For Fuppes Sake!
No matter how much I try I can’t get the stupid media streamer working 100%, really beginning to get on my nerves.
When I moved into the house I’m in at the moment I brought my server (WOPR) with me as well as my enormous media collection, unfortunately the mini-ITX box we had as the media centre wasn’t mine so it remained behind. Luckily I’ve got a 360 which is capable of streaming from a media server and there are a few around for linux.
At first we ran twonkymedia, which is pretty good, but as it is commercial software an alternative had to be found when the trial ran out. I had my mind set on purchasing a licence for it but only one thing stopped me. No transcoding. Since the 360 only played specific formats, a lot of the media in my collection is unplayable from the 360 and this was unacceptable, so twonky had to go.
I looked around and found a few opensource/free alternatives, one of them being fuppes and the reason fuppes stood out was because it claimed to support on-the-fly video transcoding, which would solve all my problems. Getting it up and running wasn’t too tricky and we’ve been using it for a long time now. Unfortunately there was 2 major issues with it. The first is that the video transcoding doesn’t work, no idea why it doesn’t just refuses to do it as if the feature never existed even though the web interface claims it is enabled. And 2, every now and then while watching something on the 360 the video goes *BLDFDBLBFFASDBlarg* and dies, which I think maybe a caching issue since we’re running it over wireless.
But lately a 3rd issue has arisen (well not really lately but it’s become much more of an issue lately) and that is the database is failing to rebuild itself, I think I’ve reached the maximum size cause SQLite is now complaining halfway through an index rebuild that it is having IO errors or cannot write to disk (even though there is loads of space left). I’ve been playing with SQLite trying to figure out if there is any issues with my installation of it and at first I thought there was, various libraries were reporting different versions, but that’s been fixed now and it does seem to rebuild faster, but it still crash and burns 
.
Anyway, I’m sure that I can sort out the rebuilding but I’m still at a complete loss as to why the video transcoding just doesn’t want to play. Quite a few people on the forums claim to have gotten it to work but I can’t see how. Even when I use their configs I get nothing, not even a debug message at the console. I’m running the most recent revision from the SVN (0.627 from memory) but nothing. Also the sourcecode hasn’t been updated in absolutely ages, which someone with better programming prowess than myself would take up the development of fuppes, I think it’s pretty good, just really buggy at the moment.
If I can’t work out how to sort it out soon I’m going to have to get rid of it and try another media streamer but I didn’t see many others which supported transcoding.
Bah…
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By Robert Massaioli, January 30, 2010 @ 6:37 am
Have you tried any of the latest fuppes and seen what they are like? I was just wondering if you had more success lately. We are currently upto revision 661 so you man find that there have been some changes from 30 revisions ago.
By Jargon, February 1, 2010 @ 3:44 pm
I haven’t updated FUPPES in a long time and probably won’t. It’s been running fine and I’ve learnt to deal with it’s quirks over time. A housemate picked up a PS3, which works a lot better with FUPPES by the looks of it. No crazy video screwiness. It also overcomes the virtual container issue the XBOX 360 has and also supports more codecs.
As for the reason I’m not going to bother updating it, is that I’ve now moved out of that house and am constructing a new media centre out of an Acer Aspire Revo (which will act as my home server for projects and other things) and throw XBMC on there, which has been reported to run perfectly