Thoughts and Ramblings

In the debate between Mercurial and Git, I’ve long held the side of Mercurial. This is mostly due to the fact that Mercurial’s commands are far easier to understand, but I’ve also liked the fact that Mercurial doesn’t encourage rewriting a repository’s history as much as Git does. This has encouraged me to seek to use Mercurial as my favored DVCS, but that’s now changing.

Mercurial has a tremendous advantage in that it’s command structure is easier to understand. I’ve enjoyed this feature having come from SVN, and every time I have to use Git, it makes me want to scream (and has literally made me do so one a few occasions). The usability of the command line is severely relegated when one starts to use tooling present in IDEs, file browsers, and other UIs. In this case, one needs only to go to the command line for very advance operations, in which case both DVCSs require looking up the command structure to understand how to accomplish the task.

While I’ve described some of the pieces in my media setup, I have not described it as a whole. I started the process when I got annoyed with DVDs that don’t allow you to skip the copyright warnings, commentary disclaimers, trailers, endless menus, studio logos, and other crap when I simply wanted to watch the movie. It was time for something better, and now I have it.

Storage

I’ve written some on my storage setup before, but I’ll describe it briefly here. I bought an Antec 300 case, Intel server-class motherboard, 6 WD 2TB Black drives (before the flood that drove up the prices), and 4G of RAM (later upgraded to 12GB). The machine is booting Ubuntu 11.10 (not yet upgraded to 12.04) off a pair of USB flash drives which are configured in a software mirror. The 6 drives are configured in a raidz2 configuration (raid6 redundancy) yielding 8TB of disk space (or 7.2TB if you count in base 2 instead of 10). The raid contains all the media is an a sub-filesystem so it can be snapshotted/backed up independently (taking advantage of ZFS’s capabilities here).

In one of my previous posts, I had mentioned how to install FreeBSD on ZFS. I was doing this for my file server, which I ran in this configuration for quite some time. It worked well for a while, but then I decided that FreeBSD was too constraining. This came when I was attempting to setup a process to rip media from DVDs and BluRay disks. I noticed that Handbrake doesn’t run natively, but is available via a port. The port doesn’t contain the GUI though; everything must be done on the command line. Then I looked at the tools necessary to rip from a BluRay disk, most notably MakeMKV. I could not get this tool to run on FreeBSD at all. Lastly, I could not execute any SWT-based java application because there is no native library for SWT in FreeBSD and the linux compatibility layer didn’t cut it.

In my previous post, I said “I think I’ll elect to forgo a player for an external drive and rip every disk that I might buy.” That thought didn’t last very long. I decided to buy a Sony NSZ-GT1 which contains both a BluRay player and a GoogleTV together. I did this because I finally realized that the Roku that bought was never going to live up to my requirements, especially amid their numerous regressions in firmware updates.

As some of you may know, I’ve ripped every DVD I own and store them on a file server. It’s a lot of space and it took a lot of time, but for my uses, it’s worth it.

I started this because one movie, I don’t remember which one, forced me to wait on FBI warning, another copyright violation warning, the same in French, and a disclaimer. Then it displayed two previews and a lengthy menu before I could hit play. This was followed by another lengthy menu animation, studio logos, and finally the movie. In the whole process, the studio logos and the previews were the only portions I was able to skip, the other screens marked as not skippable on the DVD. Now that I have my DVDs ripped, when I want to watch a movie, I browse my collection on the TV, and play the movie. No warnings, no menus, just the movie. I actually moved 8 months ago, and I have yet to unpack the DVD player.