for keeping track of my digital experiments

I have been trying unsuccessfully for the past couple of months (on and off) to stream content from my home Linux servers to several DirecTV HR20-700’s. This latest attempt, actually worked and I wanted to document my exact setup as no other literature has done.

Stuff you need:

1. Debian 5 installed on a computer with ~ 1GHZ CPU, 256MB RAM, hard drive with media content on it
2. reliable Internet connection
3. a DirecTV HR2x

 
 
Here are the exact commands you need to run, I’ll explain them later.

apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
apt-get -y install screen vlc vorbis-tools mpg123 ffmpeg unzip subversion build-essential autoconf automake curl libexpat-ocaml-dev libsqlite3-dev libcurl-ocaml-dev libid3-3.8.3-dev libtagc0-dev libavformat-dev libexif-dev
svn co https://svn.mediatomb.cc/svnroot/mediatomb/trunk/mediatomb mediatomb
cd mediatomb
autoreconf -i
./configure
make
make install
cd
wget http://vraidsys.com/article-includes/mediatomb.zip
mv mediatomb.zip /etc/
cd /etc/
unzip mediatomb.zip
rm mediatomb.zip
mkdir /var/lib/mediatomb
chmod -R 777 /var/lib/mediatomb/
cd
mv /etc/mediatomb/mediatomb /etc/init.d/
vi /etc/init.d/mediatomb < -- change line so ethX reads eth0, eth1, or whatever your LAN network interface card is assigned to
chmod +x /etc/init.d/mediatomb
update-rc.d mediatomb defaults

The idea is that the default MediaTomb install found in the repos (version 11) doesn’t support transcoding quite right for the DirecTV HR2x. So we do an install from the repos for a bunch of dependencies for the latest code (version 12) that we then checkout from the project SVN repo. A new configuration script that I built is downloaded and installed. It has support for transcoding ogg, mp3, flac, flv, avi, mkv, mov, and a few other formats (pretty easy to add support for other formats check out –> http://mediatomb.cc/dokuwiki/transcoding:transcoding#directv_hr2x_transcoding).

MediaTomb will be automatically started on boot. It can also be stopped and started manually by: /etc/init.d/mediatomb stop or /etc/init.d/mediatomb start.

You can then go to the webui of MediaTomb and update your media library. –> http://hostname:49152/

For those of you looking for DHT support with the default rtorrent package that it is in the Debian 5 apt repos you are out of luck. Currently the only way to get DHT support for rtorrent is to use the 0.8.5-2 release for Debian “Squeeze” (testing).

So to get rtorrent working with DHT, go about the installation like you would usually:
apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
apt-get -y install rtorrent
apt-get remove rtorrent libtorrent10 (should leave dependencies installed)
wget http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/pool/main/r/rtorrent/rtorrent_0.8.5-2_i386.deb (for i386)
wget http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/pool/main/libt/libtorrent/libtorrent11_0.12.5-2_i386.deb (for i386)
dpkg -i libtorrent11_0.12.5-2_i386.deb
dpkg -i rtorrent_0.8.5-2_i386.deb

Your version of rtorrent, should now have DHT and PEX support.

For automatically starting rtorrent, you can download an init script from the libtorrent project, that works real great.
wget http://libtorrent.rakshasa.no/raw-attachment/wiki/RTorrentCommonTasks/rtorrentInit.sh
mv rtorrentInit.sh /etc/init.d/rtorrent
chmod +x /etc/init.d/rtorrent
vi /etc/init.d/rtorrent (change the user in the config file to a different user account, your own? that has a .rtorrent.rc in it’s home directory –> /home/[user]/.rtorrent.rc)
vi /etc/rc.local < — stick in the line “/etc/init.d/rtorrent start” before the “exit 0″

Make a .rtorrent.rc startup file, so that /etc/init.d/rtorrent works properly
wget http://vraidsys.com/tutorials/rtorrent.rc
mv rtorrent.rc /home/[user]/.rtorrent.rc
vi /home/[user]/.rtorrent.rc (change user to the user you want this to run as)
mkdir -p /home/[user]/torrents/session
chown [user] /home/[user]/.rtorrent.rc <-- run this if doing everything from the root user
chmod -R 777 /home/[user]/torrents <-- I do this so that I can access my torrents from several user accounts. see comments section. [Edit 1/1/2010]

Now restart the machine: shutdown -r now

When you log back in, torrents should be automatically downloaded to the /home/[user]/torrents/ directory, when you stick .torrent files in the /home/[user]/torrents/ directory. You can also access the screen thread by screen -r rtorrent in a terminal session.