Home Entertainment Center

 I have replaced the two boxless bookshelf speakers I was using with a Polk Audio center speaker module. I bought the unit from a Facebook-Marketplace seller. He wanted $20. I agreed. When we met, however, I noticed the back of the unit was scruffy and scratched. He accepted $15. The unit worked as soon as I plugged it in. Model: TL 2 CEN CH black. This makes a total of six speaker units. I could use a couple of small bookshelf speakers on the ceiling. Perhaps a couple of quality computer speakers would do.

   The hardware set is much the same. The most recent addition is the Surround Center speaker I constructed from two open back bookcase speakers.    I have moved the Asus X510UAR into the server position. There was a pixellation problem with some videos in VLC but help from a web poster gave me the tweak I needed to make the correction.    The server is Plex for Windows. I also maintain a Jellyfin server and may add simpleDLNA or miniDLNA for offline use. Both Plex and Jellyfin seem to require an internet connection to function.    I use RenameMyTVSeries to rename television series prior to adding metadata and adding to the servers' lists. Free software.    MetaX is the current metadata software. The app has problems but the functionality is unequalled by others, so far. Worth the ten dollar fee. I use the mkvtoolnix suite extensively, CMD and GUI. There is a grep alternative, ripgrep, that is much faster than the version in WSL Ubuntu l...

  There are additions to my speaker setup. A couple of Cerwin Vega HUD 203's are acting as Surround Side speakers. I screwed two open backed bookcase speakers together to use as a Surround Center speaker. Taken together with the Polk Audio subwoofer, that makes a Surround Sound 5.1 arrangement. The avr I'm using is an advanced and sophisiticated unit. I suspect the avr is fairly typical of the genre. I've had to do a lot of readng and studying of the owner's manual, with occasional trial and error changes to test for effect. In fact the software is a tweaker's dream. But can be a user nightmare. It seems that "Pure Direct" is the only mode of several that will play all the speakers without any modification of the sound. Another uses modifications tweaked by me in the setup program. All others are specialized, and not for the person who wants the real experience, as the movie director intended it. There are 'test' files in abundance on the web, espe...

    I decided to take a closer look at the idea of media metadata and have, for the last year, been working to acquire and install quality metadata in the few thousand movies in the library.    This required studying the nature of metadata, especially in regard to videos. Once I understood metadata, I chose to use the Matroska container format and proceeded to convert all movies that were not already in Matroska format. The major reason I chose Matroska was because of the extensive metadata capabilities therein. After I finished converting to Matroska, I began gathering tools and writing programming scripts to acquire, modify, and insert the data.    The movies are done. I'm now writing a simplified script to process incoming movies semi-automatically. That script is about done. The languages used are Python and Bash.    The metadata includes title, year, cast, director, plot description and some other things. An image is included that serves as a...

 I have given a lot of time and thought to the software used to serve the video collection. I like jellyfin, but there are things that need to be fixed and things that need to be changed. There is a software program that is considered the most popular from what I have been able to find out.  The program is Plex. When I first started searching for media server software, I tried Plex, but the first time I downloaded and ran the program, the screen was setup for something like a 360p screen and difficult, if not impossible to use. I went to a forum and complained and got a less than stellar response by what must have been Plex die-hard groupies. Recently, I decided to try again. This time the program that installed was much more sophisticated and usable. The more I used the program, the more I liked the features and ease of use. The program is capable of many things, and accordingly, can be complex to use. Adapting takes some time but is, I think, worth the effort. Major change n...

 My drives have a new rack to hold them. Hot glue and square wood dowels provided the materials with which to build the rack. I used zip ties and a small computer fan attached to the end of the rack to provide cooling air ventilation for the drives. This will increase the lifetime of the drives. Previously the were stacked on top of each other and became noticeably warm during use. The wiring really was bad. Too many cables/wires held together with zip ties. I added a surge protected outlet strip of a newer, more sophisticated design. I rearranged the system wiring to minimize the number of outlet strips and the disarrayed wires. Two strips were screwed to the wall. One was removed. The circular strip was moved from the entertainment center to a work table beside the other two strips and combined with them to supply all devices attached to the system. The strip removed replaced the circular strip in the entertainment system.  Overall, the current setup works better. Both syste...

 The owner of Emby has blocked my using the WebOS access method of using Emby. I discovered the method and posted on the product's forum. That software is no longer my media server and has been removed from my computers. I replaced Emby with Jellyfin. Jellyfin is the evolved Emby open sourced. Emby was originally open source (and free) but was privatized and monetized by the creator. Many considered that move unethical.  The last open source version became the basis for Jellyfin,  easily competitive with Emby and almost, if not equally, well known. I've been using Jellyfin for about a year, perhaps more. The software has issues but is in constant development but is very useful in the current state, version 10.8.5.