LINUX Unplugged - Episode 156: Your Media Just Got Served | LUP 156

Episode Date: August 3, 2016

Take advantage of the Chromecast without Google, extend Kodi with awesome new backends & cast media around your network with free Linux tools. Our panel covers great tips to fully trick out your Linux media setup.Plus our thoughts on the FCC forcing TP-Link to support open source firmwares, reverse tethering for Android, a quick look at Mint 18 XFCE edition & a lot more!

I have a really embarrassing story to start with. Oh, yes. So I know I'm going to get crap about this all the time by sharing this, but I have to just let you know. So in case the audience out there runs into this, they know what the fix is. So, you know, last week, Wes, like a champ, you set up a star bound server during the show. And that evening. So that evening I was I was kind of in a unique position because when you live in a tiny home, when you get offered to house sit for somebody in downtown Seattle, you take that up. Hey, that sounds nice.

By the way, that's a little relationship pro tip too. And that offer comes along. You got to try to accept that. You say, yes. So we go down and we start house sitting Tuesday evening. We were going to wake up there Wednesday morning. And I get down there. And I don't have any Wi-Fi access. The password, they didn't leave it on the notes. We can't get a hold of them. I can't get on the internet. So in a moment

of panic, because I want to play Starbound. Naturally. I turn on tethering on my phone. I'm like, I'm just going to use phone data. This is important. Thank you, Ting. Yeah. And I connect and I start playing. And I'm wondering, is Wes online? And I'm playing along and all of a sudden I notice that I'm having a kind of a hard time controlling and looking around.

Okay. I can't really explain why, but I keep seeming to get this intermittent freeze or pause in the game. Bop, bop. Bop, bop. Every three, four seconds. Maybe every three seconds. Bop. Bop, bop.

And it makes, you know, when you're in a battle or something, it's just enough to kill you. It's just not untenable. And it's really, it was like really distracting. And I'm like, well, maybe I have a video driver problem.

Maybe I have a power, and I go, I extinguish off. There's a lot of options. Yeah. I start looking, maybe it's a power management setting, like a CPU frequency. And I'm chatting with Rikai,

and I'm tethered to my phone, and I'm looking up stuff online, and I'm like, You're in full troubleshooting mode. This is not my phone, and I'm looking up stuff online, and I'm like- You're in full troubleshooting mode. This is not how I was going to use my mobile data, but now I got to know, and we're down, we're house sitting, and of course, my lady, she's like, so do you want to come out on the deck, or what are you doing? Yeah, I got this bottle of wine here.

What are you doing? And I'm like, I got to fix this. This is important. And I dig around, and I dig around, and I I'm starting and I'm trying things. I'm adding kernel boot parameters. I'm tweaking the X config according to the Arch wiki for Skylake graphics. I'm making all these modifications to my system and I'm rebooting and rebooting and I'm rebooting. And one of the times I log in, the problem's fixed. And I go, hot diggity dang, that link found me about the kernel parameter fixed it. Look at that. And I go, hot diggity dang, that link Reekai found me about the kernel parameter fixed it.

Look at that. And I go to hit one of my keys, and I realize that nothing happens because none of my extensions are loaded. Oh. So I quickly go remove the kernel boot parameter, reboot again with extensions off. The game doesn't have the glitch. I log out of GNOME login with extensions on. The glitch is back. The glitch is back. And I start to notice that the glitch also exists in the glitch. I log out of GNOME login with extensions on. The glitch is back. Glitch is back.

And I start to notice that the glitch also exists in video playback. Okay. It exists sometimes when just moving the mouse really quickly. I start noticing like when I'm dragging Nautilus windows around, I can see that glitch and I'm like, what is going on here? It's interesting that the plugin has the ability to cause that much trouble. So I discovered it was my system monitor GNOME extension, which is a really cool system monitor extension that puts all of your hardware devices in an icon, just icons.

And so instead of having like all of these moving menu meters and stuff like that up in your toolbar, you have an icon that represents your CPU and your disk and your NIC. And you click those and it drops down and you get an expansive drop-down menu of your entire system resources. Well. Sounds nice enough. And I've had plenty of these over the years. Since GNOME 2, I've used things like System Monitor. I did a little digging around, and it turns out there is actually a current issue on their GitHub about this.

The extension causes stutter and lag in video players is where they noticed it. And there are some fixes that have been proposed, but what I did is I just did a purging of anything. So it turns out, by reading through this bug, that what it really comes down to, it's not actually GNOME's fault, and it's not actually the extension's fault. That's why this is particularly tricky. This is interesting.

It's just simply an issue in Linux when you have that many open files, and when you're catting a bunch of things in proc, at the same time you've got a game accessing all of its image data and its sound files and all that stuff, you sometimes get an I.O. stutter like that. It's just like a problem right now. And they talk about it here in this thread

and they talk about ways you could alleviate the problem by making the extension more efficient and other ways to sort of coalesce some of the polling and things like that. So I just did a grand purge of like extensions that check my CPU temps and my GPU temps. Anything with lots of random access. Yeah, I just did a purge.

I did a purge and it has been totally smooth, but it totally interrupted my gameplay. Wow. So I didn't get a chance to jump on the server last week. There you go. That is my story of a GNOME extension that turned out- That's good to know. I'm sure I would have gone through exactly the same turmoil as you did. Such a rabbit hole.

Yeah. Because, you know, you start with all the obvious things like, oh, it's freaking open source graphics. Or, oh, it's freaking power management. Or, it's my new Arch Kernel. And you're so used to those icons up there. Yeah. And I've always had system monitor extensions literally for like ever. Because, like, I'm often compiling, or not compiling often,, but when I'm re-updating my AUR packages,

I like to watch how busy my system is so I know I can do a bunch of other stuff. Or definitely when I'm encoding video, it's extremely handy to have that. So it's, yeah, it was a little embarrassing and I had to share it with you. And you might want to look into it too if you have the GNOME System Monitor extension, which is kind of a popular one.

Or any of those that pull your system a lot for what's going on. Maybe try turning them off for a little while and see if you notice a difference. That's my lesson. This is Linux Unplugged, episode 156 for August 2nd, 2016. Welcome to Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show that was almost running a little late. Because even though it rained so damn much, people still don't know how to drive around here, Wes. This is something where Linux will save us all one day. Linux will be in the cars driving us. You know it.

And us meat sacks will be busy playing on our phones. That's what I think. That's not what we're here to talk about on today's episode of the Unplugged program. We have a huge, huge fun show to get into. A bunch of really great news has cropped up just in the last couple of days from some of our favorite open source projects. So we're going to spend a bunch of time at the top of the show digging through some of those really good stuff there. New version of Mint XFCE is out, and there's some really interesting news in there, but also really interesting language

and positioning by Clem. We'll talk a little bit about that in the show. Then the Googs has the Chromecast. You guys all know about the Chromecast. It's sold like hotcakes, but it's really reliant on Google services. That's got to be its Achilles heel. This week, we'll talk about ways you can use the Chromecast with tools on your Linux

box to stream to a Chromecast locally. So you can go pick yourself up one of these cheap streaming little devices. We'll also talk about some open source alternatives to Chromecast, get the mumble rooms, tips, and all of that. Then we're going to transition into some of the Kodi exploits I've been doing. And by that I mean adventures in like figuring out how to name my files, some of the cool add-ons and extensions I've found, of course. In-depth experience here. And also a tool to help whip my media collection into shape.

And I know we'll get some great advice from that virtual lug too on making a really great Kodi installation. And I am really looking forward to what they have to say there. Plus, we'll talk about some alternative backends that the community has been talking to me about since I've been talking more about Kodi recently. And they look really cool. Some really neat stuff you can do. Even if you're not a home theater person or a Kodi or Plex or MB person, what we're going to talk about and how these open source projects can interact is absolutely fascinating. So there's just a ton of stuff there.

So to help us get through all of it, and I mean there is a lot of it, let's bring in that virtual look. Time appropriate greetings, mother room. Greetings, mother room. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello.

I secretly use Arch Linux. That's fine. Poppy, you don't need to. All right. So anyways, I wanted to start with something that proves a prediction that virtual lugger Daredevil made months ago when Microsoft announced Ubuntu runtime for Windows, whatever they call that monstrosity. Ubuntu runtime for Windows, whatever they call that monstrosity. This, he said, and I think he's right, Linux is going to become the new default platform that you write applications for. And check out this first story we're going to talk about.

So there's a lot of Docker news this week. We won't bore you to tears with all of the news, but I'll tell you just a couple of things. First of all, we're going to start with this post about bringing Linux apps to the Mac desktop using frick using freaking Docker. Why? Well, to access newer versions of software because it usually takes a while for Mac people to get our second-hand ports. I can think of a few. Like there's some Linux games I like to play where you can install them on Mac.

But like a lot of Mac users might not have Xcode installed, all the things you need to build it. Whereas Linux, I can run the script in Docker and bam, done. To test versions simultaneously, multiple different versions simultaneously, to use tools that haven't been ported over to the Mac, and for sandboxing applications. So this is really kind of an intense walkthrough of how to get

like here's an example of a GTK Slack app, to get all these different apps that are Linux applications running on top of the Mac. And sort of along with this today, Docker has announced that they now consider Mac Docker version production ready. Like it's officially been stamped as you can now use Docker on the Mac in production. What do you think about all this? You know, it is interesting. It does, I think it really does speak to what Jared Devlin said about the Linux runtime being everywhere. Yeah.

It kind of worries me a little bit because I'm still not – I haven't seen a container ecosystem where things are being smoothly and routinely updated and things are being patched when there's security exploits. And I'm worried that what we – you know, one of the big things that scares me about the Internet of Things, quote-unquote – I hate that term so much. But it's just there's so many terms I hate now that I just figure like I got to roll with it. Like I can't hate cloud for the rest of my life or derp learning, you know. But Internet of Things devices, what's the big security issue in your mind about Internet of Things devices? Well, they never get patched. Exactly. And now we're doing the same exact thing in containers. We're just loading our secure Linux boxes up with containers that never get patched.

Now that's not universally the case. But I'll tell you what. But it's easy enough that you've pulled that one Docker file one time and it just runs and you've never done patched. Now that's not universally the case. But I'll tell you what. But it's easy enough to, you've pulled that one Docker file one time and it just runs and you've never done anything else. Exactly. The handfuls of Docker images that I have done that tends to be the case for me.

And even if I'm willing to stay up to date on them, it's not always easy because sometimes you can lose data if you screw things up because and also sometimes they just simply don't update them. That's another problem. So this is sort of potentially leading us down a path that two, three years

from now could leave a lot of people in a bad situation. We're going to wish there was some sort of shared common run time among all these. But hopefully the increased prevalence on other platforms will contribute to an incentive for that? Yeah, I feel so. It doesn't have to be that way.

Boy, that is a silver lining. I do wonder if there's any work going on to integrate with that Windows, the new Windows layer. Because, you know, they don't – I think right now they're using Hyper-V. Yeah. And they're using X-Hype on the Mac. But I wonder if they'll be able to do a little bit closer binding. I don't know. That's weird.

Yeah. I don't even get me started on containers that use virtualization because that just sounds like a VM to me. But I digress. You know, this next story, I think a lot of people are going to be excited about it. I know Noah and I have talked about this quite a bit. I'm not sure where you weigh in. But folks like Popey don't worry about this. Look at this. Popey tweeted this today. He's taking apart a Netgear GS116 switch and getting the soldering iron out to fix this thing. But for those of us who want to buy new routers and run open source firmwares, TP-Link might be back on the list of possible devices that will run Linux.

This is after a FCC ruling that's going to force TP-Link to allow open source firmware. I did not expect this. Yeah. And they're also going to pay a $200,000 fine. So that's really kind of something. The TP-Link settlement was announced in the midst

of controversy spurred by those new FCC rules we've talked about in the past. The new rules for the 5 gigahertz band require router makers to prevent third-party firmwares from changing their radio frequency parameters, i.e. blast it up and stuff like that because they're worried you're going to mess with Doppler radar, I guess,

which that sounds legit to me. TP-Link didn't break any rules by blocking third-party firmwares, but it got attention from the FCC's Enforcement Bureau by selling routers that made it possible for users, once they load those firmwares to circumvent power limits. Now, other manufacturers that came up with ways to, like, Linksys worked with Marvell and others to allow open source firmwares, but not allow the firmware to tweak the radio transmitting. Here's the thing that I kind of feel a little icky about.

After admitting the violation, TP-Link halted sales of the offending devices. That makes sense, right? Right, yep. But then they issued a software update so that units already sold to consumers would comply. So they just – Yeah, that is – Like that's a major feature. Like if I could control the radio power – and I'm way out in the freaking boondocks, dude, right?

If I could control the radio frequency powers and maybe get a little more signal, that would be like the main thing I would want that for. So that would be a huge bummer. that would be like the main thing I would want that for. So that'd be a huge bummer. And it's interesting because TP-Link's violation related to 2.4 gigahertz banned, but their software update also precludes customers from installing third-party software, including open source software, to meet the new 5 gigahertz requirement. And that's kind of where they got in trouble.

It's interesting that getting in trouble for that has then led to a settlement where they're required to keep working with open source. Yeah, very much so. I really like that development. That's great. Yeah. And hopefully they can just, like, I mean, you know, figure it out on the firmware or the hardware level. And just before, I think people loved TP-Links. A lot of people were using them because they had great support for OpenWRT.

Yep, that's why I bought one in the past. Also, just kind of a separate thing, Imagination Technologies, which is a chip maker, is working with OpenWRT and others to put the OpenWRT software into a virtual machine on these devices, which would be isolated from the radio controls. Now, I don't really know if I like that a lot because what would be the host OS? Is it something super base or is it their crappy firmware? Is it like a really minimal hypervisor? Yeah, what is that? And is it their crappy firmware? Yeah, what is that? And is it safe and secure? But that's an interesting approach.

And then you can run whichever open-source firmware you want in a VM. And I would think the upgrades on that are going to be pretty rock solid because it's virtualized hardware, so it's not like that's a moving target. Right, exactly. Well, that's kind of nice. So that's pretty cool. You guys can check out more in the show notes. So, Wes, you found a pretty cool project that we wanted to share with the audience this week.

And this is so perfect for somebody like me who's often trying to figure out ways to not use mobile data because it's like a personal challenge of mine. Right. Totally. And when you hear of tethering, you always hear about connecting your laptop to your phone's internet connection. Exactly. That's the common use case. That's the common use case. But what if my freaking laptop or desktop is plugged into a nice, solid ethernet connection, and I got a big update or something like that I want to do on my phone?

Wes, here is SimpleRT, Simple Reverse Tethering for Android. So this is exactly that. It allows you to share your computer's internet connection with your Android device via a USB cable. Linux and OS X, it says, are supported. Windows is not and unlikely to be in the future. Understandable. So you've got to plug it in right now. Is it working?

Does it work? It does work. Let's see. So it must be two pieces, an app on the phone, right? Yep. Right? And then there's software on your laptop. Here we go.

Okay. Connect. Requires Android 4.0 or higher. And did you have to – was there packages? Did you have to build something? What was that like? They have a pre-built APK. So I downloaded that on the phone and installed it.

And then it doesn't on an app or anything. It all just runs in the background. So you don't need root on the phone, but you do need root on the computer that you're using. Then you download from GitHub. They have a thing. You need to install libUSB, but that's the only thing I needed. A simple make, and then it spits out. It binds to the USB so that you use sudo, you run.slash

simple RT, and then it waits for you to plug your phone in. You plug your phone in, and then that triggers the app, which starts a custom VPN, like through the Android VPN interface. Oh, smart. Yeah, it seems to work. I'm actually pretty impressed with that. And I tested it earlier at work. Have you done a speed test?

I have not done a speed test yet. That's a good question. Do you have the speed test app on there by chance? Because that would be really interesting to know that because you should be pretty much getting whatever our Wi-Fi could deliver. Well, of course. This might be USB 2, though. Yeah. Yeah, that would be the limiting factor.

But even still, that would be pretty interesting. Yeah, so that's really cool. So, again, it's called SimpleRT. Yeah, I was really pleased with the Android integration. I've done a little bit of this with IP tables and a root terminal on my phone. But it's called yeah i was really pleased with pleased with like the android integration i've done a little bit of this with like ip tables and a root terminal on my phone but it's all very hacky and this is it's not quite all the way polished like if you have like a lot of custom dns for instance if you're trying to like get your phone onto a vpn through an ethernet connection only or something like that then i think there could be some stuff improved like

maybe how how some of like the the ap scripts set up DNS maps for you. I think something like that might go a long way, but it's already very nice. You know, with Android N not too far, I mean, Ham was saying it's three days away, actually. Then that might be a way to get that download. I mean, of course, you'd probably be on Wi-Fi in most cases, but if for some weird reason you don't have Wi-Fi, but the machine you're sitting at has Internet access still,

this could be a way to do it. Or doing a whole bunch of Android app updates. Or maybe you're in a place where you only have Ethernet, but you really want to make a phone call. Or hell, even syncing down your Spotify music. That could be a way faster way to do that, because I like to do the extreme quality. Wes, and you're doing this, by the way,

on a Nexus 5 running Marshmallow? Yes. Okay. So it works on anything 4.0 all the way up to Marshmallow. That's great. That's a huge range of devices. It was really easy to get going. Huh. Yeah, this is right up my alley. This is right up my alley because I'm constantly gaming the system when it comes to mobile.

Yeah, and you never quite know when you might want that, you know. And so it can just be very helpful. Or like maybe you're on a wired network but you really want to use the cast from your phone for a specific thing on your phone that you can't do on Linux. to cast from your phone for a specific thing on your phone that you can't do on Linux. And you know what I just remembered is I have had mobile phones, one, that the Wi-Fi chip died on it. And so the only thing you could use was the network, the cellular network. Right. So there you are paying for that data. That's no good. That's no good.

So this kind of thing would be perfect for that. Huh. Simple RT. Not for retweet, but for reverse tether for Android 4.0 or higher. You know, while we're talking about mobile, this is probably a great time to mention Ting. Ting is my mobile service provider, and I really enjoy using Ting because it's only pay for what you use mobile. And because, like, I know of things like SimpleRT, but really, you know, I have Wi-Fi at work. I have Wi-Fi at home. I have Wi-Fi at families' houses that I go to. I find that to be really all I need to just keep my bill down to an absolute bare minimum for three devices talking

$35, $40. And that's, you know. That's crazy. That's with three people using their phones. And of course, Rikai again, Rikai, same thing, on Wi-Fi all the time. So it's basically like his line is almost free for us. It's $6 just for the line. And then your usage on top of that. There's no contract. There's no determination fee. It's $6 just for the line, and then your usage on top of that. There's no contract. There's no determination fee. It's pay for what you use wirelessly. See, that's right there. It's a cell plan for adults.

There's not a lot of rules. There's no gimmicks. You don't have to worry about some arbitrary Linux. No pink shirt and leather jacket required. They know that you use what you want. You pay for it. It's very simple. It is.

And you can get started right now by going to linux.ting.com to support this show and get a $25 discount off your first device. Or if you're going to bring a device and they have a CDMA and GSM network you can pick from, which is really cool, they'll give you that in credit, in service. And since your monthly bill on average can be like $23 for a line, that'll pay for more than your first month. They have really great customer service. I mean, this is like a cornerstone aspect of Ting. And they have a super nice dashboard as well. You can check it all out. They give you great controls

from your phone, on the web. I love their blog as well. They've just recently done a post about the Ting pricing promise. Check that out. Just start by going to linux.ting.com. They have great cord cutting info over there. They have also extra storage, how to hook up extra storage

to your device blog posts. Really good ones over there. Check them out. Linux.ting.com. My mobile service provider for well over two years. If you want to take the test and just see if it might work for you, go over to the what would you save buttons. Right there on the front page when you visit Linux.ting.com. Plug in your information.

They make it really easy. And see how it works. Linux.ting.com. Thanks, Ting. All right. how it works. Linux.ting.com. Thanks, Ting. Alright, so this next story is a quick mention

because I've seen some people talking about it in the chat room today, and I want to give people a heads up because I don't know, I didn't see when this ends. Oh, they're accepting entries until the 14th, so we will have time to talk about it in the last. But today, System76 announced they're giving a laptop away. Hey,

those are nice laptops. They're doing, they're giving away a Lemur, which is a pretty popular laptop over at System76 announced they're giving a laptop away. Hey, those are nice laptops. They're giving away a Lemur, which is a pretty popular laptop over at System76. It's going to be preloaded with Ubuntu. 14-inch. They're just giving it away. They're going to do a— Man. Yeah.

There's a little bit of effort, though, so you have to go read the post in the show notes to find out more. But it's going to be a 14.1-inch screen with a 6th-generation Core i3 processor, 4 gigs of RAM, and a 500-gigabyte hard drive and an Intel dual band wireless AC card. Sweet! Yes! That would be a nice laptop to get for free. And you know it runs great with Linux. Yeah, so that's really cool. You can check that out. It runs Ubuntu Ubuntu?

I don't know. I use Linux Mint so I couldn't tell you. Linux Mint XFCE Sarah has been released and it's a big release because it's going to be supported until 2021. If you think about it, if you're an XFCE user, you probably don't like reloading your system a lot. So being able to install something that is a first-class XFCE implementation that is supported until 2021, that is damn attractive. Yeah. I think of a lot of, like, you know, workshop machines where you just want a nice little

desktop. Yep. That just runs for ages. Next five years. Yeah. Yeah. And that'd be, I mean, geez, that's great. So here's a couple of new things in XFCE Sarah edition.

I wanted to quickly mention, he talks a lot, Clem does in his post, he talks a lot about X apps. And remember those X apps is this new project to produce generic applications for GTK desktop environments, Forks and et cetera. And he talks about Zed and XViewer and a bunch of the different ones in here. But he makes a comment down here that I thought was interesting, and it sort of reflects his attitude about this, which I found refreshing. He says, note that the GNOME apps and Mate apps and XFCE apps and that these XApps replace are still available in the repositories. You can install them side to side with X apps to compare them

to decide which ones you like best. X apps do integrate better, however, with your environment, not only in obvious ways with traditional interfaces, but also in the way they support desktop environments. But I do like that he says, you know, you can install them side by side and see which ones you like better. Yeah, that's a good attitude. That is a good attitude when you're forking a ton of applications and suggesting your users use them.

Which hopefully means, like, yeah, they're going to try to compete on their merit, right? So if they are better, then people will use them. Yeah. Yeah, so I thought that was kind of nice. Anybody in the Mumble room an XFCE user by chance? I find that surprising. I find that really surprising. I used to use it when I first tried Arch on a machine,

but it doesn't do what I want it to do because I don't want things really simplified. I want things more complex and tweakable like KDE. So I just no longer use it. I used it for quite a long time after the very first release of Unity and I was still on Ubuntu. I switched over to XFCE. At the time, I think I was in school, so I didn't have a a long time after the very first release of Unity, and I was still on Ubuntu. Me too.

I switched over to XFCE, and at the time, I think I was in school, so I didn't have a lot of time for customization. I mean, it still is a fine desktop if that's all you need. Yeah, I feel like after I looked at this release here, I thought, maybe I should seriously consider XFCE again for my workhorse machines. I love GNOME 3. I've got no complaints, but I had that weird extension issue. Yeah, you're not going to run into that. Yeah, and I just simply need this thing to just work every single time. Not that it isn't now.

So I don't really have any issues now. Right, there's no incentive, but it is certainly a stable platform. But that just thinking, like, it just feels like it would be a rock. But yeah. Still a Raspbian user, if that counts for XFCE. That's true.

That's true. Yeah. I guess maybe – It's a Raspbian user, like XFCE. Yeah. Yeah. I guess maybe that's what it is too is there's just less excitement on XFCE these days. I think that's a big part of it.

Yeah, that's true. Yeah, there's also a great Manjaro spin with an XFCE desktop. I do agree. Now, I enjoyed on my last road trip GNOME Maps a lot. I thought having – I went from why is GNOME wasting time making a mapping application? I remember having the same thought. To, oh, this is why GNOME is making a – because it's so nice to actually have it in a native desktop application. Totally.

Screw the web browser. I hate the web browser. Waiting for the DOM to up to edge system. Nobody needs that. And plus, I can be doing my search end and looking up stuff in one window, and I can be doing my mapping in my GNOME Maps. And I was thrilled to have that along with Fedora 24 on my last road trip. Then almost the day after I got back. It really was terrible timing.

The MapQuest API got pulled from underneath them and GNOME Maps just started displaying developer tiles. It was kind of embarrassing, actually. It just looked awful. And Ubuntu GNOME announced they'd be dropping GNOME Maps and it just felt like, what was Maps going to do, right? Here we had this nice application and just

gone. Real shame. Just a real shame. Well, guess what? We got good news here, Wes. Good, good news. Things are back up and looking better with 3. Just a real shame. Well, guess what? We got good news here, Wes. Good, good news. Things are back up and looking better with 3.20.4 release. They're switching away from MapQuest, OpenAPI for fetching tiles, and instead they're going to start using Mapbox's API. They're using a community API key from Mapbox, and Mapbox is a company they say with a commitment to open source and provides infrastructure that will allow us to do more with maps.

We're accessing the Mapbox API through a GNOME proxy. Ah. That will allow us to easily switch our tile provider in the future. See, that's the way to do it. Also watch everywhere you go. What? I mean, yeah. So there you go.

Are you saying you didn't want to tell GNOME where you are anyway, Chris? You know what I would like to see GNOME Maps do? You know the direction I would like to take this? Imagine GNOME Maps allowing me to configure my own back end so I could point it at like OpenStreetMaps or something or my own hosted mapping server. Just the wrapper around a compatible map API. Yeah. rounded compatible map API. Yeah.

So if it was canonical, if canonical had announced that they were shipping a mapping application on Ubuntu Touch that used a proxy, a proxy everywhere you go, wouldn't that be a huge controversy? A proxy to some, you know, somewhat proprietary service. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I mean, when they did that with Unity Dash Launcher, like, we lost our collective S over that. Now the GNOME camp goes, yeah, we're going to be proxying all of your map requests through a central proxy run by us. But don't worry about it.

It's fine. And we're like, okay, cool. Good idea. That's good thinking for planning for the future, guys. I wonder how that proxy is set up. I mean, would it be different if it's a Chef-configured server and you can see the Chef recipes right there? Sure, sure. That's a good idea.

I mean, you can't actually verify what's on the box, but it's a little bit more transparency. Hmm. North Ranger, you got a little conspiracy bake in there. Share it with the class. I guess I trust GNOME more to run a proxy that could potentially snoop on my location than both a game developer and Google farming out hundreds of millions of users with Pokemon, having their location shared, basically. But isn't the issue not about Pokemon and Diantic and all these people,

But isn't the issue not about Pokemon and Diantic and all these people, but more people losing their minds on results from Amazon even though they're going through a proxy with Canonical? I think it was both. I do. They were saying that it was Amazon was tracking you and all this other stuff, and they're letting – like, no, they weren't because the data never went to Amazon. It went to Ubuntu first. Yeah. There could be a flip side of that. So I remember the first question that was asked after Canonical announced the built-in search was, is it going to be HTTPS?

And the answer was no. Is this GNOME Maps proxy HTTPS? Why are we not asking the same questions? Why is that? Why is that a thing? I'm not saying that GNOME Project is doing anything wrong. I agree with North Ranger. I trust them 100% implicitly more than I trust Google or Niantic. Right.

But you're right. We should have like a set of standards for how we think maps or other personal sharing services like that should be run. I mean is this crazy to say that we need like a constitution for hosted services and in the constitution it says like if we host something that tracks you or knows where you're at at all times, we will make sure that it's set up and protected in these ways. I mean that feels like something that should just be – whenever I'm making the choice to either self-host or use – Like a privacy pledge for hosted services.

That's a better term. Yeah, a privacy pledge. That's better. Yeah, because it feels – yeah, exactly. Because it feels like if I'm making the conscious decision to self-host versus use a hosted service – A lot of times it comes down to like control of your data and knowledge about where that will be. And I can't properly make that determination right now on any service. That's a tough thing to sort out right now.

And the only so so especially where it's like all the other desktops that what the what is left of the desktop experience is becoming a lot of integrated with services so it's kind of a prescient question we need to address in the linux world if even gnome is doing it yeah i agree ww you have a thought on the pledges the thing is privacy pledges are pretty pretty much said off the top of anybody's head nowadays by whoever. And they could pledge themselves to whatever. It's actions and transparency that are more important that people need to see. They need to see, hey, what's going on with my data? For me, I don't know if we'll ever see this. I want to be able to see how the data was used and what you guys are doing with it rather than saying – having a marketing person or a social community member of your team say this stuff.

People need to see concrete evidence that you guys are doing right by the community or by them. Yeah. You know, so have you guys noticed, I mean, I just today logged in to Google because I was curious, what was I reading about? Oh, Mussolini. I was reading about Mussolini and I was curious how much of that would show up in my Google history. And there's two sets of Google history when you're a Chrome user. There's your browser history and then there is everything Chrome sends to Google. And so they actually legitimately make that manageable.

And I got to – because I'm so often a skeptic of Google, I do want to give them credit here. In Chrome, in your history, they say you should also check what Google services know about you and you click that. They make it very obvious. They really do tell you what Google knows about you. Like they know, and I just showed up right away. Like it shows that I listen to Pocket Cast on my drive. They know what time I open up Pocket Cast and how long I listen to a podcast. Every morning I drive into work.

That is something. Yeah, there is that angle too because there's like I think a certain component of Google, of how we perceive Google's awareness and creepiness, et cetera, that like even if they are doing – I'm not saying necessarily that they are, but even if they are doing everything correctly in terms of prompting you for what you want, we just – there's so much a part of our lives that you can – even if you've said yes to all these things, you forget about it and sometimes you realize again how much they do know. And you're like, ooh. Antonis, you have a tip for users to sort of see what Google knows about them. Yeah. So with Google Dashboard, you can go take a look and see what Google tracks. If you have an Android phone especially, you can see where you've been with the Google Maps.

It will show your location history. And also even if you use Google Now with your voice, it even shows you previous voice searches. You can listen to them, and it's kind of like a diary of all the places you've been. I hear it back, and I'm like, oh, yeah, that was when I was in the car with the kids, and they were jacking in the background the whole time. Yeah, the dashboard is creepy and also a very nice feature. But it leaves me with this, and the no maps thing was also another lesson. Do I have to be an extremist?

Do I have to be like all self-hosting or bust? I mean, because that just seems unrealistic at some point. There's a lot of services. At some point, you just, you know, convenience wins. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, that is something we talked about a little bit last week, how sometimes open source loses when your time becomes more precious than your values about software freedom.

I still sort of with every single service have to go through that evaluation. Right. Because there's like a certain amount of, you know, yes, and it can be, I think, okay, if you consciously value here like, well, the thing that these people are offering is they have their own little layer on top of these open source tools that they do for me and i like that because i just don't have time to do it but you do have to kind of value like well do they contribute back to those open source tools that i might otherwise be using are they a good citizen in open source do i think they're going to vanish are they going to change models it's a lot of things to think

about mini mac you have a point about uh once you have privacy settings set up correctly on Google, they manage to seem to stick with it, right? Yeah, they sync with all devices. You see, I also have an Android 3V and all that stuff. So I have a lot of Android stuff now. And once you configure your privacy settings, all devices are synced

and applied to these settings. I find that pretty cool. Yeah, that is nice. That is nice that they legitimately at least seem to make an effort to make it clear and coherent. And you can compare and contrast that to what Facebook does where it's still not clear and it's confusing. And they change it all the time.

Yeah. Yeah, you really have to dig all these settings once. There are a lot of settings you can change. It is, you know, it is honestly to say that a hosted service that somebody else manages for you is maintenance-free and doesn't require your time to keep it going and running is false. Because when you have services like Google that knows much about you, you do kind of need to go in there and manage it from time to time and see what they're tracking, see if you're comfortable with that because they're always adding stuff. And the thing about hosted services too is they may add stuff, they may remove stuff, and you have no say in the matter. Chris, I think ultimately to decide whether you need to do that evaluation or not, just ask yourself, are you the product here? Right.

Oh, yeah. That's an interesting metric. Yeah, I think – I read a book that says that as time goes on, more and more average citizens will start asking themselves that question. But so far, I haven't really seen that play out. We'll see. I don't know. I actually – speaking of Google, so the rest of the show – or not the rest of the show. That's not true at all.

The next segment of the show is going to be kind of Google heavy, but it's actually sort of using some Google – bypassing some Google services. It's the Chromecast but not using Google. So before we get off self-hosting entirely, it would be a good time to mention DigitalOcean, and you can support the show by going over to DigitalOcean and reusing our promo code DLUnplugged. It's one word. It's lowercase. You apply it to your account balance. Now, I think in response to this conversation that you and I were just having, probably the key thing about DigitalOcean that I think has really contributed to their success

is that it's really fast to get going. It's simple. It's straightforward. And so the cost of trying something like a project like NextCloud or RocketChat or GitLab is... The speed plus the per hour billing kind of stuff? Yeah, and in the case of GitLab, the entire application stack, if you just want to just deploy the entire stack on an LTS distro, it's ready to go. And you just plug in the details you need and it's set up.

So that is really giving people the opportunity to try out self-hosting in a way that doesn't mean a huge time commitment. You're not provisioning a bare metal server. You're not worrying about colo. Yeah. And look at this pricing. And so you can see like you could really, once you get going, you could really have something that is just running all the time. I love this middle plan here, $0.03 an hour, 2 gigs of RAM, 2-core processor, 40-gigabyte SSD.

That's really what does it. Yeah, that's – I mean, wow, right? When you have super fast – they're all SSDs. They have really great internet connections. They have data centers all over the world. And when you have all of that on a machine with two core processors, if it's for you, your business, or your family, that is going to be a screaming machine. And it's really easy to grow your storage on your droplet as you need at a really nice price. Highly available block storage.

You attach it to your droplet. And of course, because it's DigitalOcean, it's SSD-backed block storage. Yes. You know, I talk a lot about the DigitalOcean interface and how freaking great it is. I often will mention their API. So this week I thought I'd give you a few examples of why they really just have one of the best APIs out there. It's well documented. They iterate on it as part of their entire platform feature set.

And then because it's so clear and because it's documented, there's a ton of nice code you can take advantage of already. I like this Runbook.io project, which uses DigitalOcean's API. It's available. It's free. You can grab it. And it monitors and automatically resolves issue with if this, then that style automation for your droplets, which could be neat. Like reactions from anything like restarting Apache, rebooting a DigitalOcean droplet completely. Anything like restarting Apache, rebooting a DigitalOcean droplet completely, it is what you get if Nagios and if then that had a baby.

If those two things came together and had a mad passionate love session, this is the child they would produce. That sounds like a great recipe for not getting woken up in the middle of the night. It is exactly that. Also, this is kind of neat. I thought this was kind of cool. A DigitalOcean Dynamic DNS project. Oh, hey, that is neat. Yeah, the script allows you to dynamically update a DO domain name A record like a mini dynamic DNS update.

See, those are all things that you could write for yourself. Yeah. But because it's so easy with DigitalOcean, someone's done it for you. Yeah, it's cool. It's right there. It's really cool. Check them out. DigitalOcean.com Use our promo code D1Plug

to support this show to keep us going and get yourself a $10 credit and try it out for a little while. DigitalOcean.com. Thanks, guys. And if you guys see a really cool open source project that uses the DigitalOcean API, please do tweet it at me. So before we get into the whole discussion about the rest of

the Chromecast stuff and Cody stuff, I thought maybe we'd take a moment and talk about why we're discussing this at the moment. Because just recently it was revealed how dramatic the Chromecast sales have been. Google has not traditionally shared numbers on this. But in a conference call, they were confronted and Sindhar Pichai actually answered. And Sindhar Pichai actually answered. When responding to questions, he revealed that the company has shipped 30 million Chromecast units since its release back in 2013, which includes all the different iterations, even the Chromecast audio. 30 million units. Do you have one?

I do. I actually have two. Yeah, I have two as well. In fact, I've even bought one for friends before because they didn't have anything to watch like YouTube or anything on their TV. I bought it for parents or family or... We have one here at the studio which has been great when we have people over and we have a big group and people want to watch different YouTube videos.

My NVIDIA Shield TV I talked about on Linux Action Show this Sunday has Chromecast support built into it. A lot of apps have Chromecast support. I know there's some stuff for like, you know, lots of stuff for like having them run displays. Android N I believe has a lot more Chromecast support. I know there's some stuff for like – lots of stuff for like having them run displays. Android N, I believe, has a lot more Chromecast stuff built into the OS level. So I thought, OK, let's talk about ways that us Linux users can get content from our Linux boxes onto Chromecast.

And maybe if the Mumbler knows of some open source hardware replacements or alternatives to Chromecast, we can talk about those too. But I want to start with the easy button. So that way, if you're listening and you want something super applicable to you and you just want that right off the top, I've used this from time to time. I don't keep it installed in Chrome when I'm not using it, but it's video streaming for Google Chrome and it allows you to load any local video file on your Linux box. It opens up as like an app inside your Chrome browser. video file on your Linux box. It opens up as like an app inside your Chrome browser. Then you can use the local file browser to pick

any local file and it will stream this to your Chromecast from your Linux box. This is just a quick, dirty, install it in 30 seconds, you can be streaming to a Chromecast. It doesn't go out to the Google account and servers and send it down. It just goes directly from your laptop to your Chromecast. So that's a Chrome plugin.

But that's not super cool. and that's not Linux-specific. And you have to pay for some things if you want more features for it. Yeah, there is something you have to pay for. Not that it doesn't deserve that. I'm not saying that. I can't even remember what it was you have to pay for because I just use it for the basic feature set. But CastNow could be another option. So check this out.

CastNow is a command line utility. Hey, there we go. Hey. To play back media files to your Chromecast device. It supports playback of local video files, videos on the web, and torrents too. You can also reattach a running playback session, which is really nice. So it's CastNow. And it's just really simple syntax.

You do CastNow and then the directory that has the videos in it. It can play the entire directory or the specific file. Or you drop in a URL to like an MP4 file or a torrent file. You know, I've had some better luck sometimes like persnickety HLS streams, that sort of stuff. CastNow seems to work pretty well with. Yeah? Nice.

So CastNow, just a simple tool to install, and you can do that from the command line. I know how much we love our command line utilities, so that seemed like a good one. Then there was this one that came in. A contender that's getting some update and coverage on web updates this week. Stream to Chromecast. Stream to Chromecast, the number two,

is a command line Chromecast media streamer for Linux. The tool can transcode to unsupported formats in real time and play them on the Chromecast. It can also do audio, so it can send audio only. It can transcode any format not supported by the Chromecast using FFmpeg or LibAV. It provides basic control commands like pause, unpause, stop, and playback. You can do specific devices when you have multiple Chromecasts on your network,

which is nice. It supports passing custom transcoder parameters to FFmpeg and supports specifying the port to use for streaming media. For audio-only files, no metadata is displayed on the Chromecast at the moment. So these are two different command line utilities that will take video files or audio files and send them to your... Now, have you tried Stream? I haven't, but after this show, I think I will.

Yeah. That's really nice. That's really... That is kind of changing my opinion about the Chromecast a little more, especially since I have it built into the Shield TV. Because there are so many of the services where it's a little bit like, well, it works great, and Netflix and YouTube obviously have great support for it, but there's some outliers where it is frustrating, you don't have full access, you don't have root on it, right? So this does help with that. Pyrocast. What's this, North Ranger? Actually, it was just me doing a little

bit of Googling a few days ago, actually trying to figure out my Kodi box on a Raspberry Pi to extend some functionality. I haven't tried it yet, so I'm curious if anybody else has found a similar solution for LibreLAC or OpenLAC-type distributions. Yeah. So you want to be able to have Chromecast-like functionality with Kodi, is what you're saying. Exactly. Hmm. Interesting. Interesting. You know, I believe there could be somebody working on such a thing right now. Dr. Tanel in the mumble room, a.k.a. formerly known as Rotten Corpse, sir,

could you perhaps have something up your sleeve just like this? Well, I mean, that's convenient. Convenient with a K, even. Heyo! Cast for Cody is what I'm working on, which is a script that does exactly that, and it adds

being able to stream live video through Twitch or RTMP streams or anything like that. be able to stream live video through like Twitch or RTMP streams or anything like that. It also supports local videos through like Samba. And I recently

fixed some things that you can now do torrent streaming. So if you have like a meta link for some kind of video, it'll like the, the, like the torrents that JB has, it'll play those through that. Cool.

And it also supports multiple devices. So you can have multiple, uh, Raspberry Pis with Cody on it or open a leg even. And, uh, a lot more features that I'm working on too. It supports about 15 current add-ons for Cody,

including YouTube, Twitch, dailymotion, and many more. And, of course, Jupiter Broadcasting. Hey-o. So the interface for this is a command line utility as well? It has both the GUI and the command line. The GUI is very simple. It uses Zenity to provide that. Okay, nice.

And it's just like, hey, select the file you want to send to the Kodi machine? Yeah. Okay, nice. And it's just like, hey, select the file you want to send to the Kodi machine? Yeah, well, it uses the file manager to do the local file sending, so you just right-click and send it through the script to your Kodi device. So what is the technology behind the scenes that's making my desktop talk to the Kodi software? Well, it's basically just a bash script on one end, a JSON API on the Kodi end,

and then whatever file manager you have that supports add extensions. Yeah, exactly. But what I'm trying to get to is, is there some DLNA standard that Kodi supports? Universal Plug and Play? Discovery? What's happening? Is it a dynamic DNS? What's happening What I'm trying to get to is like is there like some DLNA standard that Kodi supports, universal plug-and-play, like discovery? Like what is – what's happening?

Is it a dynamic DNS? What's happening on the back end to make my Linux box capable of sending a video file over the network to Kodi? What two technologies or whatever multiple technologies are connecting to make that happen? Well, the actual sending of it is pushing the pushing the data the signal for uh through curl to the cody box and the cody takes whatever signal you give it and then applies its effect so technically like if you're watching a youtube video it's not uh going through your computer first it's just sending the signal to play the youtube video on your cody box oh so it's just going from youtube straight to Kodi.

So how does it handle the scenario if one time I'm sending it an MP4 file and the next time I'm sending it a URL? It detects on... It runs scans based on what you're sending. Kodi already has facilities to do that. No, Kodi has the ability to take the signal in

and the script is. It's actually scanning everything. So is it possible for you to send like torrent metadata? So like if I'm, say, pulling down TechSnap and via torrent, will it pull down like the episode name and all that kind of stuff and show that on Kodi? Yes. Nice. Wow. Damn, that is slick.

Wow. Damn, that is slick. Now, what do you think, like, future way out, totally down the road possibilities, like, to have this show up as, like, to show up in the share sheet on Android as, like, an option to send a file to when I open up in VLC or something like that? I wasn't working on Android support. Basically, just Linux desktop support is the only thing I— But there would be anything to prevent that? I mean, that would be theoretically possible, maybe? Yeah, it would be possible for sure, yes. i i there would be anything to prevent that i mean would i would be theoretically possible maybe yeah it would be possible for sure yes yeah happy really there's there's some features that you can already do that on android with um i'm pretty sure the core the k-o-r-e remote has some features like that okay i'm not sure how how well it does it or how

extensive it is in comparison but it i think it does work for like the basics so is this is this uh so this requires no changes or add-ons to cody at all for this to work no it doesn't um some things require the add-ons so for example i mean you're going to add these add-ons anyway so if you wanted to watch youtube on cody you got to install the youtube add-on sure and it uses the youtube add-on to send the signal to. Sure, okay. So basically what it does is that it takes, it figures out what you want to send it through the script,

then it creates the signal in the syntax that Kodi wants, then says, this is a YouTube URL, so send it through the YouTube add-on specifically, so that way it just immediately jumps to the add-on. And if you have it, if you don't have the add-on, it will tell you that you can't play this design for this particular add-on. Oh, that's nice.

If you do have it, it will just start playing. Huh, I can't wait to try it. That's really nice. I think, for me, I'm kind of in a position where I didn't realize this, but using Android TV – not to make this about Android TV, but by using Android TV, my Kodi box natively already supports Chromecast built into it. But it wouldn't be – but then when I use that functionality, it drops me out of Kodi. So this would allow me to stay in the Kodi app. Oh, that would be perfect.

Yeah. Well, that's cool. How do we find out more about this? I just sent a link to the chat room. Oh, perfect. There it is. Yes. Thank you very much.

Oh, okay. I'll put a link in that there, what I like to call show notes. Did you know we have show notes, Wes? Yes, we do. Yeah. That's true. Just one more quick question. I wanted to answer Dream's question about Ubuntu Touch.

It should work in Ubuntu Touch. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, gosh. That makes sense. I like that. I like that a lot. And I like that it already works with Jupyter Broadcasting. Boom.

That's great. A Bash script tool for casting media to Kodi Entertainment Center. So I want to take a little time now to talk about making Kodi great again. Not that it's not already great, but I want to make my Kodi great again. You guys know me. I love trying to use open source solutions whenever possible, but every now and then that little voice in the back of my head goes, Chris, just set up Plex. Just set up Plex. It'll be much easier because then your kids can stream the files they want. It automatically takes care of the metadata problems you've been having.

You don't have to worry about that. Just set up Plex. But now that I've moved and I'm resetting up my home entertainment system and I'm going to be resetting up network storage and I'm reevaluating anything that requires an internet connection top to bottom. And one of the things I don't ever want to have to really deal with is I sit down to watch TV and I can't because we're somewhere where we don't have internet connection. I just want my media to work. I just want my TV to work. And normally when you're in that position, you've had a long day. You just want to unwind. The last thing you want to do is get up and fix whatever's wrong.

Likely, like if I'm on a road trip, I've been driving all day long. Exactly. And you need to put your feet up. And Kodi is fast. It works great with local media. It's the best playback interface. It just really is. It's got a great UI. It has great support for media. It's the best playback interface. It just really is. It's got a great UI.

It has great support for like tons of good skins. IR control. Yep. You know. Yep. Yep. Lots of great add-ons. Some of those skins are just beautiful.

Yeah. There's a new one coming. There's a Jupyter Broadcasting app. Whoa. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So I'm going to be migrating from Plex to Kodi. And there's a lot that comes with that.

Yeah. It's a different paradigm. It is. And I do have to rename some of my media. I have to change how I've done some of that. And there's different back ends I can use for Kodi too if I want a shared Kodi central database, if I want to take advantage of streaming. So I want to chat about all these different options, plus get some of the virtual lugs ideas and takes on some of this. It's kind of a new adventure for me because Kodi is a really cool, super

impressive open source application that I have played with on and off every single release since it was XBMC on a hacked Xbox. Right, exactly. I really have. Humble origins. But I have never really put, you know, 12 terabytes worth of

media into it and tried to get playback and metadata synced across three television screens and then remote streaming for people on tablets. I've never gone that far into it, right? I've never actually like really integrated it. And that's where I'm – that's the route I'm taking now. And it does involve sort of reassessing how I have things set up. And if it's something you've ever considered doing or if you have tips on, I'd love to get your input. I'm going to mention right now our friends over at Linux Academy.

Linux Academy is where you've got to go to get your basics and then work your way up to the advanced topics. If you're thinking about getting some certs, this is a great resource for you. Linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. They have self-paced in-depth video courses on every Linux, cloud, and DevOps topic. They have hands-on scenario-based labs that give you experience on real servers.

They have learning plans that allow you to pick a course and set a time frame to fit your schedule and your learning goals. They have labs that spin up on demand. They have instructor mentoring, full-time human instructors happy to advise and answer questions, nuggets, tiny little sparks of wisdom that go deep into a single topic. iOS and Android apps so you can study on one of your devices when you're on the go. Custom randomized decks of study cards that can be forked and improved by the community. A community that's stacked full of Jupyter Broadcasting members.

Study guides, lesson audio, personal notebooks, and tools that help you study. You pick from your distribution to adjust the courseware and the servers, and their system can evaluate you while you perform tasks on their server to give you real-time feedback. With hands-on guides that give you real-world experience, the feedback system, the study tools, and the learning plans that allow you to pick your availability, nobody can touch Linux Academy. And they're growing like crazy. They just announced a major, major partnership with a real, actual physical school. This is something they've been growing on more and more recently. And I think it's kind of an interesting way to take the Linux Academy hands-on training experience and offering it to students at a traditional university-level class.

And they're getting real college credits for it. It's fascinating. They have more information over on their blog. They've got the best tools to prepare you for search in a variety of Linux, AWS, OpenStack, DevOps, Azure, and big data topics if you're searching for those certs. It's a great platform for this too. LinuxAcademy.com slash unplugged.

And a big thank you to Linux Academy for sponsoring the Unplugged program. Now I want to start with the obvious. This is like the due diligence segment of the show. I have to mention this part. So I'm contractually obligated to reference you to the Kodi wiki on naming video files and TV shows correctly. So this is the canonical guide by the project that's being updated all the time. They give you hierarchy examples, et cetera, et cetera, to follow.

This is sort of the golden standard. So that is linked in the show notes right at the top of this segment if you're going to get into this. Have you any experience going through and naming this stuff? For MB, I've always used Filebot. Tell me about Filebot, Wes. Tell me about Filebot. Filebot is a script about Filebot, Wes. Tell me about Filebot. Filebot is a script

that... Oh, really? Yeah, and it has some parameters, specific parameters they call... Filebot.net. Automated Media Center, and so... Is this it? This? Is it right here? Is this it? Yeah, that looks right. I think it's a Java program, actually. Oh, snap, son. And here, let me

throw in the Automated Media Center link right there, which is kind of around a forum, but it works very well. You kind of pull down your torrents or Usenet or whatever, however you have your media. You then run it on that folder. You can set it up to auto run. I'm sure you could use something like inotify wait if you wanted to do it that way or a systemd timer or anything. So this sounds like something that you could plug in with a Usenet downloader and have it automatically. Yes, absolutely.

Or like some torrent clients support triggering programs to run, that kind of thing. So you can also have support for running things. So you can have it use ButterFS reflinks. You can have it make symlinks when it organizes things. This is never really something I ever had to worry about with Plex. Like everything I just download or backup and I throw in there and I name somewhat correctly, Plex seems to grab it and nail it every single time. Like it seems to be really good at that. I think some people use it with Plex too.

At least I know that's what I've heard about it. Well, so I was thinking about trying out Tiny Media Manager, which is kind of the same thing. It does a scan. It helps you manage the file naming and all that. Tiny Media Manager, a multi-OS media management tool. So what I'm thinking, right, is I got to get the original set of media correct first. I got to go through a lot of files, lots of seasons of crap and all that stuff that I love. Just, you know, stuff that I treasure.

But maybe I have sort of let the automated system manage the naming of it. This looks like a great interface to kind of explore that, make sure everything checks out. I like that it has a GUI. That's great. Yeah, yeah. And it does look like it's pretty straightforward to use too. So that's sort of what I've found so far in how to sort of set up my and prep my Kodi library.

I don't know if anybody in the Mumble room has tips for managing Kodi. And just to give you a picture here, I have been attempting to sort of move stuff in to see what just works without having to just sort of manage it. Right. And it's pretty hit and miss so far. So it hasn't been perfect. Right. I think one of the things that I want to sort of transition to is talking about some of the backend solutions you can use here.

The ones that I've gotten feedback on are obviously MB backend for Kodi and Plex backend for Kodi. Wes, have you messed with the MB backend for Kodi? And what's the advantage? What's the reason? Why would I do that and not just use Kodi's built-in database? Well, I used it to share my MB library with my parents. So I installed Kodi on a NUC at their house and VPNed our two networks together. And then I connected the MB plugin for Kodi with

my MB server. And so I could then have local media there for them if they want, but like the NUC had a limited hard drive space, right? So then anything at my house was, it just looked like it was right in the Kodi database. They could play it. It was transparent to them. So for me, it seems like the advantages of using MB on the backend or Plex would be that I can let MB and Plex scan the media, manage that, set up the libraries. You also get the web interface. To go in and correct mistakes or watch it and stream it myself, which is a big deal. And I can then sync watch status across my Kodi instances. Does that work okay?

It did seem to. I made multiple users. There was a little bit of an issue, I think, with how you do it, and I think if you want to have multiple users, there was kind of some workarounds you had to do, because I think by default it syncs it into the info files, but there are some options there.

Interesting. So that's MB is definitely, and the nice thing is... I was very pleased with how smoothly it integrated, and if you have a good link to your MB backend, playback was seamless. So the other one I'm considering a lot since I have an existing Plex database, but I probably would not – I'm probably not going to go this route. But one that I am looking at and it was pretty, pretty strongly recommended in the subreddit after last this weekend is Plex Kodi Connect, PKC. It combines the best front-end media player, Kodi, with the best multimedia back-end server, Plex.

And I do have like a lifetime Plex pass or something like that. Well, it isn't the back-end of Plex open source. It's the front-end that is closed source. So that would be nice. I'm not sure if that's still the case, but at one time, wasn't that the case? The front-end and the back-end are no longer open source. The front-end used to be open source, and they decided to basically hire someone to make it closed. Now, the Plex back end for Kodi supports movie and TV shows and pictures and music.

It automatically downloads the artwork. It does all the stuff that you'd expect, including the transcoding and the streaming. There's a few issues, like when you toggle the view state of an item, you have to resync, Kodi has to rescan the library before it sees that change on another Kodi box. But it seems like it's sort of the best if you're familiar with Plex. You get the management of

Plex that does seem to have pretty good metadata matching, at least in my experience so far. At least for how I have my files named, with the Kodi front end. So I'm really – that's something else I'm sort of – I'm chewing on. I don't know. If anybody out there has tried it, I'd love to hear your feedback, linuxactionshow.reddit.com

and let me know. Mr. Tonnell or Dr. Tonnell over there, you have – you must – I mean you're developing Kodi add-ons and things for Kodi. You must have a decent Kodi setup. Can you describe it a little bit? How do you have it? Are you just Samba server shares? Are you accessing local files?

What's been sort of your tried and true method to keep it working? Yeah, basically a Samba server. Here's one of the nice things. The Plex Media and I think MB server backends support swapping out local file paths if you turn it on. So you can turn on when you click a file, instead of using the Plex HTTP path to the file, you can have it use your Samba share in the background. So it'll do a file that way, which

is really nice and fast. So that's sort of cool, too. I use Samba for storing the thing, but I use Raspberry Pi to open a leg on Raspberry Pi. Oh, that's great. And there's also the thing, but I use Raspberry Pi to push it, to open a leg on Raspberry Pi. Oh, that's great. And there's also this thing,

there's this adapter called the Flirk. Oh, the Flirk is awesome. What is the Flirk? What is the Flirk? It's a little dongle that gives you like a regular remote, like a TV remote. Oh, okay. There, I put it in the IRC there.

Will you drop that in the show notes too there? Absolutely. So here's my really dumb Kodi 101 question. Is a shared backend database the only way for me to have... Really, the only thing I want truly is synced watch status. I do like the idea of being able to remotely stream files, but that's secondary. What I really, really want is for the TVs to all see what files have been watched.

So if I'm watching Mr. Robot or Silicon Valley, which are my two shows I only watch really, but when I watch those, I want to be able to watch them and have them marked as watched. And run downstairs, you hit play, and it's the same thing. And bearing in mind that I'm on both ends,

I'm on an Android TV box. It seems like there's a lot of effort. Unless I want the remote streaming capabilities, it seems like there's a lot of effort just to get synced watch status across them. Yeah. Anyways. I don't use the synced watch status. So, I mean, I just use the – I only have the one device anyway.

Well, I have multiple devices for testing of making the multi-device work, but I only have one that I care about, so I couldn't really help with that one. The other nice thing of having a central back-end would be if Cody misidentifies something, I fix it in one spot. Yes, that's true. That's nice, too. I've played with MB, and so far I like MB for the functionality of what you're talking about. I haven't rolled it out in a big scale or anything because I don't need it, but I have played with it, and it seems to work as advertised.

Yeah, I'll second that. My Kodion Raspberry Pi 3 plus an MB server backend, and I was even able to stream 720p or have MB downsample to 720p and stream to a Raspberry Pi box at my dad's house 300 miles away over my Comcast internet with a 10 megabit upload.

Hey, you know, that's pretty slick. From a Raspberry Pi? Yeah, I love it. There's so many options. It's awesome. The other thing it looks like with the MB back on or to do the MB back end is, and Wes, maybe you could tell me if I'm wrong, but it looks like all they really have to do is there's already an existing add-on. Yeah, you just install the add-on, configure it to point to your server.

Is it already in, like, if I just go in code, is it in the main list right there? I believe so. And then you just have it. It should be in the main list. It's also created by the MB team. Yeah, exactly. And that is also another reason why I really like that long term. And it gives you a GUI where you put in the MB server info and stuff like that right there.

And so I think when I'm working from an Android TV set-top box, I don't feel like I hate Android's file system. I don't want to dig around on that. It's a mess. So that's kind of appealing. Plus, MB is open source through and through. And it seems like that's a better match with an open source media server. And I think MB also, the MB backend, also supports swapping out the local file paths so I could use my Samba shares. Yeah, totally.

I'm getting really excited. You know, it's been a long time since I've reevaluated how I do this. I set this up. And it's kind of a big decision, not because it's that important, but just because you really aren't going to come back to it for a long time if it's working. There's that. Once you set it up, you don't want to mess with it. And two, I am not mature enough as an adult to be over that

embarrassment that I feel when so this happened this weekend. So this weekend, we were in Leavenworth, Washington with no internet connection. And we have Plex on a set-top box in the bedroom and we have Plex on a set-top box in the living room of Lady Jube's. I use these terms loosely. And the living room in VideoShield has a Plex media server locally running on it.

That's how I currently do this at home. And without an internet connection, the Plex front end in the bedroom can't just go out and make the roundabout connection and play the local file. I don't know why. It's supposed to. It is supposed to. But it wouldn't. That's really annoying.

And so there we are. And so I'm like, okay, let's watch the movie. But this is where Noah's voice is in the back of your head and you're like, ugh. So then I'm like, OK. From now on, I'm just going to – I'm going to set this up and I'm going to do local file paths and I'm done with this. Totally. So I think that's – I think that's what's going to seal the deal on Envy. And then just not have to worry about it because when I do watch TV like a couple of times a week, it's like my sort of unwind, relax.

I do it when I'm totally worn out and there's nothing else more productive I'd be doing anyways. I'm like, all right. Time to allow myself a little chill out time. And to get frustrated and not build it when that thing just sits there and spins and spins and spins. So the other nice part about using MB Replex is that you also then get Chromecast support if you

are somewhere where you're like, well, I want to do this but I don't have my Kodi set up with me, but you have a Chromecast. Boom. I'm excited to set this all up again. It's been a long time. And it makes my... Actually... Yeah, go ahead.

Sorry about that. I'm actually looking at the Envy's plugins. It actually has Envy, Kodi, Sync, Kui plugin built in there. You just install it. Yep. Go right to it. Yeah, I know. It looks really straightforward.

It looks like... And then you're using two great open source projects together. So it's just, I have, the only thing that's, the only hesitation I have is I have had really great experience with Plex. I have a Plex Pass, and I have friends that I'm sharing my Plex libraries with already. And they're pretty good, I mean, for being partially proprietary, they're pretty good. I mean, they employ that MPV developer. That's true, yeah. I mean, they seem like good citizens. Yeah That's true. They seem like good citizens. And they have kicked up some upstream code.

So that's, yeah, that is, but they're not Envy though. But they're not Envy, right. We live in interesting times, Chris. I know. I know it doesn't, for me, I'm not trying, this is not like some big problem

I'm trying to solve. It's a fun challenge to get to like re-look at my home storage and now try to do it in a way that's like mobile and low power. You get to play architect, sysadmit, all these things. And try to do it in a way that's like mobile and low power. You get to play architect, sysadmit, all these things. And try to do it in a way that's going to be like

long lasting, sustainable, low maintenance. Yes, and that's the trick and that's the perfect like trifecta if you can pull it off and that's exactly what you want for your home media system and the thing that I think that really has me fired up about it is just spending a couple

of months in Kodi using local files on the NVIDIA Shield. I have just grown such a new appreciation for this open source project. It's been going for so long and it's very polished. And it's like I really respect some of the decisions they've made recently because I think they're really following some interesting trends. And there's more and more better hardware out there all the time. And then it feels like if this is something I can really get my head around, then down the road I can start experimenting with Raspberry Pis running. Yeah. Especially with all those things Wimpy was telling us about compiling with better video support.

Yeah, exactly. compiling with better video support. Yeah, exactly. And, you know, the thing that makes me think about that is it's a really easy, sustainable, long-term way when like a family member wants something like this after they check out. Add them right into your network. Yes, exactly. So it could be really nice. And it could be a really fun, sustainable home project.

So I'll give you guys an update when I actually put it all together. I'm going to start experimenting with stuff over the next few weeks and then figure out how I'm doing the back-end storage. And then, well, I actually probably have to figure that out sooner than later, really. And then I got to rename all the media. But it's a good problem. It's a good problem to have. It is a good problem to have.

I'm looking forward to it. And we have links to a whole bunch of stuff in the show notes if you guys want to check it out. And if you have any experience in this area, I would love to hear it. LinuxActions.reddit.com. Go chime in. Go chime in. There's never too many cooks in this kitchen. No, I've been getting mixed responses.

I've been getting mixed responses. Some people are, yeah. But a lot of folks have been very helpful. Totally. So it's really cool. And it's pretty exciting. Be all, end all. We're very excited about all these open source projects.

It's neat to rediscover like to rediscover and re-embrace something that I that I haven't that I've observed but haven't really fully dived into for a long time

exactly that's sort of a fun aspect of it cool it is yeah yeah alright that brings us to the end of

at least the official part of this week show episode 156 wraps up we'd love your feedback your responses your topic ideas

at linuxactionshow.reddit.com. Your feedback also is welcome at jupyterbroadcasting.com slash contact. And a huge part of this show is our virtual lug and our live chat room. Find out our live times at jupyterbroadcasting.com slash calendar. And then just head over to jblive.tv

during that live time, which is 2 p.m. Pacific, and hang out in the chat room or do bag mumble and get the mumble server info just join us any way you can absolutely man i can't wait till next week see you right back here next tuesday you know in some ways i feel like the home media center topic has been done over and over and over again. But in other ways, I feel like it's sort of re-energized in the sense that there is cooler hardware available than we've ever had. The embedded stuff is getting powerful enough to actually do this. I feel like ARM's coming up.

Intel's getting cheaper and smaller. It's like there's a lot of those middle range devices. And on the back end, like hard drives are getting big for cheap. I think, what is it? Seagate now has a 10 terabyte hard drive you can buy. And which means, what that really means is their eight terabyte hard drives are now completely reasonable in price. Yes, exactly, right.

Eight terabytes in a single drive. You know, you put three of them. That's a lot of Star Trek. Woo! Yeah, exactly. That's a lot of Star Trek. Woo! Yeah, exactly. So there's like this confluence of super well-priced, really powerful front-end hardware.

And an abundance of free software that you can just use it to manage all. At all levels. From getting this content automatically off the internet, from backing it up off your own optical media to managing it. And then on top of it, like the seamless integration now with things like YouTube and Torrance and all this stuff that makes online media at the same level as all the other stuff. Everything is on the same level playing field. And Kodi is in a perfect intersection of all that stuff with the heart. It's just – I love it. I'm really excited about it. And I just linked a super sexy case from the Flirk team.

That is really nice. Check this out. I saw that. I think I saw it. Maybe linked on the Cody's main site. I might have to pick that up. I can't remember where I saw this. Yeah, they had a deal.

Flirk and Cody made a deal to make their own Cody version of this. Okay. Oh, nice. Yeah. That does look really nice. Wow. That is so, like, legitimately, I could see, like, when Angela's like, okay, I'm ready to replace these Rokus. I would totally go with this. See, that's perfect because I have that Nuck at my parents' house.

It's also their like router and it's playing a lot of roles for them. But I can just, I have a pie sitting around, buy one of these, stick it in their bedroom upstairs. Now they have both TVs connected to my chair. You know, I wonder if Noah's going to start working with some of this stuff too. I know. Because he does some displays too. Exactly. Nice, Rotten Corpse.

Yeah, thanks for mentioning that, because I'd forgotten about that. And it's $15, and your money's going to a good deal. Anytime I feel like you're buying from this ecosystem, it's going to a good cause. And specifically, since Chris mentioned on last that the NVIDIA Shield was just so responsive, I noticed a huge bump upgrading from Raspberry Pi 2 2 to Raspi 3 when using Kodi. Yeah. I believe that. I should make mention that on playback when watching my review of the Shield, Plex actually started the file right away.

But the video file I just happened to chose had like two seconds of black. So somebody on YouTube was like, hey. And I watched it back and I'm like, oh yeah. The Nvidia Shield is just wicked fast, period. And I mean that on every level. Netflix is obviously, that's going to be fast. That's a simple app.

But Borderlands 2 launches instantly. It's really powerful. And Noah's Box is cheaper and I like that. And then the Raspberry Pis are even another route to go so who am I to say which one you should go with but at each level

there's great options and I kind of even want to build a full PC over here in the studio too just to have fun with that you know I do have that Pi sitting around so if you want to try it

as an end point to whatever solution you go to I might I would be happy to set that up love you Wes what were you going to say Northridge?

I actually have a I have a Pi B+, that actually runs Kodi. It's not the fastest solution, but it does work pretty well, especially if you're only doing 720p and lower. It runs like a champ. Yeah, yeah. Which almost all the TV shows I get are 720p or lower uh north ranger were you gonna say something but we kept cutting you off oh yeah i can't remember if i uh saw this one on you know the big rundown on last two that some of these android tv boxes are really the only

ones that you can do reliable 4k streaming yet for people that are jumping on the 4k tv bandwagon that is true yeah you know and i don't have a 4K TV, so I just mentioned it in the specs. But not only does the Shield support 4K video, but it also supports UHD 4K. And I'll tell you, I am more excited about UHD 4K than I am 3D because what UHD, basically, if my understanding is correct, and it might not be, but my understanding is that UHD

is essentially HDR 4K video. So it's 4K video with HDR exposure. The spec you want to look for is UHD+. Right. Yeah, okay, thanks. And that, I cannot wait. Oh, man. That 3D did not compel me, but 4K UHD+, yeah, that's got me. UHD plus, yeah, that's got me.

So, Chris, what are you thinking for storage hardware, especially in the RV? And aren't you worried about heat? Big time. Yeah, I really am because it's going to be in a dinette booth underneath the booth, closed up. I'm already worried about heat with just the cradle point and the Wi-Fi. And I have a cell booster in there right now. So I don't know. I have a cell booster in there right now. So I don't know. I have pledged to make it Linux.

That's what I know. Okay. Which has eliminated FreeNAS from the running, which is a little disappointing because I could use the FreeNAS plugins to accomplish some of the stuff I want because I don't want to run more than one device. Right. Just because of the power issues.

So these are running on – It simplifies everything if you just have the one. All of this stuff is going to be running off an inverter, which also powers my fridge and two other TVs. So there's not – I don't know how much overhead this thing has, but this inverter probably only has like another 1,000 watts to give. So I got to make sure that I really – I got to make sure that I am very power conscious about what I choose. So whatever I

implement, I think I'm going to need the support of, I got to be able to virtualize. Totally. So I think, so I am, I am really trying not to do a NUC with Linux on it that's just connected to some disk. But that seems like a possibility to me. But what I really

want to do is, I would really like to have something like FreeNAS that is Linux-based. But eventually, I have three booth dinette seats to work with. So I'm going to spread things out amongst the dinette seats to spread out the heat. And that is one thing I'll be doing. Isolate. To spread out the heat. And that is one thing I'll be doing. And then I want to have a shit ton of storage so I can consolidate all of my media that I store here at the studio and all of my media that I store at Angela's house, which is about two terabytes here at the studio and about 12 terabytes at Angela's house.

I want to consolidate all of that into my own file server so I can get off their file servers. The studio's file server shouldn't be housing some of my personal media. So get that off there. Get it off Angela's house server so that way she can put more of her own stuff on there, like whatever she wants to watch. And then I want to have enough left over to run virtual machines and enough left over to store video content and audio content that I record on the road when I'm like doing rover logs or shows and when I have a local backup.

A nice working set that you can have all the time. Yeah, and how to do all of that without generating a crap ton of heat or a crap ton of maintenance and something that is super reliable because when I'm on the road, I've got a million things to worry about. You need it to just work. Yeah. So that's my challenge. Yeah, go ahead, whack work. Whack work.

Whack work. I like that we have mu-ha-ha-ha in there too. Mu-ha-ha-ha. So that is my goal. That is what I'm aiming for. And whatever I end up, whatever solution I build, I'll probably record it all as I build it up and set it up and then do

an episode of Last About It or something. So whatever I end up doing, however I try to solve all these things. Stay tuned. Yeah, stay tuned and find out. Alright, I have a little conspiracy bacon to fry that's not really Linux related. It's actually Apple related. But it might result in

more Linux users. You want to fry a little conspiracy bacon with me? Smells good in here. So if you follow any of the Apple blogs or Scuttlebutt or whatever, I mean, they're just all over the Internet. Apple users are bellyaching about how old Mac hardware is, right? It's, like, super ancient now. With the exception of, like, a couple of Mac devices,

they basically are some of the machines are running three-year-old hardware and they're still charging the same exact price they did when they shipped it like the Mac Pro or some of the MacBook line. And I've been wondering like what are they doing? Are they crazy? And then today, this new Apple commercial went online. Have you seen this? I have not. It's called iPad Pro, What is a computer? Now, I can't play all of the audio because I'm sure even though it's a commercial,

I'll get taken down for playing it. Well, of course, Chris. And a screen you can touch and even write on. So the whole ad is the premise around rethink what a computer is. Don't assume that it's just for content consumption. This is the new iPad. Imagine what your computer could do if your computer was an iPad Pro. So here's my conspiracy. Are you ready? Oh, yeah. What if Apple is intentionally slowing down the MacBook and the Mac line in general to try to get their consumer base to switch over? Rev up on the iPads.

Yeah. Yeah. To be like, oh, let's buy iPads instead because they feel like they can't really, you know, there's not like that Mac business isn't going to go. It's just sort of what it's beenads. Yeah. Yeah. To be like, oh, let's buy iPads instead because they feel like they can't really, you know, there's not like that Mac business isn't going to go. It's just sort of

what it's been forever. Yeah. Do you think that could be what it is? Could it be the grand Apple conspiracy to get everybody on iPads? I mean,

it is their beautiful walled garden environment. I could see it. I leave it to you to decide, dear audience. Makes sense to me. Everyone will have

services and iPads and only only us weirdo linux users will be left on the desktop yeah yeah oh maybe it's better that way then people who want to make desktop apps will have to come to us and we'll by then we'll have decided on the one true packaging format so it'll be fine oh we've already decided we're gonna talk about in the show today oh great yeah great. I'd be curious about Apple's margins on their A9, A10, and A11, all their in-house chipsets compared to Intel.

Sure, especially since they can build that one chip and use it across three mobile devices. The margins on that have got to be pretty smart.