AaronStaves.com

Here's the skinny...

If you hadn't heard, my sister and brother in law just had (well, he's 1 now) a baby boy, congrats!.  Given how tech savvy they both are they take a ton of movies and photos and post them online for relatives from all around the country to watch.  This is an awesome way to keep up on how the little guy is doing.  However! Given that some of our relatives may be a bit more on the less tech savvy side I decided that making an interactive web based movie page would be a good way to help them view their new nephew, cousin, grandson or great grandson.  You can see a demo of it here.

For starters, I've already done a few projects using the JW FLV Player. I use this player for a few reasons.  First off, it's free to use for non-commercial purposes!  And even if you do use it commercially, it's pretty dirt cheap.  Second!  It's got an insanely awesome javascript interface.  You can pretty much completely control the player and hook into almost every event you can think of that the player may publish. This is great for web developers that know absolutely nothing about flash but still want the benefit of a flash based movie player.  Lastly, this player is great because it constantly getting updates and there's a huge community behind it; always good stuff.

What you'll need

I did try to spruce up this player slightly so you'll need a few things if you'd like this to work on your server.

• mod_perl, along with the CGI, File::stat and DateTime packages.  I imagine most come pretty standard with a vanilla install of PERL.
• ffmpeg, compiled with png support.  I imagine a pretty standard install of ffmpeg should be fine.
• movie files, yup! you'll need some movies to view.  Right now this is limited by the type of movie files that the player natively supports.  I may add some transcoding using ffmpeg later if anyone actually uses this and wants it.

And that should be it!  Pretty simple.  I'm also using the YUI javascript toolkit, but Yahoo! has been kind enough to host that on their CDN.  So no need to download all those crazy javascript files.

How to Install

Here are some quick install instructions:

1. Grab the zip file from here
2. Make a directory on your server (in my case aaronstaves.com/movietest) where you want the files to and unzip 'em there.
3. Make a directory (if you need to) where you're movies are going to be placed.  I put mine in aaronstaves.com/movietest/movies).  This directory will need to be writable as far as your webserver is concerned.  If you already have them you can forget this step!
4. Edit the movies.conf file.  You'll need to specify the absolute path of your movie director and the url that links to them.
5. Once that's done you should be able to just go to your url and watch some movies!

Features

Sorting and Dates

I've made it so the player automatically sorts the movies by date.  The newer movies are listed at the top and the older movies are listed at the bottom.  It also grabs the date one of two ways.  1) if the date is specified in the filename (yyyymmdd format), it will use that.  2) otherwise it will grab the timestamp on the actual file.  Neat huh?! The only downside to this is is that it has to touch each file(name) to do this.  But I wanted to make this without the hassle of a DB, kind of a necessary evil.  Hopefully with 100's of files, this won't be that much of a performance hit.

Native file support

As I said above, this natively supports mp4 (m4v, etc) files as well as flv files.  So hopefully if your files are in that format, you won't have to deal with transcoding files.  Awesome! As I said, transcoding wouldn't be that hard to do, but it would be pretty time consuming on the server side, pending on how large the files were, so I'm not sure how I'd go about that at the moment.

Downloads

See a movie you like? Well download it! You'll notice at the top of the screen when you play a movie, you'll get an awesome download link.  For anyone that wants to actively share or archive these movies, I figured it would be a necessity.

Feedback

Right now I've only tested this in FF3+, IE 7  and the latest version of Opera.  If anyone finds something wrong with it, let me know and I'll see if I can address those issues.  Otherwise feedback, suggestions, comments and criticism is welcome.  This is my first mini-project in a while that I've made to "distrubute" so somethings may be clear while others may not.  Hopefully with the addition of the conf file, you won't have to touch any of the code I wrote.  This small tutorial is written for them, but anyone is more than welcome to use it if they want their own personal video page to share with others.  Enjoy!

So this weekend I decided to install linux on my PS3 (more on that later), so what better time to upgrade the hard drive! I commend Sony on making swapping out the drive so easy. Because it literally is that easy. Before you start, be sure to backup your data via System Settings -> Backup Utility.  For my purposes I just used an external USB hard drive.  My backup was 22GB (off of a 40GB PS3) just to give you some idea of how big it's going to be.  First off - we need to decide on a hard drive. Initially I was going to try going with a SSD, however the price/space ratio was just way too much. So I simply went to amazon and typed in PS3 hard drive. To my (pleasant!) surprise I was given a list of 2.5" notebook drives that seem to work well with the PS3. This is just based on user comments/googling. Anyways, I settled on a nice 320 GB hard drive from Western Digital. With over 95% five-star reviews, how could I go wrong.

Removing the old drive

As I said above, removing this drive is very easy. Do you know how to use a screwdriver? great! because that's all you need. First up, find the hard drive cover on your ps3.

PS3 Hard Drive Cover

Once you remove it you'll notice a (blue colored!?) screw. Unscrew it and you'll be presented with a nice little latch to safely pull out the hard drive.

PS3 Blue Screw!

Hard drive removed!

Once it's out, you'll notice 4 screws on the side of the hard drive holding it in place.  Remove those!

Screws on the side of the hard drive

Once it's out, you're free to swap out drive.  Put your new drive in, then screw it into place with the 4 screws you just removed.

Everything taken apart!

In goes the 320GB!

Then just replce the last screw on the latch, pop the cover back on, and you're set! It's seriously that easy

Formatting and getting the drive "up to speed"

So some drives may already come pre-formatted. Unfortunately this was not the case for me. So I had to go through quite a bit of unexpected hoops to get the drive working once installed. First I was prompted to connect a controller... ok...

Insert controller here!

Then I received a more  nasty message from the PS3.

Uh oh!

Cannot run correctly?  Oh no!  Basically this is because there is no software on the drive, so it has no idea what to do.  The solution is to provide the new drive with a much needed update!  To do this I just went to the Playstation website and grabbed the software.  Make sure to note the directory structure!  Anyways, once that installed, it restarted, formatted the drive and everything finally started working.  Lastly I took my backup and restored it from the System Settings -> Backup Utility menu.  All in all it was pretty easy.  I just wasn't prepared for all the "usb disk that has software on it to boot your ps3" part.  Now for linux!

So most of the apps for my phone thus far have been free.  But recently I came into possession of a (trial!) program of panoman.  The user interface for it is insanely easy. So far I've only used it twice but the results have been extremely awesome.  Example below!  Especially check out the high-res that it was taken in (take that iPhone!)

Although I'd probably barely ever use this, it's awesome for those surreal views that you can capture.  Anyways, if it's ~$5 or so, that'd definitely be worth it; especially if the license can go between phones.

If you don't know, Ubuntu 8.10 dropped today. As promised I will be attempting to install it this evening. I say "attempting" because you never know what might go wrong. Anyways, I came across an awesome program called rEFI that enables you to actually control and partition your mac hard drive without being forced into only 2 paritions (OS X and Bootcamp). So this way I can still keep my windows partition for the occasional game and create another partition for Ubuntu. Great! The program installs like any other program under OS X and only took about 5 minutes to get working (4:30 was how long it took for my mac to reboot). Anyways, there are some pics below, and expect an update within the next day or so. Or even possibly tonight!