Today while perusing the forums on the Plex website, I noticed someone inquiring as to how they would go about changing the file paths in Plex for one of the video sources without removing the source and adding it back from the new location.
The reason for wanting to do this is to ensure that your database entry tweaks, fanart settings, etc., are not lost, which is what would happen if you removed the source and it’s library entries.
One of the more interesting parts of the Plex project at the moment is the complete re-build of the database structure and how you work with it. The existing database structure is fairly poor in it’s design. There are a lot of cryptic field names, and it is easily corruptible. The current library system is a hold-over from the old XBMC code base.
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So several months ago I was in Atlanta visiting some friends (Hi, Justin!) and got hooked on his hackintosh Plex box. Now, I wanted to run it on a Mac Mini, instead of a hackintosh, but the application was great. Since then I have purchased the Mini and had a blast getting Plex working and tweaked to do what I want.
If any of you out there running Plex have noticed that there seems to be quite a few instances of Python running when you have Plex up, here’s why: each plugin that you have runs under it’s own instance of Python. Here’s what the development docs have to say:
Each media server plug-in runs in its’ own process, in a separate Python instance. This ensures that plug-ins can’t interfere with each other, or with the operation of the server.
So there you have it. Essentially, each plug-in is sandboxed from each other as well as PMS.
If you want to see this in action, just shell into (or open up Terminal) when running Plex and execute the following command:
ps -ef | grep Python | grep -v grep | grep "Plug-ins"
You should see one entry for each of the plug-ins that you have installed.
This weekend I spent a large chunk of time setting up Plex Media Center for OS X on my shiny new Mac Mini. When I left for work this morning, after two weeks off, I expected to get to the office and fire up iTunes to listen to my music from home using Simplify Media like normal.
Everything was working fine, if a bit slower than I expected, for the first hour or so, then unexpectedly Simplify Media simply quit working. Restarting the application didn’t help. Restarting iTunes didn’t help. Restarting the computer didn’t help. No matter what I did Simplify Media decided to be stuck in the initializing mode.
After toying with somethings on my iMac at home after work, I realized what was different in the setup than before Christmas break. The difference was that I am now running the Plex Media Server (PMS) component of Plex on the iMac to server the iTunes library up to the media center Mac Mini in the living room. After stopping PMS and restarting Simplify Media everything worked fine. With Simplify Media stopped and PMS restarted Plex was working fine.
After looking into the preferences of Simplify Media, I noticed the ability to turn off Simplify Media for the local network. After checking that box and restarting both PMS and Simplify Media everything is green again in the Simplify Media land.
I am not quite sure why they are conflicting. A comment in a post on elan’s Plex blog clued me into checking the Plex UPnP code to make sure it was disabled. I looked into that and I definitely have it disabled.
Update (2010-1-6) – According to the Simplify Media blog page, they are having network problems in their data center.
In November 2009, my USB Logitech Optical MouseMan died a cruel death. I had been using this particular trackball for a number of years. In fact, I liked it so much that I bought two more, one for the desk at home and one for use on the road with the laptop.
As I contemplated going out to OfficeMax to buy yet another one, I realized that it might be time to upgrade, at least a little bit. While I was very fond of the existing device, there were a few features that I was lacking that had been added to the newer models over the years:
- cordless operation to make desk arrangement less cumbersome
- scroll wheel
- extra buttons for things like forward and back in a browser
- third button for use in X11
After realizing that I needed an upgrade I decided to dig into some research on the possibilities. Now I must confess that I am a completely unrepentant trackball user. I had been using trackballs for my computers for at least the last 20 years. I did occasionally use a mouse, because sometimes they are better tools, but for the most part I used trackballs exclusively. One of my favorites over the years has been the original Kensington Turbo Mouse. It had a great big trackball and four large, easy to hit, buttons. One of the great things about this particular trackball was the fact that you could swap out the trackball with a standard billiard ball and it would fit perfectly.
After some research I decided to go with the cordless version of the same trackball that I was replacing. I purchased the Logitech Cordless Optical Trackman at Fry’s in Atlanta.
Initial Impressions
One of the first things that I noticed about the new trackball was that it was tremendously stiff. I didn’t remember this being the case with my older models. The cursor movement was also very jerky. Over the first day of use, however, the movement and tracking of the ball improved. My guess is that part of the stiffness was caused by some sort of film that was on the ball from the manufacturing process. One user in a forum posted that his was vastly improved by cleaning the entire ball with rubbing alcohol. Not having any of this on hand, I hoped that the film would gradually be removed with use. Thankfully this was the case.
Usage
I did notice a “learning curve” when it came to getting used to the style of the design and placement of the trackball. The ball is placed off-center on the right-hand side of the casing. I was used to having my hand completely flat in orientation with respect to the wrist rest and the trackball from the older models. After some use I found the new orientation to feel more natural.
As with many users, I have found that you will need to spend some time tweaking the Logitech multiplier and tracking speeds in the Logitech control panel as well as the OS X mouse preference pane. It took me sometime to get the settings just so. This was not really the case with the USB model, however with the older model you didn’t have a multiplier available in the Logitech software package. After quite a bit of back and forth with the settings, I finally got it to a useable setting.
Software
The Logitech software gives you the expected settings for the various buttons, scrolling speed as well as the multiplier to apply to the tracking and cursor movement. Interestingly enough, the software installer can’t figure out that you don’t have a Logitech keyboard installed, just pick one and move on. Due to the three kexts (kernel extensions) that are installed, the software requires you to restart, even though you can dynamically load a kext without rebooting.
In my particular installation, the registration application that starts after installation never completely loaded.
I did find some interesting points while tweaking the software settings:
- The scroll speed in the Logitech panel doesn’t appear to actually have an effect on the speed of the scroll wheel. This will need to be controlled in the standard OS mouse preference pane.
- The tracking multiplier can have a huge effect on the jerkiness of the cursor. My best results were achieved when leaving the multiplier set on 1 and controlling the tracking speed with the standard OS mouse pane.
- The battery life indicator in the Logitech panel is nice, however it would be great if there was a menubar indicator or a LED indicator on the device itself.
Overall, I am quite pleased with the new trackball. In fact, I have become so used to having the extra buttons and the scroll wheel that I find myself trying to use them when I am at home with my older, USB model. Looks like I need to add another item to my shopping list.
One of the standard methods of configuring Mac OS X in the enterprise has become known as the magic triangle or golden triangle. This is generally described as a setup involving Active Directory (AD) for authentication of the clients and services and Open Directory (OD) for managing the client preferences. The triangle comes from the fact that you have the Mac clients talking to AD, the clients also talking to OD, and the Mac server talking to AD. (Apple officially calls this the magic triangle setup in the Snow Leopard Server Open Directory Administration documentation.)
One of the issues I ran into was granting a non-admin in AD the ability to perform administrative functions on the clients bound to AD. The way this is handled with the Windows clients is for the particular AD user to be a member of a group that grants local administrator privileges.
Unfortunately there is no simple equivalent on the OD side of the equation to allow this for the technicians working on the Mac OS X clients. If you add an AD user to the system level group Open Directory Administrators using Workgroup Manager (WGM) this has no effect on whether a user is granted local administrator privileges to a connected client machine.
The solution to this involves:
- creating a group in OD to hold the members of AD that should have local administrative privileges,
- adding this OD group to the requisite local workstation groups to mimic the standard administrative privileges, and
- adding the OD group to the sudoers file
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