anomalous territory

UPDATE: It appears, at least in iTunes 7.0.2 that isntead of creating some big, cumbersome playlist with lots of “is not” entries as mentioned in the first link below, you can simple do “Playlist, is, Music” or “Playlist, is, TV Shows” – yay!

iTunes has some awesome features, but some odd deficiencies.

One such is the inability to build a Smart Playlist that contains ONLY music, or ONLY TV shows for example.

Although a handy solution is within your grasp. A useful feature of these Smart Playlists is to read OTHER playlists, so basically you create a big ol’ big list that excludes -for example- all TV, Movies, Podcasts, etc. then include that in your Music-only playlists going forward.

A handy guide explaining the aformentioned music-only base playlist:
http://www.43folders.com/2006/11/09/music-only-playlists/

Some other excellent iTunes wrangling tips of all varieties:
http://www.43folders.com/2006/11/10/smart-playlists-for-packrats/

Good luck and god speed!

The bane of having an awesome media server, regardless of whether it houses audio, video, photos or all-of-the-above is that you have to rely on physical devices somewhere to store the data…

Having recently had yet another hard drive decide to begin spewing bad sectors, I went on the hunt for recovery information for the overly complicated LVM2 system I was running. The immediate prospect of having to mirror the entire ~2TB filesystem before being able to run a repair made my head hurt. After acquiring a replacement disk for the 1 in poor health, I was tempted to try the standard Linux command ‘dd’ with some ignore errors and pad blocks options, but then I happend to stumble upon TestDisk which sounded extremely versatile and useful. However, what I was most impressed with was their extremely informative MediaWiki-based site and in particular, the Damaged Hard Disk area with references to two different versions of ‘dd rescue’ tools, in particular Antonio Diaz’s ddrescue utility. Essentially after you tell it the bad disk, and somewhere (file or other disk) to write the data, it’s fully automated. If you make sure to use the logfile feature, it can even resume and pick-up where it left off if your recovery process is interrupted for any reason.

If you’ve had hard disk/CD/DVD failures for whatever reason, I strongly suggest looking at the TestDisk page as it runs across >6 operating systems and supports >17 different filesystems derivations – oh and their site is very helpful. Have at it!

It appears that the sorry state of UIs in media server software doesn’t extend to the Mac platform. I’ve been surfing around reading a few obscure articles this week and although the software isn’t very mature, I’ve been quite impressed with several Mac projects. Namely: MediaCentral, CenterStage, iTheatre, and CoverFlow. The best part is that unlike some of the Windows appliations, these three for the Mac are free! (Try saying that ten times fast.)

Although MediaCentral is quite text-based for navigation, its presentation is definitely a lot sharper and more refined than any of the others. CenterStage is intersting and has a lot of potential, but better be careful not to ‘over utilize’ available space. It’s definitely the most mature of the projects. My main gripe is that if I’m browsing a bunch of movie covers (which BackStage – the CenterStage backend component sucsessfully downloaded for me), why do I need a text title underneath them? I don’t; it simply wastes space. Also the cover browsing section seems awfully small, but as I didn’t poke too deeply, one might be able to turn off the preview area to the right (that would be handy). iTheatre is at RC1 currently and has quite a few pieces of missing functionality, but could be nice although is heavily text-based like MediaCentral. CoverFlow is purely for browsing your music but it is such a simple, obvious UI that it merits mentioning. Hopefully its ideas can be intergrated into a more encompassing media browser.

MediaCentral
(lg, xl)

CenterStage
(lg, xl)

iTheatre
(lg, xl)

CoverFlow
(lg, xl)

I was originally commenting on an article on Engadget but felt like expanding it a bit here.

Ok, what everyone has to remember is that the User Interface of whatever is presenting you with your >1,000 DVD library has to not just be good, but has to be GREAT. The only GREAT interface I’ve found is from Kaleidascape but sadly that’s only inside their $20k media server (nuts!). In looking at the Niveus and Escient screenshots, they look like rejected 80s MTV visuals… Don’t even get me started on MythTV, Meedio, DVD Lobby or the like; goodness.

Although not leaps and bounds better, I am very happy with Xbox running Xbox Media Center. I have my 2TB library ripped to my file-server and the Xbox Media Center software is by far the most friendly and elegant for access. However, even this isn’t a match to the Kaleidascape UIs. Frankly, I’ve given-up and settled for writing my own interface in Flex. Not sure when it’ll be released, but it’ll definitely be free when it’s done.

Just wanted to add my thoughts to this debate in the hopes of tempering all these new product announcements lately and remind people that a >1,000 DVD library is really pretty useless when you can only see ~9-12 covers on screen at a time… Oh and the Sony XL-1 Digital Living System does look quite impressive, but is still bound by the Microsoft MCE2005 limitations. Sony did have some UI screenshots of a different media server but I can’t seem to locate them right now – more on that later.