A blog about building a smart-house automation, media storage and playback systems centered on Windows Server 8.
Thursday 8 December 2016
The TV selection challenge
It's time for a new TV. Our main TV is an 8 year old Sony Bravia 40" and while it's still perfectly serviceable, it is showing it's age in terms of picture quality and features. We now have an XBox One S and Fire TV HD attached and so have multiple 4K sources (UHD Blu-Ray, Netflix and Amazon). The time seems right to take the plunge with 4k and HDR.
I didn't think this would be so difficult.
It started easily enough - figure out a panel size and a budget. Initially I figured a 50" would be a great improvement and would be pocket-friendly as well as prices increase somewhat when going from 50" to 55". To be sure, we borrowed a 55" set for a few days to confirm that it would be too big for the room. It wasn't. It was perfect and, even though it was only a HD set (Panasonic DS500), the improvement in quality over the old Sony was astounding.
Tuesday 6 December 2016
Why Emby's not for me
I so want to like Emby. I use the server as a lynchpin of my whole-house a/v system, integrating it with Kodi front ends where it provides excellent media management and serving. I've recently starting using Amazon FireTV devices as clients and, while it's possible to sideload Kodi on these devices, it's not a seamless process and there's always a question mark over how long it will be tolerated on that platform.
Emby client looks like it might be a viable alternative. It's a natural fit with the server and it's a fully-fledged member of the app community with a presence in all the relevant app stores. Plus, the recent addition of LiveTV support makes it worth having a look at. LiveTV is a big part of my system and PVR is a significant part of the way we use TVC in our house. There's a TvHeadEnd instance running on the network that manages 6x terrestrial/satellite tuners with channels accessed through Kodi TV plugins.
Of course, TvHeadEnd is not an officially integrated TV backend for Emby, like NextPVR or MediaPortal. There is a community plug-in though so it should work OK. I tried it in the web browser instance and eventually managed to get a picture so thought I'd try the dedicated client. This turned out to be unsatisfactory for a variety of reasons;
Thursday 1 December 2016
Tidy up unRAID Docker folders
Since the latest unRAID update introduced the /mnt/users/docker share, my Docker files seem to be all over the place. I have some there and some in an /appdata share which seems to have scattered them on across the cache and the array.
I wanted to update all my Dockers to use the new /docker share and this is what I needed to do.
It turns out it's not just a matter of updating the AppData Config Path field for each docker - it doesn't seem possible to do that for an installed Docker, (changes don't stick). Instead, it's necessary to go through the worrying process of removing the Docker and reinstalling it!
Here's the steps I followed;
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