multimedia

RV Offsite Backup Update

Kyle Rankin — Wed, 07 Aug 2019 21:15:00 +0000

Having an offsite backup in your RV is great, and after a year of use, I've discovered some ways to make it even better.

Last year I wrote a feature-length article on the data backup system I set up for my RV (see Kyle's "DIY RV Offsite Backup and Media Server" from the June 2018 issue of LJ). If you haven't read that article yet, I recommend checking it out first so you can get details on the system. In summary, I set up a Raspberry Pi media center PC connected to a 12V television in the RV. I connected an 8TB hard drive to that system and synchronized all of my files and media so it acted as a kind of off-site backup. Finally, I set up a script that would attempt to sync over all of those files from my NAS whenever it detected that the RV was on the local network. So here, I provide an update on how that system is working and a few tweaks I've made to it since.

What Works

Overall, the media center has worked well. It's been great to have all of my media with me when I'm on a road trip, and my son appreciates having access to his favorite cartoons. Because the interface is identical to the media center we have at home, there's no learning curve—everything just works. Since the Raspberry Pi is powered off the TV in the RV, you just need to turn on the TV and everything fires up.

It's also been great knowing that I have a good backup of all of my files nearby. Should anything happen to my house or my main NAS, I know that I can just get backups from the RV. Having peace of mind about your important files is valuable, and it's nice knowing in the worst case when my NAS broke, I could just disconnect my USB drive from the RV, connect it to a local system, and be back up and running.

The WiFi booster I set up on the RV also has worked pretty well to increase the range of the Raspberry Pi (and the laptops inside the RV) when on the road. When we get to a campsite that happens to offer WiFi, I just reset the booster and set up a new access point that amplifies the campsite signal for inside the RV. On one trip, I even took it out of the RV and inside a hotel room to boost the weak signal.

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Weekend Reading: Multimedia

Carlie Fairchild — Sat, 29 Dec 2018 12:45:00 +0000

by Carlie Fairchild

Put the fun back in computing. With this weekend's reading, we encourage you to build yourself an internet radio station, create your own Audible or even live-stream your pets on YouTube. Sky's the limit with Linux. Enjoy!

Building Your Own Audible

by Shawn Powers

I have audiobooks from a variety of sources, which I've purchased in a variety of ways. I have some graphic audio books in MP3 format, a bunch of Audible books in their DRM'd format and ripped CDs varying from m4b (Apple format for books) to MP3 and even some OGG. That diversity makes choosing a listening platform difficult. Here I take a quick look at some options for streaming audio books.

Linux Gets Loud

by Joshua Curry

Linux is ready for prime time when it comes to music production. New offerings from Linux audio developers are pushing creative and technical boundaries. And, with the maturity of the Linux desktop and growth of standards-based hardware setups, making music with Linux has never been easier.

Using gphoto2 to Automate Taking Pictures

by Shawn Powers

With my obsession—er, I mean hobby—regarding BirdCam, I've explored a great number of camera options. Whether that means trying to get Raspberry Pi cameras to focus for a macro shot of a feeder or adjusting depth of field to blur out the neighbor's shed, I've fiddled with just about every webcam setting there is. Unfortunately, when it comes to lens options, nothing beats a DSLR for quality. Thankfully, there's an app for that.

Creating an Internet Radio Station with Icecast and Liquidsoap

by Bill Dengler

Ever wanted to stream prerecorded music or a live event, such as a lecture or concert for an internet audience? With Icecast and Liquidsoap, you can set up a full-featured, flexible internet radio station using free software and open standards.

Live Stream Your Pets with Linux and YouTube!

by Shawn Powers

Anyone who reads Linux Journal knows about my fascination with birdwatching. I've created my own weatherproof video cameras with a Raspberry Pi. I've posted instructions on how to create your own automatically updating camera image page with JavaScript. Heck, I even learned CSS so I could make a mobile-friendly version of BirdCam that filled the screen in landscape mode.

Nativ Vita

by James Gray

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DIY RV Offsite Backup and Media Server

Kyle Rankin — Tue, 10 Jul 2018 11:45:00 +0000

by Kyle Rankin

What better way to add a geeky touch to #vanlife than with a Linux server in your RV?

One easily could make the strong argument that an RV is the ultimate DIY project playground. It combines all of the DIY projects you could perform on a vehicle with the DIY projects for a home. Add to that the fact that you may spend days living in a small house on wheels navigating highways, forests and deserts, and you have a whole other class of DIY projects to make the most of that smaller space. RVs also offer a whole suite of power options from 12V deep cycle batteries to 110V shore power to generators and alternators to solar power, so there's a whole class of electrical DIY projects related to making the most of your changing power options.

And if you're a geek, having an RV introduces a whole other level of DIY possibilities. First, there are all of the electronics projects to manage switching between power sources, tracking energy consumption and keeping those batteries charged. Then there's an entire category of projects related to internet access while away from home that involve everything from mobile WiFi hotspots to cellular-boosting networks to roving satellite internet (and if you're clever, a smart router that routes you to the best and cheapest available option). Finally, there are several project possibilities related to the computer systems in the RV, including local switches and routers, personal computers that turn the RV into a mobile office, and media centers so you can watch TV and movies from the road.

It just so happens that I recently got an RV—a 1996 Roadtrek 170 to be exact. Although this purchase has spawned a huge list of DIY projects, my very first Linux-based project focuses on the media center. At home, my media center is a Raspberry Pi running OSMC, and it works great for accessing my ripped DVDs and CDs from my NAS and playing them on my living-room TV. When I got the RV, I realized that one of the first things we'd want is a way to access all of that media from the road, even if we were in the middle of the woods.

In this article, I describe all the steps I took to build a media server just for the RV that maintains an up-to-date copy of my media and even syncs up automatically when it's parked in my driveway. It turns out that in the process of building a media server, I ended up with a pretty great off-site backup solution as well. Even if you don't own an RV, you could adapt these steps to add your own semi-offsite backup to your car.

Figure 1. Introducing "Van Winkle" (Photo Credit: Joy Rankin)

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Linux Gets Loud

Joshua Curry — Wed, 13 Jun 2018 13:08:08 +0000

by Joshua Curry

Exploring the current state of musical Linux with interviews of developers of popular packages.

Linux always has had a place for musicians looking for inexpensive rigs to record and create music, but historically, it's been a pain to maintain. Digging through arcane documentation and deciphering man pages is not something that interests many musicians.

Loading up Linux is not as intimidating as it once was, and a helpful community is going strong. Beyond tinkering types looking for cheap beats, users range in experience and skill. Linux is still the underdog when it comes to its reputation for thin creative applications though.

Recently, musically inclined Linux developers have turned out a variety of new and updated software packages for both production and creative uses. From full-fledged DAWs (Digital Audio Workstations), to robust soft-synths and versatile effects platforms, the OSS audio ecosystem is healthy.

A surge in technology-focused academic music programs has brought a fresh crop of software-savvy musicians into the fold. The modular synth movement also has nurtured an interest in how sound is made and encouraged curiosity about the technology behind it.

One of the biggest hurdles in the past was the lack of core drivers for the wide variety of outboard gear used by music producers. With USB 2.0 and improvements in ALSA and JACK, more hardware became available for use. Companies slowly have opened their systems to third-party developers, allowing more low-level drivers to be built.

Hardware

In terms of raw horsepower, the ubiquity of multicore processors and cheap RAM has enabled Linux to take advantage of powerful machines. Specifically, multithreaded software design available to developers in the Linux kernel offer audio packages that offload DSP and UI to various cores. Beyond OS multithreading, music software devs have taken advantage of this in a variety of ways.

A well known API called Jack Audio Connection Kit (JACK) handles multiple inter-application connections as well as audio hardware communication with a multithreaded approach, enabling low latency with both audio DSP and MIDI connections.

Ardour has leveraged multithreaded processing for some time. In early versions, it was used to distribute audio processing and the main interface and OS interaction to separate cores. Now it offers powerful parallel rendering on a multitude of tracks with complex effects.

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Using gphoto2 to Automate Taking Pictures

Shawn Powers — Sat, 27 Jan 2018 15:04:01 +0000

by Shawn Powers

Introducing an app that allows DSLR cameras to function as an image or video capture device in Linux.

The gphoto2 suite of drivers and apps allows a huge list of DSLR cameras to function as image or video capture devices inside Linux. There's a compatibility list at the gphoto site, and even if your camera isn't listed, it's likely you'll be able to use it in some manner. For example, my Nikon Coolpix P610 isn't officially supported, but I'm able to get some images from it regardless. In fact, it even supports previewing a photo in ASCII art. That might not be a useful feature, but I found it incredibly fun to play with.

In all reality, if you want to automate taking pictures while using a real DSLR camera, gphoto2 is probably the tool you want. Whether it's a short-term setup on a tripod or a future super-high-def BirdCam (send me a link!), be sure to check it out. And if I can get my wife to loan me her Canon DSLR with the 50mm prime lens, BirdCam might rise to a whole new level!

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Building Your Own Audible

Shawn Powers — Sat, 20 Jan 2018 14:35:41 +0000

by Shawn Powers

A quick look at some options for streaming audio books.

A system that plays any audio format.
A way to play books on multiple platforms, iOS Android and web browsers.
Current location stored and honored across platforms.
The ability to play audiobooks at different speeds.
An easy way to access my entire library remotely.

Several options come close. My favorite Android audiobook app, for instance, is "Listen", available in the Play Store. But, it falls short on the multi-platform front and also on accessing books remotely. Audible itself will do most of what I need, but it doesn't allow importing remote books. And, traditional music players are out.

Honestly, Plex seems like the perfect platform for audiobooks. And although some people do use it, they're just kludging things. Plex doesn't natively support the concepts behind audiobooks, so the process isn't smooth at all. I'm honestly hoping that changes in the future, because it would be a perfect addition to an already amazing system. Thankfully, in the meantime, there's BookSonic.

You've probably heard of SubSonic, which is a music streaming server that allows you to do pretty much what I'm looking for with audiobooks, but it's strictly for music. Patrik Johansson has forked SubSonic and created BookSonic, specifically modified to handle audiobooks. It even handles tagging and book art. Currently, the system isn't perfect, but it's closer than any other projects come to book nirvana, and if you use Docker, it's dead simple to get installed. A simple:


docker -d create \
  --name booksonic \
  -p 8080:8080 \
  -v :/audiobooks \
  -v :/var/booksonic \
  ironicbadger/booksonic

will get BookSonic running on your Docker host. Once it's installed, just head over to http://docker_host:8080 and log in as admin/admin. You can start the book scan, and fairly soon, your books will show up for you to start playing!

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Creating an Internet Radio Station with Icecast and Liquidsoap

Bill Dengler — Mon, 15 Jan 2018 14:34:13 +0000

by Bill Dengler

Icecast is "a streaming media (audio/video) server that currently supports Ogg (Vorbis and Theora), Opus, WebM and MP3 streams. It can be used to create an internet radio station or a privately running jukebox and many things in between. It is very versatile in that new formats can be added relatively easily and supports open standards for communication and interaction."

Liquidsoap is "a powerful and flexible language for describing your streams. It offers a rich collection of operators that you can combine at will, giving you more power than you need for creating or transforming streams. But Liquidsoap is still very light and easy to use, in the UNIX tradition of simple strong components working together."

When combined, Icecast and Liquidsoap can create a flexible, feature-rich internet radio station. In this article, I describe how to configure Icecast to host an internet radio station. Then, I explain how to install and configure Liquidsoap to connect to Icecast, adding random (or sequential) music playback with smart cross-fading, prerecorded randomly inserted announcements and jingles, a song request system and support for live streams, with automated recording and seamless switching between live and automated programming. I also show how to configure the server to serve your stream in MP3, Ogg and Opus formats for maximum player compatibility.

Icecast, Vorbis and related projects are maintained by Xiph.Org, a nonprofit organization that develops open multimedia standards and software. To ensure that you are running the latest version of Icecast, with all (or most) features, you should install from an official Xiph.Org repository. Visit the list of official repositories here, and follow the instructions on that page to add the Icecast repository for your distribution. Then, install using your system's package manager. On Debian-based systems (such as Ubuntu), you may be asked to "configure Icecast" during package installation; select "no" as you will configure the server manually if you are following along with this article.

Open the Icecast configuration file using your preferred text editor. On Debian-based systems, the file is located at /etc/icecast2/icecast.xml. The location on other systems may differ; check your package's documentation for the correct path. The configuration file is in XML format and is divided into several sections. First, enter your server's location and email into the location and admin fields, respectively—for example:

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Live Stream Your Pets with Linux and YouTube!

Shawn Powers — Thu, 26 Oct 2017 11:53:25 +0000

by Shawn Powers

Recently, however, I've finally been able to create an automated system that streams my BirdCam live over YouTube. It starts when the sun comes up and stops when the sun goes down. And thanks to some powerful open-source software, I never have to touch the system!

Some of the tools I describe here have been covered in other articles, but this is the first time I've been able to create a stream that anyone can see utilizing bandwidth Google pays for!

Figure 1. Birds are always camera-shy. If you watch long enough, however, they come and steal peanuts!

My List of Ingredients

First off, I want to be clear about what sort of hardware and software is required in order to accomplish something similar to what I'm doing:

A Linux computer: if you plan to use USB cameras, this needs to be a physical computer. If your video source is network-based, this can be a virtual machine on your network. A Raspberry Pi isn't really powerful enough for the video work that has to be done, unless maybe it's low-resolution. I have an old i5 CPU running at 1.6GHz, and it's more than enough.
A video source: this can be pretty much any video source you have at hand. If you plan to use a USB webcam, you'll need to be sure you are using a physical Linux computer as noted above. I've used USB, MJPEG over http (see my old BirdCam articles), cheap wireless security cameras that have an RTSP stream, and most recently, I started using UniFi video cameras. In fact, if you are considering purchasing outdoor video cameras for a project like this, I can't recommend UniFi cameras enough. They are PoE, HD and the free software handles recording and provides RTSP streams that have both HD video and top-notch audio.
A YouTube account with Live Streaming enabled: you'll need to verify your account, and then enable live streaming here. It's not a difficult process, but without following those steps, you won't be able to use the free service.

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YouTube on the Big Screen

Shawn Powers — Wed, 20 Sep 2017 15:32:58 +0000

by Shawn Powers

For years I've been jealous of folks with iOS devices who could just send their phone screens to their Apple TV devices. It seems like the Android screen-mirroring protocols never work right for me. My Sony Xperia has multiple types of screen mirroring, and none of them seem to work on my smart TVs or Roku devices.

YouTube is a completely different story. It doesn't matter if I'm on a laptop, iPhone, Android device or Chromebook, I can "cast" the video to any of my Roku devices or smart TVs without any problems at all. It works and works well. The great part about casting is you can shut off the connection from the sending device, and it keeps playing! Because 95% of the stuff I want to display on the TV from my phone is YouTube videos, I couldn't be happier. Plus, I can check email on my phone while the family watches the latest "Bad Lip Reading" video on the big screen! Take that Apple TV!

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Nativ Vita

James Gray — Mon, 21 Aug 2017 13:38:01 +0000

by James Gray

The motto "open to anything" underpins Nativ's development philosophy on all of its audio solutions, including its new Nativ Vita, "the world's first High-Resolution Music Player" and touchscreen control center that is designed to function as the central access point for one's entire music collection.

This philosophy is evident in Nativ Vita's Linux and open-source internals, offering advantages like support for virtually any music service—even lesser-known and regional services like Jango Radio, KKBox and Paradise Radio—and extensibility far beyond pure audio applications. Naturally, Nativ Vita supports mainstream music services like Apple Music, SoundCloud, Vevo, Spotify, TIDAL, Pandora and Amazon Music, among others.

Nativ Vita can store up to 4TB of music on its internal hard disk drives or SSDs and can access remote files on a PC, NAS or smartphone. Wireless streaming to multi-room speaker systems is achieved utilizing popular solutions like SONOS and Bluesound and to high-end headphones via Bluetooth aptX. A high-end digital output stage with myriad outputs ranging from AES/EBU to USB Audio Class 2.0 connect the Vita to an amplifier or USB DAC for best-in-class sound performance.

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