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Just stumbled on an 8-bit remix of the song What is love by Haddaway, a song from the early nineties. The three guys you see in the car is from a scene in the movie Night at the Roxbury.

This was a hard one to figure out, but I managed to get my Conceptronic CH3SNAS up and running with Mediatomb (DLNA-server) and my Samsung UE32B7000 LED television. The problem was that my television didn’t want to recognize my media files and came up with a message like “unknown format”. To setup the NAS as a DLNA-server – be sure to disable the built-in DLNA server via the admin panel – first install funplug, a good tutorial I used can be found here. The latest funplug has Mediatomb already integrated, so no worries about that.

Now comes the important thing, find your Mediatomb config.xml file. In my case it was located at /ffp/var/mediatomb/config.xml. To edit the file, open it with vi:

In the config file search for the variable named protocolInfo and change it from no to yes:

<protocolInfo extend=”yes”/><!– For PS3 support change to “yes” –>

Enable the custom-http-headers section by removing the <!– and –> tags and enter the following lines, which are essential for the Samsung television to recognize your media files:

<custom-http-headers>
<add header=”transferMode.dlna.org: Streaming”/>
<add header=”contentFeatures.dlna.org: DLNA.ORG_OP=01;DLNA.ORG_CI=0;DLNA.ORG_FLAGS=0170000000000000000
</custom-http-headers>

Change the mapping in the extensions section:

<map from=”avi” to=”video/mpeg”/>

Somehow the Samsung LED tv will only play files if they are mapped as .MPEG files, even though they can be divx/mpeg/whatever. Not sure why/how, but it seems to be the solution.

Restart Mediatomb, click here for information about daemons. Be sure to clear your Mediatomb database and reindex all media files, this can be done via the Mediatomb web interface which is by default accessible via the IP of your NAS-device, port 49152. When you’ve finished all the steps, your Samsung LED television should play most of your media files flawlessly from your CH3SNAS via DLNA.

NIN - concert hall

Yesterday I went for the third time in my life to a concert of Nine Inch Nails, previously I saw them in Paradiso and at the Nijmegen Rockin’ Park music festival. This time I went together with a good friend(+girlfriend) and for the second time in my life I was sitting at a concert (in the back). Far away from the sage, but actually not so bad, it was quite warm inside and I usually get tired in my legs when standing the whole evening.

I mostly liked the older tracks they performed. Some tracks I didn’t even recognize, but afterwards I read that he mixed up some tracks live. I don’t know about the ambiance. I had the idea that they were just performing with not that much interaction with the public, but Trent isn’t a big talker at all. But that doesn’t really matter, in the end it is all about the music. Another thing I missed is the big LED-screens with animations on it. I was expecting to see that at this show, but they actually only used oldskool light spots mostly. It certainly would have brought the performance to a higher level.

But I keep respect for the band and their philosophy in the music world. The last albums are available for free, concert footage is allowed to be used/mixed and Trent just posted his view on how to do it different in the music world. Probably the tours they are doing this summer are the last ones and will they be non-active for a long while.

Two weeks ago we decided that we should look for a new television, besides looking for new houses. I did some research and found out that the Samsung UE32B7000 32″ LED LCD television seems to be what we needed. We didn’t want a 37 or 40 inch screen, because it’d be too much an eye-catcher in the living room. This television is only 3 cm. thin, not too power-hungry (I measured ~75 watts – see also this comparison of HD-TV’s) because it is illuminated by LED-lights instead of CCFL’s (TL-like tubes) and last but not least it has quite some nice technological features. You can use widgets – and even develop them, somehow Yahoo is involved in this technology. Some default installed widgets are from Flickr (photos from internet) and a weather-channel. There is even a Twitter-widget which you can use and there also seems to be a Youtube-widget, which I haven’t found yet.

The television has many, many inputs. One useful input is the network connection which we now have connected to our router, which itself is connected to our network attached storage (NAS) device. This is just a little box with harddisks in it and some mini-operating system running. The television supports DLNA, which means that it can stream video/audio/photos from that little NAS, which works flawlessly.

So we now have an up to date multimedia living room.