media

In the past, I've booted LibreELEC on the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 in my "This is not a TV" Sharp NEC display.

According to LibreELEC's Pi 5 blog post, the new BCM2712 SoC decodes 4K and 1080p content just fine in H.264, and supports HEVC 4K60 hardware decoding.

And they've tested AV1, VC1, and VP9 at 1080p with no issue, though 4K in non-native formats does encounter frame dropping.

I wanted to put the Pi through some testing of my own, now that the Pi 5's been out for months, and LibreELEC version 12 is stable.

A couple weeks ago, as my kids settled into the car, I asked like I always do, "what songs do you want me to play?"

They have a range of favored earworms, from Baby Shark to Babaloo, and usually the songs are tolerable, at least.

But a few albums, like Bluey's soundtrack, transcend the children's genre. They're genuinely fun to listen to, for everyone in the car.

Well, that fine day, the kids chose Ladybug Music. And let me tell you, besides a few duds, Ladybug Music slaps. And the songs incorporate diverse styles, too, it's not just the same nursery rhymes regurgitated in a bubbly voice.

So I found the album on my phone and noticed the songs were all greyed out.

I tapped one, and nothing. Just this notice:

Not available in my region? Well, that's weird. I pay for Apple Music. And I know the artist is in the US, and I'm in the US...

Do you remember when Netflix first started their movie streaming service, back in 2007?

Physical media was still the preferred way to consume media. Besides sports content, and some TV shows that were cable-exclusive for a time, most people would run by Blockbuster and pick up a movie.

Netflix started with mail-order DVDs, then switched to streaming. The absence of ads (which were rampant on cable channels) and the convenience of not having to drive to a physical store (Blockbuster et all) made Netflix a no-brainer, especially considering the depth of their initial library.

It's been more than a decade since I wrote Ripping Movies from Blu-Ray, HD-DVD and DVD, Getting them onto Apple TV, iPad, iPhone, etc.. Heck, back then I didn't write everything as a 'blog post'—that was labeled as an 'article' :P

In a surprising twist of fate, we went from a somewhat more centralized online media situation back then (basically, Netflix) to a hellscape of dozens of streaming services today. And in many cases, older movies can only be found as used and/or pirated DVDs on eBay!

Thus, I'm writing a fresh guide to how I rip DVDs and Blu-Ray discs into my Mac, then transcode them with Handbrake. Heck, some people who are deeper into the r/datahoarder rabbit hole even have dedicated transcoding servers so they can generate optimal archival copies in 4K, 1080p, etc. akin to how YouTube and other online platforms set up their files!

But for me, the basic process goes:

Since 2008, I've ripped every DVD and Blu-Ray I bought to my Mac, with a collection of SD and HD media totaling around 2 TB today. To make that library accessible, I've always used iTunes and the iTunes Shared Library functionality that—while it still exists today—seems to be on life support, in kind of a "we still support it because the code is there" state.

The writing's been on the wall for a few years, especially after the split from iTunes to "Music" and "TV" apps, and while I tested out Plex a few years back, I never really considered switching to another home media library system, mostly due to laziness.

I have a 2010 Mac mini (see above) that's acted as my de-facto media library/NAS for over a decade... and it's still running strong, with an upgraded 20 TB of total storage space. But it's been unsupported by Apple for a few years, and besides, I have a new ASUSTOR Lockerstor 4 with 16 TB of always-online NAS storage!

So, I have amassed a pretty massive media library over the years—my goal has always been to maintain every single bit of digital media I own locally via iTunes (and/or other libraries which can be shared with devices in my home), and be able to play any of my DVDs, Blu-rays, digital purchases, etc. on any of my devices (mostly in the Apple kingdom, but there are a few Raspberry Pis and other devices floating about).

I also like the convenience of purchasing media on the iTunes Store, so I have also amassed a decent collection of movies and TV shows there. One problem: none of those files can be played outside the Apple ecosystem! In the past, I outlined how I put Blu-ray, HD-DVD, and DVD media onto my Mac. In this post, I'll run through my process for stripping the DRM from protected M4V videos I purchased and downloaded from the iTunes Store.

Aside: It's ironic that the International Day against DRM was a couple days ago—it has no bearing on my writing this post, it's just coincidental.

After migrating an older Drupal 6 site with 20,000 media items to Drupal 8, I found a strange problem with image uploads. On the Drupal site, using Image FUpload and Adobe Flash, I could upload up to 99 images in one go. On the new Drupal 8 site, I was only able to upload 20 images, even though I didn't see an error message or any other indication that the rest of the images I had selected through the Media Image upload form were not successfully added.

I could choose 21, 40, or 500 images, but only 20 were ever added to an album at any time.

There were no apparent warnings on the screen, so I just assumed there was some random bug in the Media Image Entity or Media module suite that limited uploads to 20 files at a time.

But due to an unrelated error, I glanced at the PHP logs one day, and noticed the following error message:

tl;dr: If you want to skip the 'how-to' part and explanation, check out the pix_migrate example Drupal 8 migration module on GitHub.

For a couple years, I wanted to work on my first personal site migration into Drupal 8, for the last Drupal 6 site I had running on my servers. I've run a family photo/audio/video sharing website since 2009, and through the years it has accumulated hundreds of galleries, and over 20,000 media items.

The home page of the Drupal 8 photo sharing website.

The Raspberry Pi Dramble (which powers www.pidramble.com, run from my basement!) has been featured in a number of videos lately:

• Ansible 101 - on a Cluster of Raspberry Pi 2s
• Nginx Load Balancer Visualization on a Raspberry Pi Cluster
• Ansible + Drupal: A Fortuitous DevOps Match
• Ansible Serial/Forks Demo on a Raspberry Pi Cluster

The Dramble was even featured on PCWorld's 2015 list of Insanely Innovative and Incredibly Cool Raspberry Pi projects!

It seems the media has taken every opportunity to spin Pope Francis' words as being veiled criticisms of his predecessor's own words, especially when it comes to liturgical and theological topics. While it's great seeing the media show meager support at times, rather than destructive criticism for a Pope at every turn, it's misguided and not really that helpful.

All the press is saying is that what makes Catholicism Catholic (liturgy, ritual, priesthood, catechesis, etc.) is irrelevant, and we should worry more about the poor and such instead—and they're taking many translated quotes from Pope Francis out of context to support their theories. This horse has been beaten to death by many well-intentioned cafeteria Catholics throughout my lifetime, and I'm quite sick of it.

James over at the Forum has written about this a few times, and his most recent post, "Criticism" of Benedict in Rio? is spot-on:

Ever since Francis was elected, the media has been relentlessly billing him as the anti-Benedict. [...]