This office could use Ubuntu. 
Saturday, April 21, 2007
Sunday, April 15, 2007
Windows/iTunes Replacement = FireFly/Amarok
I have a home theater PC (HTPC) in my front room, which I use for all the usual stuff: stream music and other media to my 52" LCD TV and living room sound system. Ridiculous I know. I have a Linux server hosting all my content in my office. I also have iTunes running on another workstation which is used to catalog and manage all my MP3s (160GB worth). I share the iTunes library on my one workstation so that I can connect to it on my HTPC. Now, as you can see iTunes is critical in this current set-up. I've been looking to get away from iTunes, especially on my HTPC so that I can put a Linux distro on it. I've been a fan of Amorak for sometime and just needed to figure out how to get it to connect to a shared iTunes library. The latest version of Amarok has that capability. In order to get completely away from my dependency on iTunes, I installed FireFly media server on my main Linux server and had it scan the directory with all my music.
Once I had FireFly up and running, the next thing to do was test it. iTunes was the first test, no problem. Found the shared library and was able to connect to it. Now for the Amarok/Linux test... pulled out a live distro with the latest version of Amarok on it. Linux Mint Bianca was the distro of choice in this case. Booted into the live environment on my WiFi enabled HTPC. Launched Amarok and connected to the FireFly server. Awesome. Works beautifully. Now, when my "evaluation copy" of Windows Vista runs out in.. 23days.. I have a viable replacement. Windows and iTunes free at that.
While I had Linux Mint Bianca booted up, I decided to take it through a media test run. I know that there is some heartache out there with all Linux Mint decided to bundle in their distribution. I threw MP3s, WMVs, MPEGs, and even DIVX (or was it XVID?) files at it. Linux Mint Bianca handled them all; in a 'live' environment at that. I was surprised when it played DIVX/XVID files without a hitch. I don't think Windows can even do that 'out-of-the-box'.
Once I had FireFly up and running, the next thing to do was test it. iTunes was the first test, no problem. Found the shared library and was able to connect to it. Now for the Amarok/Linux test... pulled out a live distro with the latest version of Amarok on it. Linux Mint Bianca was the distro of choice in this case. Booted into the live environment on my WiFi enabled HTPC. Launched Amarok and connected to the FireFly server. Awesome. Works beautifully. Now, when my "evaluation copy" of Windows Vista runs out in.. 23days.. I have a viable replacement. Windows and iTunes free at that.
While I had Linux Mint Bianca booted up, I decided to take it through a media test run. I know that there is some heartache out there with all Linux Mint decided to bundle in their distribution. I threw MP3s, WMVs, MPEGs, and even DIVX (or was it XVID?) files at it. Linux Mint Bianca handled them all; in a 'live' environment at that. I was surprised when it played DIVX/XVID files without a hitch. I don't think Windows can even do that 'out-of-the-box'.
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