WordPress.com and domains

So apparently it’s not that simple to get out from under the thumb of WordPress.com.

I want to use a custom domain name and my own hosting instead of onlydarksets.wordpress.com, but I would like to retain my Google/Yahoo/Live search rankings. I had hoped throwing a little cash at it would do the trick, but apparently all that gets you is 302 redirects, which are “temporary” redirects.  In common parlance, that tells the browser how to get to the page, but it does not tell the search engine spiders to update your URLs.  So, Google will continue to think that onlydarksets.wordpress.com contains all of my existing posts.

WordPress.com suggests simply paying them $10/year for life to redirect the old links to my new site.  After thinking a little more about why I was doing this, I’m thinking $10/year ain’t a bad proposition.

The good news is that, from this point on, the search engines will use onlydarkets.com for new posts.

Migrating from hosted WordPress.com to your own server

The problem is that you lose all of your search indexing if you just export it and start at your own domain.  However, here is a good writeup on the steps to avoid that.  It’s pretty simple if you’re willing to spend $10.

Basically, you buy a domain and host it through WordPress.com for a while, and then you setup your own server.  Doing it this way, WordPress.com will forward all of the requests to the old site in a way that search engines update their index with the new URL.  We’ll see how it works!

Speeding up album art display for SageTV extenders

On my SageTV HD-100, it was taking 3-5 seconds to scroll through each page of videos or music.  Turns out there are three things required to fix this:

1. Turn on hardware caching in sage.properties (enable_hardware_scaling_cache=true)
2. Reduce the User Input Timeout (Settings | Customize | Inactivity Timeout and OSD AutoHide | Configure)
3. Enable album art caching (SageMC | Enhancements | Cache Album Art)

Now it’s smooth as silk.

Roll your own YouTube (mirror)

A while back I found a good post (via FlashInsider) that detailed how to create a video sharing site, but when I went to look at it recently, it was replaced by a placeholder page written in German.  Thanks to Google cache, here is a mirror of it, including comments.  I’m not planning on hosting a YouTube site, but the FLV/FlowPlayer stuff is interesting.

UPDATE: It’s back now, but I’m leaving this here anyway.

Increasing PHP upload limits

My hosting provider has the default limits for uploading files via PHP set pretty low (2MB).  To get around that, they allow custom php.ini files, but they don’t tell you where to put them or what to put in them.

Create a text file called “php.ini” and place it in the directory where the script is going to run.  I read that it a custom php.ini file is applied to subdirectories, but that was not the case in my setup.  The custom php.ini should have the following:

upload_max_filesize=100M
post_max_size=100M

Importing archived WMV videos into SageTV’s “My TV”

I have a ton of archived TV shows recorded in Vista Media Center that I processed with DVRMSToolbox (i.e., removed commercials, converted to WMV, and copied over all of the metadata), but they didn’t fit in well in Sage’s “Videos” structure.  After converting a few shows using SageMC, I realized that you can have pretty much any video file type show up in “My TV”, so I spent some time figuring out how to migrate all of these shows using a VB script.

Turns out you can access most of Windows Media Player via WSH, so that made it pretty easy to grab all of the metadata once everything was loaded into WMP – you just have to know where to look.  The XML layout for the Sage Webserver is pretty well documented, although the source code to Andy’s excellent MigrateMCtoSage utility made it much easier to figure out the bare minimums.  The hardest part was actually finding the XML writer for WSH.

Note that this should also work for AVIs, which is the other main container format supported by WMP.  However, AVI tagging is pretty abysmal in WMP, mostly because it doesn’t write the tags back to the file.  I have found a couple of apps to do this, but nothing I would wholeheartedly recommend.

Backup you wiz.bin file before proceeding – you need to shut down the Sage service to do this properly.

1. Download and unzip CreateVideoXML.vbs
   Optional: Open in a text editor and edit the output and temp files
2. Import your videos into WMP and clean up the metadata
3. Run CreateVideoXML.vbs
4. Open Sage Webserver and import the resulting XML file (by default: C:\Playlist.xml)
   1. Check the Import TV files box
   2. Check the Overwrite Existing Show Information box
   3. Check the Overwrite Existing Sage TV File Information box
   4. Check the Use imported Airing data to determine startTime option (THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT)
   5. Uncheck everything else

After import, your videos will show up under “My TV”.

Creating an XML document in WSH

This took forever to find, but I was hoping XmlTextWriter would work in Windows Scripting Host (I thought I found an example), but I couldn’t get it to work.  This is the only structured way I could find to create an XML document in WSH:

http://www.aspfree.com/c/a/Windows-Scripting/Creating-an-XML-Document-in-WSH/

(OK – found the problem.  XmlTextWriter is .NET only, and WSH is not .NET.  It’s been a while for me.)

Watching Blu-ray discs on the Sage extender

I picked up a Blu-ray drive for the Sage server and a couple of BR discs.  I don’t use the Sage server as a client – I have a HD-100 extender for viewing (with a HD-200 in the pipeline).  Since I don’t have a stand-alone player, the only way to watch the movies I have bought is to rip them.

After going through this thread and all of its suggestions, I have found that some discs work with no modification, while for others the audio won’t work unless manipulated first.  Generally, if the first audio stream is AC3, it will work. So, I have come up with the following workflow for getting the movies to play on the extender.  Basically, I start with the easiest method first, and work my down through successive steps as necessary:

1. Play the m2ts file as it was ripped from the BR disc.  With many discs, this just works.
2. Delete all streams from the m2ts file except the main video and audio streams.
3. Demux the main video and audio streams from the m2ts file, downmix the DTS-HD stream to AC3, and remux in a MKV container.

In each case, there is no converting of the video stream, so there is no quality loss and the processing time is relatively minimal.  Details after the break.

Media Center and Vista need a divorce

Long Zheng posted a link on his blog to a Microsoft-produced retrospective of the last decade of Media Center versions (also posted by Brent at GeekTonic, which reminded me to write on this).  It’s time for Microsoft to uncouple Media Center from the OS.

I jumped ship from Vista Media Center almost 6 months ago, and one of the biggest reasons was a  persistent bug with an identified cause resulted in many of my recordings having an incorrect duration, which made it difficult (although not impossible) to use the files.  To date, the problem has still not been resolved, because Media Center updates are tied to the OS release schedule, which does not permit quick release patches for non-critical bugs.  If they get it wrong, it’s a whole new cycle before they can send out another patch.

Microsoft already realizes that baking everything into the OS is not always the best idea, because it creates a bloated OS and reduces flexibility and limits the options for the individual apps (see here, here, and here).  Given the much richer experience I have had with SageTV since August, I think that applies to Media Center, as well.

Converting SageTV recordings to Zune/iPod/iPhone, version 2.0

I posted a method for converting SageTV files to iPod/iPhone compliant files a while back, but a number of the files weren’t converting properly.  I also had problems with mencoder cutting commercials out of the files.  So, I retooled the approach, and I am now getting 100% success, using the approach outlined below.