All I had to do was uncomment the line that said <protocolInfo extend="yes"/>. I also decided to disable the ability of my PS3 to see every folder on the server. That required changing <pc-directory upnp-hide="no"/> to <pc-directory upnp-hide="yes"/>.

With MediaTomb I could also enable the use of on-the-fly media transcoding. In the event I had a file the PS3 could not play, a rule could be setup in the config file that would automatically convert the media to a more compatible format. Using this feature required a lot of testing to work out settings the PowerMac could handle. Also, because the media files are being transcoded in real time I lost the ability to pause, fast forward, and rewind on the PS3. In the end I decided to take a different approach and setup folder actions to convert only files I wanted.

MediaTomb Transcoding

I mentioned earlier that I had developed an alternative to MediaTomb’s built in transcoding feature for media files that didn’t play on the PS3. I stole the idea from Vuze, another bittorent client, which added its own UPnP server. In the event Vuze downloaded a file that wasn’t compatible with the PS3 it would re-encode the file completely and then share the new version instead of the non-compatible version.

I was able to accomplish almost the same functionality using FFMPEG, folder actions, and MediaTomb’s built-in directory scan feature. If I had a file that did not work then I moved it to a folder called “convert”. Attached to that folder was an Applescript action that would tell FFMPEG to covert the file to a new format and save it in another folder called “compatible”. I then configured MediaTomb to scan the “compatible” folder every hour for new files and make them available to the PS3. For everything to work I had to rebuild FFMPEG to include codecs for aac, mp3, x264, and xvid. Below is the commands for MacPortsid

port deactivate ffmpeg
port install -f ffmpeg +nonfree

Below are the applescripts I wrote for the folder actions. When a file dropped into a folder the action would initiate the script and start processing the file through FFMPEG. Based on testing I had done some video files only needed the audio re-encoded for the PS3. Others required a complete re-encode. I’ll admit the PowerMac didn’t have the power to re-encode at realtime speeds, but I normally let it take care of files during the night or while I was at work.

Re-encoding only audio of a video file example:

on adding folder items to this_folder after receiving these_items
repeat with i in these_items
set {name:Nm} to (info for i)
set Nm to quoted form of Nm as string
set vFolder to quoted form of POSIX path of this_folder as string
set vSource to quoted form of POSIX path of i as string
try
do shell script "/opt/local/bin/ffmpeg -y -i " & vSource & " -vn -f mp3 -ab 192k -ac 2 -ar 44100 " & vFolder & "converted/" & Nm & ".mp3"
on error
display dialog "There was an error when re-encoding " & Nm
end try
end repeat
end adding folder items to


Re-encoding Audio and video example:

on adding folder items to this_folder after receiving these_items
repeat with i in these_items
set {name:Nm} to (info for i)
set Nm to quoted form of Nm as string
set vFolder to quoted form of POSIX path of this_folder as string
set vSource to quoted form of POSIX path of i as string
try
do shell script "/opt/local/bin/ffmpeg -y -i " & vSource & " -vcodec libxvid -vb 1000k -acodec libmp3lame -ar 44100 -ab 128k -ac 2 " & vFolder & "converted/" & Nm & ".avi"
on error
display dialog "There was an error when re-encoding " & Nm
end try
end repeat
end adding folder items to


Starting Meidatomb during startup:

1. Created a plain text file with the command /opt/local/bin/mediatomb -d
2. Save the file as mediatomb.command
3. Open a terminal window
4. Run the command chmod +x _folder_location_/mediatomb.command
5. Open System Preferences and go to Accounts
6. Select the account that auto logs in and select Login Items
7. Add mediatomb.command

With enough time and patience I could create a start lauch daemon to take care of starting MediaTomb up as a service, but I took the lazy man’s approach.

Next time: Other odds and things

OS Configuration

I decided to keep the partition layout in OS X simple. The OS would live on the 320GB hard drive. The 2TB drives would not have any special RAID configuration. Just one partition on each drive. Ideally I would have used 3x 2TB hard drives and configured them into a hardware RAID 5 configuration. That would have gave me 4TB of total storage with redundancy in the event one of the hard drives failed. Sadly the FirmTek SATA controller didn’t support any kind of hardware RAID and OS X didn’t support software RAID 5.

Backup Server

Creating a backup server was the easiest part to setup. On the server all I had to do was open up the Sharing System Preferences and enable AFP/SMB file sharing. Now the drives were available to other systems in my network. To get my Mac and Windows systems to use the network storage for backup required configuration on their end.

OS X:
Open up a terminal window and enter the following command.
defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1
Using network shares other than an Apple Time Capsule is completely unsupported by Apple. Users previously reported issues when a drive filled up, which caused their entire Time Machine backup to become corrupt. I’m uncertain if the the issues were ever resolved in 10.6 but to test I followed the advice of some and added a disk quota for the backup’s sparse bundle. Right now I’ve yet to hit the limit so I don’t know what to expect when I do.

Windows 7:
Windows Vista/7 came with a built in backup utility that allowed for the use of network shares as a storage location. That is great if it wasn’t for the fact Vista/7 also broke authentication when connecting to Windows shares hosted on OS X 10.5. The problem was remedied by making an edit to the system with “gpedit.msc”. Information was found at the following link: http://www.windowsreference.com/windows-7/unable-to-access-network-share-on-macos-x-from-windows-7/. With the authentication issues sorted out it was possible to configure Windows 7 to perform a full backup of the system drive on a regular basis.

Next Post: Media Sharing

This year I thought it was time to finally build a physical media server and move all of my music, videos, and old documents off my PCs. The original plan was to build a server using a mini-ITX motherboard with 4 SATA ports, and 3x 2 terabyte hard drives in a RAID 5 configuration, stuffed inside the smallest case possible. The system, in theory, would sit behind my TV and share everything out using FreeNAS.

Unfortunately, those plans have not worked out so now I’m falling back on an alternative. Why not take an old computer I already have and turn it into the storage I want?

The Base System:

What I’m starting with is my 2001 Quicksilver PowerMac G4. It is by no means a fast computer by today’s standards, but all I need it to do is store/share files. For that the system should do fine. If you are looking at the photos and thinking that doesn’t look stock then you are correct. Over the years I replaced many of the components so let me get you up to speed.

• 2001 Quicksilver PowerMac G4
• 2x 1.8 GHz PowerPC 7447 processor from GigaDesigns
• 3x 512MB PC133 SDRAM
• ATi Radeon 9800 Pro video card w/ Artic Cooling ATi Silencer 1 NVIDIA Geforce 2MX
• Pioneer 111D DVD burner
• Generic USB 2.0 PCI card from CompUSA
• Silenx iXtrema Pro fans

So that is the base system I’m starting with. To get the PowerMac ready I need a little bit more hardware. Namely a PCI hard drive controller. If anyone has upgraded G4 PowerMacs then you may know that every system before the 2002 Quicksilver PowerMac does not have 48-bit LBA on the PATA interfaces. In simple terms it means the motherboard cannot read hard drive beyond 137GB. To get around that a PCI hard drive controller is required. My choice is the FirmTek SeriTek/1V4 SATA controller from OWC. It adds four SATA ports that operate at 1.5Gb/s with ability to boot from a SATA drive. The 1.5Gb/s throughput may create another bottleneck, but I want to get off of booting from a PATA drive since that will be even slower. If I didn’t care about the ability to boot from a SATA drive then an alternative would be the Rosewill RC-217 controller that had 3Gb/s support. The Rosewill controller is built off of a Silicon Image 3124 SATA controller, which has OS X drivers.

The Parts:

• FirmTek SeriTek/1V4 SATA PCI-X controller
• 2x 2TB Western Digital Caviar Green 3.5” hard drives (3Gb/s)
• 1x 320GB Western Digital Scorpio 2.5” hard drive
• Molex to SATA power adapters
• SATA data cables (2 provided with FirmTek controller)

The Installation:

The installation of all the new hardware isn’t very difficult. I did rearrange the hard drive trays so that everything was as low in the case as possible. I went with a laptop hard drive for the boot drive mainly because I wanted something with low power and not very large capacity wise. Ideally I should have bought a drive bay adapter, but this computer shouldn’t move from its current location. The SATA controller plugs into an empty PCI slot and the hard drives connect through regular SATA cables. Power comes from using some adapters that convert Molex connectors to SATA.

Finally the last thing to do is install OS X, in this case 10.5. I had contemplated running a variant of GNU/Linux, but most major distributions have dropped PPC support. There are still ways to get the most up to date versions of OSes like Ubuntu and Fedora, but that is more work then I wanted to put into this build. Yes, I have installed GNU/Linux on both my PowerMac and PowerBook before, but there were issues (especially getting booted up from the install media).

In the next post I will go into detail about the software I’m running.

Note: You may see the strike through above for my PowerMac’s video card. In initial testing I plugged a Kill A Watt up to see the power draw of the system. I was surprised to find the computer was drawing 200 watts of power both during idle and peak usage. That told me that 1. the computer’s power management isn’t very good with all the upgrades I’ve performed and 2. over the course of the year I would pay an extra $125 to power it. For fun I replaced the ATi Radeon 9800 Pro with the OEM NVIDIA Geforce 2 MX. The Kill A Watt said the computer was using 160 watts after the downgrade and equaled $25 in savings.

All of that is great if you are using a Mac with an ADC video card or even an ADC adapter (the brightness controls are controlled through the USB connection), but there is no way to control the monitor from a Windows PC natively. Luckily there is the Internet and the great world of open source software. A few years ago a guy by the name of Laurent Morichetti wrote an application called WinACD. The function of the program was simple; give Windows XP users the same control over their ACD monitors as Mac users have.

The installation process is simple.

1. Download WinACD from http://sourceforge.net/projects/winacd/.
2. With the monitor’s USB cable disconnected, run the WinACD installer.
3. If any popups appear saying the drivers are not signed click “Continue Anyway”.
4. Once the installation is finished plug in the USB cable from the monitor.

Controlling the monitor settings is as simple on XP as they are on a Mac now. When looking at the advanced display settings a new tab is available. Under it there are controls for the brightness and monitor buttons. There is also an option to control the monitor’s brightness using shortcut keys.

There are a few issues with WinACD. There has been no development on the program since 2006 so it does not support any of the new LED Cinema Displays. WinACD doesn’t work on any 64-bit version of Windows. Also, as you can see my screenshots I cannot change any of the settings for the monitor buttons. That is probably just specific to monitor I am using. If you can over look those issues then WinACD is a great application for anybody using an Apple Cinema Display.

It’s been a while since I added a blog entry, but this is worth it. This time I am building a DVI to ADC adapter so I can connect an old Apple Cinema Display to a PC.

The Backstory:
The PR department at the college I work for was going through some old stuff. They came across some Mac equipment they no longer wanted and asked my office, the Help Desk, to dispose of it properly. What came back were some Apple video cables and one 20″ Apple Cinema Display. It wasn’t the aluminum version, but the older white one that looked like an easel. Of course, this display couldn’t be connected to any regular computer because it used an ADC connector. Apple specially engineered the ADC connector so that power, video, and USB were carried along a single cable. While this was great for reducing the amount of cabling you had, it also meant you had to have either a PowerMac with a compatible video card or a DVI to ADC adapter. That originally cost an $130. Oh, don’t forget your computer had to have a DVI.

The Idea:
If you fast forward to today you can buy a DVI to ADC adapter for $75 from Amazon.com. That would be the quick solution for connecting the monitor to a computer, but I have an idea: why not build my own? The ADC standard is basically the same as DVI with extra wires for power and USB ports. The pinout on the connectors between DVI and ADC are a little different, but shouldn’t be too hard to over come.

The Research:
Searching the Internet revealed some good information. Most of what I found discussed building a VGA to ADC adapter for the older CRT Apple monitors, but nobody had instructions for building the DVI version for the LCD monitor. Regardless most people recommended looking at the Apple development library to see the ADC pinout and spec (1). I also found a few more important articles from Apple. The Apple DVI to ADC Adapter: Compatibility Table (2) has a note that says the monitor must be plugged up to USB to have brightness, power, and sleep functions. Another page, the Apple Cinema Display Tech Specs, (3) let me know the power requirements. From all of the research I did, here was a table showing what pins would need to be connected.

Included in the pile of cables that came back with the monitor I found an ADC to DVI cable. This cable was made by Belkin and was designed so you could connect a regular DVI equipped monitor to a PowerMac with an ADC connector on the video card. It did the same thing I wanted, just in the opposite direction. Still, the ADC to DVI cable allowed me do a signal test between contacts and confirm the my chart was correct.

The Parts:
To build the adapter here is what I purchased.
1x ADC connector, $3.00 (4)
1x DVI connector, $4.84 (5)
1x USB connector, $1.12 (6)
1x Power connector, $0.63 (7)
1x Protoboard, $16.85 (8)
1x 90W 24V PSU, $8.76 (9)

Total: $35.20

Other things I needed were a solder iron with very fine tip, solder, solder flux, a steady hand, and a good bit of luck.

Note: I couldn’t use a regular protoboard from Radioshack because of the hole spacing. The ADC and DVI connectors are based on the SMD (surface mount device) standard so the pins are spaced at 1.9mm. A standard hobby board has holes spaced at 2.58mm or 0.01″. The board listed above is the only one I found to be punched at 2mm and have solder pads.

The Build:
Putting everything together was tedious, but fairly straightforward. I started by installing all of the connectors onto the protoboard. This took some work because the pints were spaced at 1.9mm and the holes at 2.0mm. After a little but of wiggling everything lined up.

Now for the hard part. I had to carefully solder a wire to each of the desired pins. This was made especially difficult because of the some wires cover pins I needed access later. The solution was to solder wires on the pins closest to the middle of the board and then work my way out, attaching the wires on to the other connector when necessary.

The beginning:

The result:

With the hard part of the project the next step was to protect it from damage using a case. What project would be complete without an Altoids case. Lucky enough I had an Altoids tin sitting around for a future project. Lucky me. Using a Dremel and cutoff wheel I cut holes in the side of the case for the ADC, DVI, USB, and power connectors.

Here you can see how everything looks installed.

The Payoff:
After checking all of the input/outputs based on the chart above the only thing left was to plug in the cables. I was honestly surprised not to find any smoke rolling from the case. What’s more surprising was to see my computer detect the monitor and a picture actually show up. The screen was bright, responsive, and the colors looked good. I also connected the monitor to my PowerMac and was able to control the brightness of the backlight; something not possible from Windows 7 64-bit.

And there you have it. One working home made DVI to ADC adapter. Not bad for an amateur electronics geek.

I case your were wondering about the loose wires and red toolbox, the PSU I ordered hadn’t arrived yet so I had to use my DIY project PSU to power the monitor. It really wasn’t designed to output enough amps for the monitor, but worked for testing.

(1) http://developer.apple.com/legacy/mac/library/#documentation/Hardware/Developer_Notes/Macintosh_CPUs-G5/PowerMacG5/3Input-Output/Q87_innout.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40002012-CH207-DontLinkElementID_21
(2) http://support.apple.com/kb/TA26840
(3) http://support.apple.com/kb/SP52
(4) http://www.surplussales.com/Connectors/Video-Data.html
(5) http://www.mouser.com/ProductDetail/Molex/74320-9014/?qs=CjUIBtwrELLx99OyVI%252bsEQ%3d%3d
(6) http://www.mouser.com/ProductDetail/Molex/67068-9001/?qs=7zcQ9RRVJlgyTi0%2fmeWa7g%3d%3d
(7) http://www.mouser.com/ProductDetail/Kobiconn/163-7620-E/?qs=sGAEpiMZZMu2f9RNbWupYpN4Bpd1ZXeWglHv88z1Rc8%3d
(8) http://www.mouser.com/ProductDetail/Vector/8017/?qs=2uJXkMYZVXPpqN%252bZxvwgtg%3d%3d
(9) http://www.amazon.com/UNIVERSAL-ADAPTER-Notebook-Charger-TOSHIBA/dp/B0026ZKSR2/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1289966296&sr=8-1

Update:
Here is a wiring diagram of the adapter. I just wish it was as easy to physically run the wires as it was in the schematic.