WDTV subtitles from DLNA server

So far I could not figure out how to stream external subtitles from DLNA server. However WDTV supports MKV container and subtitles can be embedded in to the video file. To do this use mkvmerge tool from the mkvtoolnix set. Obtain the srt subtiles for the content you want to watch and then run following command to merge the subtitles and the video in to one mkv file:

mkvmerge.exe -o output.mkv input.mp4 input.srt

This will produce the mkv file that can be streamed over DLNA and your WDTV will be able to display the subtitles. Roku on the other hand can not display subtitles from the MKV container and needs an external file. Given that Roku often crashes when playing or navigating in the MKV file, you would need to keep a separate mp4 file and a srt file for the playback on Roku.

WDTV Live again

I took my replacement Roku back to Costco and decided to give WDTV Live a second try. The box arrived from Amazon and I was excited to to open it and start comparing it to Roku (again).


The WDTV box is obviously larger than Roku but that does not bother me. Ether box is small enough to be placed somewhere near your TV.  The WDTV is also more power hungry than Roku, it has a larger power supply and runs much warmer. The WDTV is noticeably warm on touch even when in the off state. The box is running Linux and clearly does not power off, other than turning off the video output and the led. Nether does Roku but the chip it uses is less power hungry.

After spending 2 days with the WDTV, I am back to thinking that Roku has more polished product, despite all of the shortcomings. But let me describe things in order.
Configuring WDTV box takes about the same time as Roku - you need to configure network and your TV output format. The WDTV has few more customizable options that allow you to set various things but over all experience is close. The WDTV does not have any downloadable apps so the configuration ends here.
We only have Hulu Plus so I registered box with the Hulu site and tried watching some content. The Hulu app on WDTV is somewhat different from the Roku version. Queue display is different and also the WDTV app allows you to set the bitrate, which is a great feature! Roku app often stutters because the bitrate of the content is too high and there is no way to get it down. When I run in to this problem I will try to compare the two boxes and post my observations.
The local content playback is the area where WDTV suppose to shine. It does play any format that I have tried. It played all the MKV files, that caused Roku to reboot, without any problems. There were however few issues.
First problem was to get Windows7 to share the files. This task should become simpler to accomplish with Windows7, in reality it was more complicated than XP. For some reasons after enabling Home Group sharing the WDTV still did not see the the directories. Eventually after some fiddling with the settings, the box could see the shares and play the videos. It worked OK for the lower bitrate videos but somehow higher bitrate made it stutter. I assume the problem is with Windows networking being too chatty. Same videos over DLNA worked just fine.
The second problem is finding a good DLNA server. I have tried every free DLNA server running on Windows that is listed on Wikipedia. I wanted a small footprint DLNA server since at the base of DLNA is just a simple web server. Most of the servers are large and some of them are unstable. When the DLNA server crashes the WDTV box gets very unhappy! The menu is completely unresponsive and the only reasonable solution is to pull the power plug.
At the end I settled on two candidates - PS3 Media Server and Serviio. Both seem to behave more or less OK although both use copious amounts of memory, with Serviio being a little smaller.
One thing I wanted to mention in conclusion - I could not get external subtitles to work with the DLNA server. If subtitles are important to you Roku seems to be easier to get working with the external subtitles.
I will keep this blog updated on my experience with WDTV over the next few weeks.

Roku: review after few months of use

We have used our Roku XS devices for a few months and there are few things I wanted to say.

The honeymoon is over

 I liked this device initially but as I used it more and more my opinion about it plummeted. Now the initial good impression is completely displaced by its problems and quirks. For starters there are a lot of problems with the hardware and the software. My first Roku XS remote is died within a week and I took the device back to Costco for a replacement. My second Roku XS was rebooting randomly when in the sleep mode and not booting back after that without power cycle. I took that one back to Costco too. I did not even unpack the replacement Roku and will take it back this weekend after more frustrations with the current unit.

Roku problems

Where do I begin? 

Automatic updates to the software - this has to go. Roku updates itself to the new version of the software without any way to revert back. The new software at times is worse than the previous but there is no way to stop the update. If you find a good version of the software you can't keep it on your device. The bottom line is that this feature will bite Roku (the company) in the rear one day.

HuluPlus - we have been using this service to watch TV after dropping the satellite. The app is bad from usability standpoint and also the service is slow. I have no problems with their content, if one does not like the content, one does not have to subscribe. I do have a lot of problem with their inability to deliver it. Half of the movies that I tried from Criterion collection fail to play smoothly. Hulu states that I need 3Mb/s service for HD quality. Well, I have 19Mb/s at all times and I want to watch SD. There is no way to select SD on Roku and videos do not play well. The transition between commercials and content often result in macroblocking for a few seconds. Browsing content is also terrible as it is very slow on the Roku app. The app itself is huge memory hog and does not stop running when you exit from it. Because of this all other apps suffer when Hulu is started.

Codec and container support on Roku is terrible. They should fire the QA department and get a new one. The only codecs they claim to support is the h264 and the WMV. That is a blatant lie. WMV is not well supported and a lot of videos do not play and worse cause Roku to lockup and reboot after watchdog is expired. Same with the container support. The mp4 container is OK. Files are recognized and played correctly most of the time, except some files produce lipsync problems which can not be fixed by transcoding. PC plays these files just fine but not Roku. The mkv container is also on the list of supported containers but this is a blatant lie as well. The files in the mkv container often cause Roku to lockup and reboot and even if the file can be played, seeking in the file causes reboots. This is my biggest problem with Roku.

Roku also claims that device supports subtitles. Technically it is true but the support is very finicky as the file must be formatted just right. VLC has no problems with the file but Roku will not play it if it is encoded in Unix format or has no empty line at the end or numbers do not start with 1 or many other reasons.

Another bad miss is absence of the parental control, as well as the inability to select applications that are loaded on the specific device under the same account. If application was removed from one device it will be removed from another linked to the same account.

Now to the general content selection. It is true that Roku has many more channels than say WDTV or a networked DVD player but most of the channels are junk, just like your cable or satellite. Hulu, Netflix, Amazon are available on most of the other devices so Roku does not get any credit here. On other devices the quality of streaming is better however. The other channels like HBOGO require subscription to the HBO on cable?! If I have a subscription to cable why would I need Roku to watch it? Private channels do add to the selection but they come and go - stop working for no reason and then start working again. Of course most of them are not getting paid but then why bother?

The user interface on the device is too simplistic and often fails to respond to the remote. I am not sure if this is app problem or in general Roku problem but with closed source system we will never know.

At the end the only app I really like is MyMedia which allows you to stream content from your PC. That app works OK and you can stream your pictures movies and music collection to the TV. It is also open source so you can modify the app or the server and add the features that you want.

Conclusion

Would I recommend Roku after a few months? Maybe, most likely not. If you want to play movies that you took with your camera or ripped from DVDs, the answer is HELL NO. If you want to watch Netflix or Hulu, the answer is maybe. I would get a networked blue-ray for that. For the same $100 you will get more functionality.

Roku is clearly used the wrong chip for their product! They should have used a chip that is capable of playing many more formats. Even the same Broadcom can supply a number of chips that are much more capable. In any event they should test the software better to make sure simply playing a file to the device would not cause a reboot!

Getting the most out of your Roku

So you bought a Roku2 box and wondering how to get the most use out of it. In this post I will try to share my experience and thoughts on the subject.

My first recommendation would be to get a Pogoplug classic for $30 and install ArchLinuxARM on it. Then install MyMedia server on your new Pogoplug and enjoy streaming content from your local network. Pogoplug and MyMedia are perfect match for your Roku. If you have kids who wants to watch DVDs over and over this setup makes a lot of sense. Just rip your DVDs and place them on your Pogoplug server and your kids can enjoy them any time without trashing your disks. The server can also be used for backup of your computers if the drive has enough space.

Hulu is one of the options to get your TV programming. It has a lot of foreign programming, Korean and Australian being predominant. It also has Criterion collection movies. Hulu application is pretty bad as far as software is concerned. It does not throttle bit rate and on the slower connections video stutters a lot. I wish Hulu addressed these problems since the only people who suffers are paying customers. At the end Hulu is not that expensive and may be worth it if you want to cut the cable.

Crackle is another good option. Content is so so but the application is OK enough and I did not have any problems playing videos. The only problem is that advertizements are not as well integrated and the ad experience is worse than on Hulu. For free though one can't complain.

The other option is to download content using Bittorrent client. I would recommend qBittorrent but there are no shortage of clients. A lot of new content already encoded in h264 format which Roku can play. If however your content is encoded in divx, you would have to transcode it in to the h264. Hanbrake is one of the best applications to do this. Just select Normal profile and off you go. The application is very easy to use and produces videos that have no problems with Roku. Just make sure not to use Mkv container. Although Roku claims to support this container, it has lots of problems playing and navigating the content, and often crashes.

If your kids like PBS shows, most of them can be downloaded with a little patience and know-how. Rtmpdump would be the application to use for downloading and Wireshark is the application to use for capturing the show URLs. I downloaded and transcoded for Roku whole seasons of Fetch and Cyber Chaise. I am surprised why PBS does not put these seasons on the web for everyone to download or maybe just for people who make donation.

Over all Roku can keep you entertained just enough, especially if you are not addicted to the TV.

Ebooks vs paper books

I was reading ebooks long before they were popular and long before there were any ebook readers on the market. My first reader was Sony Clie with various reading applications. My favorite app was Plucker. Reading ebooks is much more convenient for following reasons:

• You can read anywhere, given that your reader is compact. Bored standing in line at the store? Pull out your device and start reading.
• You can read just a few pages at the time when you got a spare moment. The reader remembers where you are and ready as soon as you power it on.
• You never run out of books to read. Even the old Clie with 16MB of memory could easy hold 10s of books.
• It is easy to make notes with the right application or even without it if you get a little creative.
• You don't need to have light while reading in bed if your device has a backlight.

There are of course some downsides:

• You can't read on the plane during take off and landing.
• Your device battery can run out if you forget to charge it.

Of course Clie is no longer practical and there are much better devices available. I currently read on iPod touch 2G which I received as a gift. iDevices have very poor ebook reader applications especially after demise of Stanza. Notable exception is MegaReader but it is still missing a lot of features and the font rendering is not accurate. If you have apple device this is the one I would recommend. iBooks is slow and huge. Most of the main stream readers are not configurable to be pleasant to use on the small screen.
Android platform has much better selection. All of the applications that I have tried were very good. FBreader was my favorite but they all very good. My next device is going to be Android powered, most likely one of the Samsung media players or possibly 7" tablet. I have tried 8" Visio but it is too heavy and too big to be useful on the go.
If you are avid reader and not sure if you want to read ebooks, give it a try and you will not regret it.
For managing your ebooks and converting them for your device Calibre is a perfect application. It is actively developed and getting better every day.

Checking root filesystem on ArchLinux

My shiny new ArchLinux on the Pogoplug was complaining about root filesystem not being clean. I tried usual approach of placing /forcefsck file in the root folder and rebooting. Although the file was removed at the next boot the filesystem check still complained.

I went to the IRC to the #arch-linux-arm channel which is recommended on the website, but no one appears to know how to do this on the running system. The only recommendation that I got, was to take out the drive and put it in to another Linux box. Well, this being a USB flash drive makes it possible to do so. But imagine an internal disk and this quickly becomes less than practical solution.

So I went to the "Internets" and did a search. As expected someone already asked this question and got a multitude of answers which helped me to put together a procedure. So here it goes:

• Execute following command:
  fuser -v -m /
  This will give you a list of all processes having files open on the filesystem. Look for the processes that have F or f flags set. For example:
  root        182 .rce. dhcpcd
  root        197 frce. crond
  root        219 .rce. sshd
  ntp         226 Frce. ntpd
  So it looks like the crond and the ntpd have files open.
• Shutdown these processes by using following command:
  rc.d stop ntpd
  Shutdown all of the processes that have files open on the filesystem.
• Now you can remount filesystem using following command:
  mount -r -o remount  / 
  
  If you correctly shutdown all of the processes remount should complete without any error.
• At this point you should be able to do a filesystem check:
  e2fsck /dev/sda1 or e2fsck -y /dev/sda1 

I hope that you found this post helpful and it saved you some time.

Pogoplug after a few days

I had this device for several days and so far it works well. I replaced the original Pogoplug software with ArchLinuxArm. The box is much snappier than my original Cobalt Qube 2 with NetBSD 5.2. Of course it is much faster machine and with double the memory. The size of the device is also small and the case while funky looking is OK. I only wish it would open more easily so I could take a look inside.

ArchLinux appears to be well made distribution with the package manager that tracks dependencies. Startup scripts are easy to understand, unlike the latest Ubuntu. I am not sure why they keep changing startup scripts every year. I installed Python and Samba to run MyMedia server and to backup my data from the Windows PC. MyMedia server runs very well on this hardware. The menus come up fast and the videos and images served quickly enough. Over all it is very good box for the purpose.

I am getting another enclosure and will install Linux on the hard drive instead of the USB stick it is on now. I want to try to compile some software and to see how well this box would work for unix development. It probably would not be a speed daemon but it could work.

At this point I would recommend this device to anyone capable of installing Linux himself.

Linux on Pogoplug

I was tempted by the Pogoplug Family deal and got myself a Pogoplug  classic for $29.95. They advertise it as a "free device" with Pogoplug Family but in reality you are buying the device for the above sum. Don't forget to cancel the service after receiving the device. Otherwise it would be more expensive than actually buying the same device outright.
After getting the device I evaluated it for about a day. I got the grey version of the Pogoplug Classic with Marvel Chip, 256MB of ram and 128MB of flash. The device itself is snappy and works reasonably well. It recognized my USB hard drive and went to work on it, apparently indexing the content. I measured transfer speed and using my old router with 100Mbit Ethernet, the transfer speed is around 9MB/s which is not bad. The device is silent and consumes very little power.
The companion software on the other hand is terrible. It is very much useless for backup as one can not control what is being backed up. You can only specify the top directory and everything under that directory is backed up. I thought about using the drive feature to backup with Microsoft Sync Toy but somehow it makes for a very slow backups. This device appears to be made for a completely computer illiterate person who never used any NAS devices. It also requires connection to the Pogoplug servers and I would imagine opens files on your "cloud" to snooping by the company. Over all I found the "Pogoplug Cloud" concept is sorely lacking in the implementation department. It does not hold a candle to the simplicity of Dropbox or Google Drive.

I actually got this device to replace my very old Cobalt Qube microserver which is showing its age. In that role Pogoplug Classic performs really well.
Most people appear to have good luck with the Arch Linux Arm and that is what I decided to try. I used a Centon 4GB flash drive as my root drive and WD drive in USB enclosure as my data drive. Installation of Arch Linux Arm is very simple and described on the web page. The Pogoplug Classic model number is POGO-E02 which is one of the supported devices.
The installation went smoothly and the box appeared operational but it would not acquire  IP address. Due to the bug in the Ethernet driver and my old router the device kept disconnecting and reconnecting to the network. After some search I found the solution. If your Pogoplug appears to boot but fails to acquire IP address add following line to the dhcpcd.conf file : nolink. Linux, samba and python occupy around 740MB on the flash drive. I did not install git but instead use my custom copy of the MyMedia server.

Now my Pogoplug is booting Linux and can act as NAS device with up to 4 USB drives and can run MyMedia server for Roku. It is much snappier than my old MIPS box but obviously not as fast as my desktop. It is worth $30 in my opinion if you can install your own Linux on the device. Similar devices would easy cost north of $50.

If I decide later to change my mind and use the "Pogoplug Cloud", reverting back is as simple as removing the USB flash drive and rebooting the device. The original system is preserved in the flash along with the original uBoot bootloader.

Inkjet change of mind

All of the good things I said about that HP printer? Well, I take them all back. I honestly do not know how people live with inkjets. I own a Brother laser printer and before that I had Oki. Nether one gave me so much grief  or was so high maintenance as this HP!
We print very little in our house. The older generation is out of school and the younger does not print that much yet. This causes constant ink problems with this printer! I can turn off laser printer for a year and after I turn in on, it will print perfectly. If I turn off inkjet for a year chances are that I would not be able to print when I turn it back on. The ink will dry out and/or the head will clog. It happened several times already and I am getting annoyed.
I  had to unclog head again recently and it cost me two refills and hours of time. The ink runs out in the worst possible moment, just when I need to print something.
To say something good about this printer - the scanner still works OK. That is the extent of the good things.
I would not recommend inkjet at all, unless you have to print in color all the time. After my supply of ink runs out I am selling this junk and getting myself a new laser all in one!

Roku2 vs WD TV Live

I recently picked up Roku2 at Costco. I figured that we can try using it for streaming some media from the internet and the PC. My initial impressions were not very good because of the defective remote. The remote would lock up about twice a day and I had to remove and replace the batteries and that was very annoying. Other than that device was OK but it did not support many formats. After talking to the Roku customer support person I returned device to Costco and got WD TV Live which a lot of people liked. After using Roku2 and WD TV for a week each I formed my opinion.

In streaming from the internet Roku wins hands down. It has many more channels, some even very good. If you only want to use Netflix and Hulu, WD TV is OK. If you want more choices Roku2 is your box! It has bunch of educational channels like Khan Academy and MIT Open Courseware.

If you want to stream variety of formats locally WD TV could be a better choice if you do not want to transcode. Since I occasionally had to transcode video for iPod, I already had Handbrake and has no trouble transcoding for Roku. Roku only supports H264 and VC1 codecs and only few containers, while WD TV supports a large selection of codecs and containers.

To stream locally with WD TV you can use DLNA server or just use windows sharing. Windows sharing is dangerous to use over wifi since my network is not secured. All DLNA servers that I used are huge and clunky. At the end I used ps3mediaserver which after running overnight grew to 1GB in size. There is NO REASON why a glorified web server should be that large.
To stream to Roku, one also has several choices. I tried two - Rocksbox and MyMedia. Rocksbox is pretty good and works well. It costs $15 after a month trial period. It works together with the monogoose webserver or any other webserver that you can configure. The monogoose server is light, small and fast. It is very easy to configure.
MyMedia server has its own server solution written in Python and the source of the Roku app is included. I liked that approach since I could add features and fix any problems, not that it had any. At the end I went with MyMedia and it works very well. Memory footprint starts under 10MB and grows to around 15MB after running for a while. The server is responsive and supports multiple Roku units.

In the user interface department Roku2 wins with the large margin. User interface is fast, responsive and intuitive. WD TV is very far behind. You can tell that this product was done by the company with no experience in user interfaces. UI is sluggish, progress indicators are absent in the few notable places. You think that box is hung but after a few long seconds it comes alive and does its thing. The WD TV is never actually hung but I thought several times that it did.

WiFi performance is much better on Roku2. When away from the router WD TV had trouble with the streaming and video would often freeze. Roku never had any problems.

So over all my preference is Roku2. The only area that falls short is a media format support. Given fast computer and handbrake it is not a huge problem. On my quad core AMD Phenom PC 1 hour SD movie is transcoded in about 6-7 minutes. This machine is about half speed of modern i5 or i7 machine.

WD TV power consumption about twice that of Roku2. Not that it matters much since both boxes consume under 10W. Roku2 consumes under 3W when running and less than 2W when screen saver is running. KillaWatt could not detect any energy being used by Roku2.

The only area WD TV box is better than Roku2 is the media format support. If you are not willing to transcode your media but instead willing to live with clunky and slow interface, WD TV is your box. If you want many free and good internet channels, willing to transcode and like good interface experience, go with Roku2.

Costo bundle of Roku2 XS contains 2 months of Hulu and a HDMI cable. Given that the price of the bundle is lower than just a Roku box elsewhere, it is a very good deal. Do not forget a complete Angry Birds game which comes with this Roku box.

WD TV Live went back to the store and I bought a new Roku2 unit at Costco. This unit does not have the problem with the locking up remote and I am very happy with it.