HP MediaVault

[kenzo]

Hi Ron,

I’d like to request a n00b FAQ for installing Firefly on a HP MediaVault.

The folks over at HP have been trying to help with this… there’s a discussion ongoing at:
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/HPMediaVault/

This NAS looks like a winner otherwise… any Firefly guidance would be very welcome. If I can help with testing, please let me know.

cheers,
kenzo

[rpedde]

@kenzo wrote:

I’d like to request a n00b FAQ for installing Firefly on a HP MediaVault.

It would take someone actually installing it first to be able to make a FAQ, and I don’t have one. 🙂

Looks like a nice box, though.

In any event, I think porting it to run on that particular nas box is a losing proposition. I think a better solution would be to get ipkg running on the box, and setting it up to use the nslu2 optware tree. I think the media vault is broadcom mipsel platform, and there are already mipsel binaries in unslung, and provided at my ipkg feed.

I’d be happy to help anyone who needed firefly specific questions answered, but I’d be limited in what I could do without one of these boxes.

Again, though, I’d recommend getting the thing to run optware. If you do that, then you automatically get hundreds of packages that will run on the box.

— Ron

[lee810]

@rpedde wrote:

It would take someone actually installing it first to be able to make a FAQ, and I don’t have one. 🙂

Hi Ron,

Let’s see if phpBB won’t trash my third attempt to post with the comment about having a url tag in here which were disabled due to spammers. Losing the first few posts was painful… I’ll make sure to clip and save before hitting the Preview this time.

I am the systems architect for the HP Media Vault. I maintain a FAQ for it here:

http://www.k0lee.com/hpmediavault

In any event, we have an experimental version of iTunes running on the HP MediaVault, but it’s based on the latest stable release, version mt-daapd 0.2.4 from March, 2006. Ken has about 5000 songs ripped in .aif format and the tags don’t show up on the Roku. I’ve installed the latest version of Firefly on my PC and noticed that the .aif tags don’t show up in iTunes either, although I can see the file names and play the songs. The .aif metadata looks fine in the iTunes Library.

I’ve explained the process for installing Firefly on the HP Media Vault here:

http://www.k0lee.com/hpmediavault/iTunes

If we compile with the latest version of Firefly, do you think it would fix the problem with the Roku and .aif tags?

Thanks,

Lee Devlin
http://www.k0lee.com

[lee810]

After looking at the release notes for the nightlies going back to the beginning, I think I’m getting a better picture of what might be going on. It appears that making the .aif tags appear requires scanning through the iTunes Library.xml file to put them in to the songs.db so that they can be seen on the Roku.

The iTunes Libary.xml scanning feature was added on the release Apr 27, 2005. On July 13, 2005, the update stated that the iTunes Library.xml could just be ‘dropped’ in the mp3_dir and it should figure out the paths to the actual files. I was concerned about this because the path to the files on the PC will definitely be different than the path on a NAS device. So I assume this means that Firefly figures out how to translate the relative paths to the files.

However, aiff support wasn’t added until June 16, 2006. Since the version we compiled for the HP Media Vault was from March 1, 2006, then this may account for why we can’t see the .aif metadata. I’ll have to grab the latest version and try recompiling it and will report back here.

Lee Devlin
http://www.k0lee.com

[rpedde]

@lee810 wrote:

After looking at the release notes for the nightlies going back to the beginning, I think I’m getting a better picture of what might be going on. It appears that making the .aif tags appear requires scanning through the iTunes Library.xml file to put them in to the songs.db so that they can be seen on the Roku.

The iTunes Libary.xml scanning feature was added on the release Apr 27, 2005. On July 13, 2005, the update stated that the iTunes Library.xml could just be ‘dropped’ in the mp3_dir and it should figure out the paths to the actual files. I was concerned about this because the path to the files on the PC will definitely be different than the path on a NAS device. So I assume this means that Firefly figures out how to translate the relative paths to the files.

However, aiff support wasn’t added until June 16, 2006. Since the version we compiled for the HP Media Vault was from March 1, 2006, then this may account for why we can’t see the .aif metadata. I’ll have to grab the latest version and try recompiling it and will report back here.

Lee Devlin
http://www.k0lee.com

Correct. There are two pieces of the metadata — the file/header based stuff like bitrate, channels, song duration, etc. That’s calculated since the June 16 version. The rest of it — artist, album, etc comes from the iTunes music library.xml.

Yes, if you dump the xml file somewhere above the music, it works pretty hard to figure out the right path to the songs and augment the metadata with the stuff it finds in iTunes. So you should be able just to dump it in the root of the share and have it work.

You’ll need libsqlite (or libsqlite3 > 3.3.0) as an additional prereq. If you want support for ogg and flac transcoding, you’ll need libogg, libflac, and libvorbisfile as well for the metadata, and the ogg123 and the flac binaries for transcoding. If you want musepack support, you’ll need taglib and the mpc binary for transcoding. (I don’t provide mpc support in the binaries I build, and nobody seems to mind — presumably those that use musepack build their own).

If your machine has no floating point, you’ll need the tremor codec and a hacked version of ogg123 that supports the integer decoder (similar to ivorbis-tools in unslung).

If you get all that, I have no doubt it will run.

What kind of platform is it? It is a broadcom mipsel platform like the Maxtor right? How are you compiling it? With the broadcom hndtools? 3.0 or 3.2.3? Linux or ulibc?

And have you thought about porting ipkg?

[rpedde]

@rpedde wrote:

@lee810 wrote:

After looking at the release notes for the nightlies going back to the beginning, I think I’m getting a better picture of what might be going on. It appears that making the .aif tags appear requires scanning through the iTunes Library.xml file to put them in to the songs.db so that they can be seen on the Roku.

The iTunes Libary.xml scanning feature was added on the release Apr 27, 2005. On July 13, 2005, the update stated that the iTunes Library.xml could just be ‘dropped’ in the mp3_dir and it should figure out the paths to the actual files. I was concerned about this because the path to the files on the PC will definitely be different than the path on a NAS device. So I assume this means that Firefly figures out how to translate the relative paths to the files.

However, aiff support wasn’t added until June 16, 2006. Since the version we compiled for the HP Media Vault was from March 1, 2006, then this may account for why we can’t see the .aif metadata. I’ll have to grab the latest version and try recompiling it and will report back here.

Lee Devlin
http://www.k0lee.com

Correct. There are two pieces of the metadata — the file/header based stuff like bitrate, channels, song duration, etc. That’s calculated since the June 16 version. The rest of it — artist, album, etc comes from the iTunes music library.xml.

Yes, if you dump the xml file somewhere above the music, it works pretty hard to figure out the right path to the songs and augment the metadata with the stuff it finds in iTunes. So you should be able just to dump it in the root of the share and have it work.

You’ll need libsqlite (or libsqlite3 > 3.3.0) as an additional prereq. If you want support for ogg and flac transcoding, you’ll need libogg, libflac, and libvorbisfile as well for the metadata, and the ogg123 and the flac binaries for transcoding. If you want musepack support, you’ll need taglib and the mpc binary for transcoding. (I don’t provide mpc support in the binaries I build, and nobody seems to mind — presumably those that use musepack build their own).

If your machine has no floating point, you’ll need the tremor codec and a hacked version of ogg123 that supports the integer decoder (similar to ivorbis-tools in unslung).

If you get all that, I have no doubt it will run.

What kind of platform is it? It is a broadcom mipsel platform like the Maxtor right? How are you compiling it? With the broadcom hndtools? 3.0 or 3.2.3? Linux or ulibc?

And have you thought about porting ipkg?

Oh… and how did you get it to embed urls if it wouldn’t let you post tags? Or did it just magically make it clickable?

[richdunlop]

@rpedde wrote:

And have you thought about porting ipkg?

Lee – there’s been a lot of interest on the Roku forum about using the media vault as a possible base for a Firefly based music server. Looking at your install instructions it looks easy although it would be neat to have a way of restarting mt-daapd on reboot.

Providing an easy way for people to install Ron’s nightlies (for FLAC transcode etc.) is pretty much essential for this to take off big time though. Ipkg fits the bill for this although a manual install of one of Ron’s nightlies would work too.

I for one would be very interested in getting this running if these things were possible as it looks like a very neat device and has had some great reviews.

[lee810]

@rpedde wrote:

What kind of platform is it? It is a broadcom mipsel platform like the Maxtor right? How are you compiling it? With the broadcom hndtools? 3.0 or 3.2.3? Linux or ulibc?

And have you thought about porting ipkg?

We’re running a Broadcom 4875 which is in the same family as the 4780 used in the original Maxtor Shared Storage device except it has better performance. We have a version of the 3.0 mipsel-linux hndtools (also available on my FAQ site) for compiling.

We’ll look into use ipkg. The only issue now is that a lot of the directories are cramfs which are not writable. If we figure a work-around for that, then maybe we can use ipkg in the future.

As for the URLs, I just type in the http address and it appears to work fine. Previously I had tried to use the URL button and it inserted tags and those caused the post to fail.

Thanks for your help, Ron. The work you do for the Firefly community is quite admirable.

Lee Devlin
http://www.k0lee.com

[rpedde]

@lee810 wrote:

We’re running a Broadcom 4875 which is in the same family as the 4780 used in the original Maxtor Shared Storage device except it has better performance. We have a version of the 3.0 mipsel-linux hndtools (also available on my FAQ site) for compiling.

Seems like the problems I ran into is that I needed g++ for one of the prereqs and 3.0 didn’t have g++. Is that still the case?

We’ll look into use ipkg. The only issue now is that a lot of the directories are cramfs which are not writable. If we figure a work-around for that, then maybe we can use ipkg in the future.

The unslung ipkgs (http://ipkgfind.nslu2-linux.org/) only write (afaik) to /opt, so a symlinked /opt to the installed hard drive would be sufficient, I think.

Should be able to grab the optware svn tree and try to build it all with the 3.0 tools (I’d build it as a mss, and link the hndtools dirs to the 3.0 toolchain).

Thanks for your help, Ron. The work you do for the Firefly community is quite admirable.

Hard to help too much without a system, but I’ll provide any help I can.

— Ron

[lee810]

Just to follow-up on this thread, we do have a the very latest version of Firefly running on the HP Media Vault. The Firefly server that runs on Windows is a little more capable because it can transcode .wma lossless using Windows libraries that exist on a PC. The version of Firefly for Linux based devices doesn’t have that option. However, we did get it to work with .aif and m4p lossless and it will parse the iTunes xml file to populate .aif tags.

The next step will be to get it to autostart and that should be possible after the next firmware update which will run a user-configurable startup script.

-Lee Devlin

HP Media Vault FAQ:
http://www.k0lee.com/hpmediavault

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