Instant XBMC
My book, Instant XBMC, is still very relevant for Kodi and Gotham. It's available in print on Amazon.com and in ebook format from Amazon, the Apple store, Kobo and from the Packt Publishing web site.
Ripping difficult double feature DVDs.
Submitted by charm on Sun, 11/01/2015 - 18:45
Handbrake is my favourite DVD ripping software, it's fast, simple once you get to know how to use it, and can batch process television show episodes. But occasionally it doesn't correctly parse DVDs, point in case the double feature DVD I picked up awhile back with The Swap, featuring Robert Deniro, and Out of the Blue featuring and directed by Dennis Hopper. Handbrake sees this particular double feature as one long movie.
Beware of Despicable ME2 mini-movie collection sold at Walmart
Submitted by charm on Fri, 10/30/2015 - 21:26I buy a lot of movies at Walmart because we live so close. One of the original reasons I set up XBMC/KODI was so I could tuck my movie collection away. This is actually starting to happen now, I'm pulling the DVDs and Blueray discs out of the boxes and putting them in binders/storage units so they don't take up so much space. But the truth is I've bought a lot more DVDs and Blueray discs since setting up XBMC/KODI several years back (maybe I should have stuck with MythTV but we ditched our cable company).
Work, workstation
Submitted by charm on Thu, 10/22/2015 - 09:43It's been awhile since I last posted something here. I was tempted to comment on the election in Canada, but I think after a prolonged election everyone has had enough of politics for awhile. So here's a screenshot of my current Linux desktop at work. For the curious I'm running Xubuntu 14.04 on a Touch Systems branded computer with the following hardware:
Intel Core i5-2300 @ 3.10GHz (4 cores), Gigabyte H67MA-D2H-B3, 4GB RAM, a Seagate ST3500418AS 500GB hard drive, an NVidia GeForce 210 1GB video card, a Dell SP2309W monitor and an Asus VE24K monitor.
Virtualbox - refuses to load guest additions
Submitted by charm on Tue, 10/06/2015 - 22:28Over the past two days I've been trying to get shared folders working in Virtualbox under Ubuntu with an Ubuntu Server guest OS. First I installed the guest additions on the Ubuntu OS, when that didn't work (the client said it didn't recognize vboxsf and vboxfs mount types) I tried installing them in the guest OS (Ubuntu server). I also tried installing dkms in both OS'. At this point I'd tear my hair out but since I recently got a buzz cut it's a little hard.Missing something, this should be extremely simple.
MakeMKV 1.9.7 released
Submitted by charm on Sun, 10/04/2015 - 10:46I've mentioned MakeMKV as the tool I use to back up my Blue ray discs. Since registering less than a month ago there have been 2 updates, indicating development is still pretty active. The latest release (as of this writing) is 1.9.7.
Shrinking and re-encoding multiple movies with Handbrake
Submitted by charm on Sat, 10/03/2015 - 21:49Around 3 months ago I posted a video on Youtube describing how to create MKV files from televisions shows on DVD using Handbrake. Today I found myself using the same principle to save myself many gigabytes of space encoding 26 DVD dumps. At some point while I was experimenting with different programs I started dumping the entire contents of DVDs to the 2TB hard drive in our KODI/XBMC system. Most of the DVDs I dumped were dual-layer, so some were over 4GB/DVD.
