Dec
26

Streaming multimedia content to a PS3 system from Windows, Mac or Linux

My brother just got a new Playstation 3 for Christmas and since he is away to London right now I thought I would also have some fun with it :)

Anyway, I wanted to watch a movie and that’s no problem when we got a NAS at home but the DLNA server of the device is setup to only take content from the music folder on the device (for some reason the DNLA server in the NAS can only provide content from one folder). So I had to find another way to push content to the PS3 system. I knew I wanted to use the network connection since the whole house is build on this network anyway, and secondly I’m rather lazy. Furthermore I really wanted to take advantage of the build-in DNLA streamer/player in the PS3 so I had to setup some kind of DNLA server on my laptop or other kind of computer.

I Googled around the interwebs and found Java PS3 Media Server at Google Code. It’s an awesome project which I hope continues. Well the project looked really nice and I downloaded and installed the server only my laptop which easily should be able to serve the content seen from a processor (Intel Core 2 Duo, 1.8 GHz) and memory (3 GB) point of view.

First I tried to stream some random video content and is ran smoothly but when I choose a bit more demanding kind of content the stream just couldn’t keep up with the demand. I firstly tried to lower the transcoding settings and looked at the network load at the same time. This is what I found:

Note that I boosted the transcode buffer maximum size up to 600.0 MB.

Streaming audio

I set the default quality of audio streaming down from 640 KBit/s to 320 KBit/s and I did that first of all because I wanted to keep my portability and not needing a network cable plugged into both the laptop and the PS3 which both were operating wirelessly. Secounly I didn’t need all of that quality since I rip my CD’s at 320 KBit/s and the transcoding was going into AC3 which means that even at a low bitrate I would get rather good quality out of the Samsung LE32B535 which is connected to the PS3. I also changed the number of audio channels from a whooping 5.1 (6 channels) to stereo (2 channels) again because I wanted portability and I wasn’t streaming to any surround sound system.

When buffering a song the network load hits properly just maxes out. When the starting buffer is full and streaming normally the network load is just around 125.000 byte/sec (0.96 Mbit/sec) which I think is really good (when filling rest of the buffer). Keeping the normal network load under 1 Mbit/sec. means that nearly every wireless setup will be able to stream smoothly.

Streaming pictures

Not much to say here to be quite frank. The times it takes for the pictures to load is of course dependant of the size of the pictures and of course the maximum network speed.

Streaming video and problems

Good software always have a butt, and this one got a bad one of those. My network connection couldn’t keep up with the request of data and therefore the video was a real pain the in ass to watch. Well this only happen with some movies. I tried ripping in different bitrates at 1800 kilobyte/sec. the video stuttered every some seconds, but at around 1150 kilobyte/sec the network connection could keep up, but only just (stutters sometimes). So the real pain in the but is the network speed, I would recommend using cables (at least 100 megabit/sec. of course) when streaming stuff to your PS3 using this software. You could use at lower bitrate but then it wouldn’t really be fun to watch on a full HD monitor, right?

I think you should try it out :) In my tests both my PS3 and my laptop was in the other range of the wireless access point. When I get the time I’ll try the same tests with both devices connected to the network with cables.

Dec
23

Maximum performance in Windows XP, Windows Server 2000 and Windows Server 2003 and compromising security

Microsoft back in the day release a small paper on how to minimize the effect from the antivirus software on the operating system’s performance. Let me point out that the paper was released in July 2007.

But despite the fact of this almost (in computer and internet terms) prehistoric release date TrendLabs’s writer David Sancho still found it relevant to comment on it December 21, 2009. Hole smoke, talk about late timing.

The paper is written about which files you can let your antivirus software not scan in order to increase the performance of your operating system. The decrease of performance is due to file locking. Microsoft recommends that if you are having performance issues cost by the antivirus which is caused by these locked files. It’s a quick and rather dirty fix, which is also what David Sancho wants to point out.

David Sancho got the point when he say the following:

In line with this, we advise users to educate themselves fully about these recommendations before taking any action.

I states that the biggest risk to the consumers computer and internet security is the consumer themselves. As security professionals we need to secure the consumers from themselves because, sadly, they don’t have a clue of what they are doing or what they are agreeing when visiting malicious and non-malicious websites. This of course, is badly generalised but if you as a security concerned programmer wants to create the most secure environment for your user, you’ll have to secure the user from the user itself.

Back to the Microsoft paper. Microsoft as a huge influence on the users should consider more carefully what they are releasing to the public and most of all they should re-read their own papers at least every year in order to make sure that they are giving their users the best kind of advise and in that way contributing to a more secure environment for the normal user.

What do you think of all this? What should Microsoft do to create a more secure envirnorment? Or should the users be more poweruser like?

The Microsoft paper can be found here.

The blog post by David Sancho can be found here.

Dec
13

Having fun with chaos

So right now I’m writing a rather huge project in school about “mathematical chaos theory in conjunction with traditional statistics in relation with a chemical experiment”. It’s REALLY exciting and fun (in a very geeky way). When working with numeric chaotic datasets it’s really handy to show the dataset in a graphical way. I of course choose to use the Google Chart API and created a simple sample application based on the “Valentine's Grouse”. The application can be altered by editing the GET parameter called “k”.

The application

The application with the “k” parameter set to “2.9”

The application is programmed in PHP and the source code can be seen here.

Dec
13

Joomla hacks that makes your day easier

So If you read my previous post about the fact that Joomla sucks and why Joomla makes me so frustrated you properly thought I would be nice with some solutions on the problems stated.

So I created some hacks as answers, here goes:

A custom menu-maker operating in only one sub-level because that is what I needed. But if you need infinite sub-level just create a function from the code beneath.

 
$menu = JSite::getMenu();
foreach ($menu->getItems("parent", "0") as $item) {
	echo "
<li><a href="\"/$item-">link\">" . $item->name . "</a>";
	if ($menu->getItems("parent", $item->id)) {
		echo "
<ul>";
		echo "
 
";
		foreach ($menu->getItems("parent", $item->;id) as $subItem) {
			echo "
<li><a href="\"/$item-">link\">" . $subItem->name . "</a></li>
 
";
		}
		echo "
 
";
		echo "</ul>
 
";
	}
	echo "</li>
 
\n";
}

Please note that the menu items and the sub-level items is objects and not arrays of data.

Dec
09

Why Joomla sucks!

So I got this job from a customer: setup a design from a sliced PSD file into some CSS formatted XHTML. Fair enough, that couldn’t be that hard – and it wasn’t. The real pain the in ass is NOW:

I have to set the darn thing up so it can run in Joomla! I’ve heard good things about Joomla in the past and I thought it would be a pleasure to do so. But I was wrong – boy was I wrong?!

First of all I got this horizontal menu at the top. I made it so it beautifully supports sub-items, nicely done in jQuery and in CSS. But since Joomla can’t generate the menu correctly itself I now have to hack Joomla and the menu in order to get the right view. It could have been nicely done if just Joomla offered some kind of advanced template functions like: “getMenuItems($menuId)”. I guess I’m just frustrated, I’ll move on to the some of the other stuff I guess – or so I thought.

I thought I could setup the place where the content goes but nooooooo. The div where the content goes is very specific with paddings, margins and width but I thought that putting in some content wouldn’t fuck that up but I was wrong again. Because for some unknown reason Joomla had to create nested divs, tables and what not inside my perfect CSS. And I can’t really hack this part because the “content holder” that Joomla uses is reused by all of it’s freaking components. I begin to wonder if it would be easier and faster to create this freaking thing from scratch!

I just gave up for today with a little hope though all of these freaking problems today. Because I maybe found a secret weapon within Joomla, an API – yes you read right! An API! The holy grail for a lot of developers as myself which do not accept the second best solution. But now I got a new problem! Only like 5 or 10% of this holy grail is documented in their API reference wiki.

Please comment or contact me if you got some solutions to some of my problems, if you are a Joomla geek or if you also got problems with Joomla and want to get it of your chest – just like I just did :)

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