In case you didn’t know, here’s a link:  http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/

Share and share alike.

I had a dream on Friday night that went something like this:

While staring at my little home server a voice spoke directly to my brain.  It said, “To make Microsoft Home Server and iTunes cooperate, a proper sacrifice must be offered to appease the gods.  What can you give Kuroneko003?  What are you willing to offer?”

I woke up sweaty and panicked and seriously thinking, “oh geez, what would be fitting? a cake? burning incense? a blood sacrifice maybe?”  When I came to, I realized that perhaps the unintentional blood sacrifices that I had made before when building computers may have something to do with them starting up the first time and being surprisingly quite robust than it had to do with luck (for goodness sake, considering my putziness, it isn’t skill  — I cut my fingers leaving little pools of blood in the bottom of the cases).  Sigh … too much “Rental Magica” (an excellent anime series that you could be watching) I suppose.

A handful of folders on my World Book were corrupt and couldn’t be moved.  As of now, all of uncorrupted video and audio files on the World Book and the entertainment laptop have been migrated to the home server.  I left a copy of all of the music on the entertainment laptop and I will make another copy on another computer hard drive later.  All that is now left is to move are our pictures.  During the migration, I did discover that the two drives in the Home Server are mirrored, so in reality only 500GB are available for storage.  I had more files than could be contained which necessitated burning some content to DVD and blowing away series I knew I would not view again.  Sometime this month I will buy another hardrive or two to increase the capacity of the server (I wonder if I can cannabalize the World Book drives — they are SCSI drives too.  Hmm… that will probably require another sacrifice.).

I also discovered, without my explicit direction, the media server made a back up of the computer that I use as a client for the server.  I suppose this is okay, but because of this, I will not be installing the Home Server software on our other computers due to limited storage capacity.  I hope that I can change these settings so I can back-up only selected  files like my e-mail.  The rest of the stuff on the computers isn’t that important now that our media files have been centralized.

Onto iTunes … just so the it’s known:  I hate iTunes.  It’s so dumbed down that it’s nearly impossible for me to use.  The problem occured when I tried to point the library to the shared music folder on the home server.  This of course caused duplicates to occur in iTunes, which is a BIG problem when you have 3900+ songs in you library.  At first I tried resolving the duplicates manually.  After 30-mins and very little progress, I decided to go to bed and that’s when I had the dream I described at the beginning of this blog entry.  The next day, I decided to root around in my iTunes directory to see if there was a slicker way to do this.  My strategy was to blow away the library without blowing away the music files and then have iTunes remake library.  My first attempt made things worse — never allow iTunes to consolidate your library.  It resulted in triplicates for me, in addition to doubling the number of actual files residing on the server.  The trick is to move the music files and cover files to the directory you want to point the iTunes library to and then blow away all other instances of the iTunes directory so iTunes can’t rediscover them.  When you do this, iTunes will discover only the directory it’s pointed to and your library will not have duplicates.  The next test will be adding new music from the iTunes store and ripping from CD.  Sigh …

So far, playing/viewing my media files on the other computers on my home network works.  I tried out a few hi-def video files and they played smoothly, even on our ancient media center laptop (yippee!  we don’t need a new one yet!).    I haven’t fully enabled all of the sharing features on the home server yet, so stay tuned and when I get around to it, I’ll write about the experience.  Anyhow, so far I’m very pleased.

In this final entry about downloading Anime, I will describe how I view the content I have downloaded.

First a warning:  when I went seeking the guts of how this all works I tripped into a very scary world of bits and packets.  This is a cursed realm akin to the realm of beans.  It’s best not to travel to deeply into this realm unless you are network nerd.  That said, here it goes:

Codecs and Containers
Media files are huge, so they must be compressed for convenient transmission over the Internet.  A codec is used to (co)mpress and (dec)ompress or to (co)de and (dec)ode media files into or from smaller files.  In other words a codec is use to encode video files and well as decode video files.  Examples of codecs are Dvix, Xvid, MP3, RealAudio, and WMA.   A container is needed to house video files along with their attachments like audio, subtitles, indices, and other junk.  Common video containers used for anime are AVI and Matroska.  There are many codecs out there that can be used to play files in their respective containers.  Because the world of fansubbing is basically the “wild-wild-west”, a varied assortment of codecs are needed to play video files.  Unfortunately, I have found that those codec packs that have proven to be safe, like the XP codec pack, do not have all the codecs needed.  Sigh … I use the CCCP codec pack and pray that these folks aren’t malicious and that my internet security software and hardware adequately protect me.

Here are some links to more information about codec, containers, and compression algorithms.  The comparison of containers is particularly helpful.  Notice that Matroska is open source and very flexible.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_container_formats
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_Video_Interleave
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matroska
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264

From my experience, AVI and MKV (Matroska) are the most common anime file formats.   Commonly Xvid and H264 (MPEG4) are the codecs needed to decode the files.  As of now, AVI files are standard definition (480-lines or less), while the MKV files are usually 576-lines and higher — the highest I’ve played has been 1080-lines (1920×1080), but they are most commonly 720-lines (1280×720).    The MKV container also allows for multiple soundtracks, 5.1 sound, multiple subtitle tracks, and DVD like menus — it’s quite nice.   Lately, the H264 compression algorithm is being used more and more.  Although it is highly efficient, it does require more processing power and RAM to decode and some media players handle this codec better than others.  Many of the fansubbers now offer both AVI and MKV versions of series.  The MKV files is usually the hi-def version and, in general, is about 25 – 50% larger than the AVI.

Video Players
When you decide the world of downloads is for you, the first thing you want to do is severally cripple Window Media player so it isn’t your default media player and so it can’t disable all of the media files on you computer or network due to DRM enforcement (WMP can wreck your world if you are not careful  T_T ).  The next thing is a nice thing:  you don’t have to install codecs for each player you have, rather all the players have equal access to the codecs on your computer and the players can figure out which codecs to use without consulting you.  Meaning, that once you have installed a player and the codec pack, all you have to do is push play.  NICE!!!

There are lots of free and cheap players out there that do an excellent job.  These players also play music and DVDs, so you can turn any computer into an entertainment center without having to specifically buy an entertainment center computer.  Most codec packs recommended by anime download sites include Window Classic Media Player (an ultra lean version of the Windows Media Player — all the good stuff without the added “value” of Microsoft) and zPlayer.  The Classic media player is good for AVI files, but not so good for MKV.  The zPlayer should used for Matroska files.  The zPlayer, though, is not as user friendly as the Classic player.  For a little bit of cash you can pay for a media player too.   I use WinDVD, which also plays DVD’s and has some cool features that allow for clean screen captures and adding personal notations. 

So there you have it.  Now, what to do with all this info … hmm …