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How to get Boxee to correctly identify local media files

Ryan — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 16:31:37 +0000

One of the great features of Boxee is that it can scan your local media collection and retrieves artwork and information from IMDb.com. It does this by doing regular expression matching on each file name to determine what movie, album, or TV episode it is. If you have a collection that is not well named or organized this might not work correctly for a lot of your media files. Fortunately there is a specific way you can name your movie, music, and TV files to give the Boxee the best chance of to correctly identify your media collection.

Again, Boxee uses IMDb.com to identify and retrieve information about your media files. If you are unsure of a proper title, or having problems with identification, check there first and make sure it matches what they have.

TV Shows

TV episode file names are usually consisted of the show’s name, the season (usually indicated by the letter “S”, or just the number), the episode (usually indicated by the letter “E”, or just the number), the episode’s title, and some more info regarding the quality and source of the file.

Boxee currently supports the following types of naming conventions for tv shows.

Show.Title.S##E##.info.extension
(double digits are required: S#E# will not work.)

Examples:

The.Sopranos.S02E01.avi Entourage.S05E01.avi

Please note: Adding the series’ release year in the file will help resolve remakes and TV shows with similar names
(please refer to IMDB.com to find the correct release year of the show)

Movies

Boxee currently supports the following naming convention for movies:

Title.(Year).extension Title (Year).extension Title.[Year].extension Title [Year].extension

It is recommended that you add the movie’s release year for greater accuracy, especially when dealing with remakes.

Examples:
The.Day.the.Earth.Stood.Still.(1951).avi The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951).avi The.Day.the.Earth.Stood.Still.[1951].avi The Day the Earth Stood Still [1951].avi

It is recommended that you add the movie’s release year for greater accuracy, especially when dealing with remakes.

For multi-part movie both part# and cd# are supported.
Title.(Year).part#.extension

Examples:
The.Simpsons.Movie.(2007).part1.avi The.Simpsons.Movie.(2007).part2.avi

Music

With music the filename is not as important as the id3 tags.

id3 tags hold all the information such as album name, artist, year, genre and even artwork. Whatever is there, will be presented in Boxee, so be sure to include as much info as possible in your id3 tags.

Renaming Files

You can always use a third party application to help you rename the files. Most media players such as iTunes or Windows Media Player, also allow you to edit those tags, but you can also Google for some dedicated ID3 editors.

Manually Identify a File

In a few cases the file won’t be recognized even with these formatting tips. In this case select the media file and click the “Wrong Video?” button. You can then follow the on screen instructions to search for and the correctly identity the media file.

Extract the contents of an RPM package

Ryan — Sun, 10 Oct 2010 16:30:07 +0000

Strangely enough there is no way to directly extract the contents of an .rpm package using the rpm (RPM Package Manager) tool. This feature can come in handy for example if you need to access a single file in a package but you don’t want to install it on your system. Fortunately there is a simple hack that you can use to make this work.

To do this use the rpm2cpio tool to convert an .rpm file to a cpio archive then pipe it to cpio command to extract it.

Here is an example:
$ rpm2cpio rpm-package.rpm | cpio -idmv

The options explained:
i – Extract the archive
d – Create leading directories where needed
m – Retain previous file modification times when creating files
v – List the files processed, be verbose

Convert PDF file to text with pdftotext

Ryan — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 15:56:14 +0000

In many cases it can be helpful to access text from within a PDF file but accomplishing this can be next to impossible. Luckily in Linux there is a command line program called pdftotext which is included with the xpdf package.

This first step is making sure that the xpdf package is installed. In Ubuntu you can use the following command.
$ sudo apt-get install xpdf

Now you can convert a PDF to text with pdftotext. This code will output a file named <filename>.txt
$ pdftotext <filename>.pdf

You can also attempt to preserve some of the formatting within the PDF such as columns and spacing by using the “-layout” option.
$ apdftotext -layout <filename>.pdf

Custom screenrc configuration file

Ryan — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 14:00:44 +0000

Screen may be the most useful Linux applications when it comes to getting things done through the terminal. This custom screenrc configuration file will provide you with a permanent caption line at the bottom of each window. This caption line will enable you to easily keep track of each terminal window and provide other helpful information such as host and current time.

When screen is invoked, it executes initialization commands from the files “/etc/screenrc” and “.screenrc” in the user’s home directory.

Simply create a file in your home directory with vim or some other editor.

$ vim ~/.screenrc

And place the following line in the file.

caption always "%{Wb} %H %{Bk}| %{Ck}%-w%50>%{Cb} %n %t %{-}%+w%<%{- Wk}%{Bk} | %=%{Wb} %C "

Now launch a new screen session for it to take effect.

Here is an example of what it will look like.

Determine file type with the file command

Ryan — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 13:11:43 +0000

The file command identifies the type or format of a file. It is a very handy command that can show you how to approach a file when the format is unknown. There are a variety of tests that it uses to determine its type, these tests include a filesystem test, magic number test, and language tests. The first successful test is the one that is printed to the user.

The magic number tests are used to check for files with data in particular fixed formats. To determine the format of a file in this manner, either a magic number identifier exists at the beginning of the file, or a specific identifier can be determined at a specific offset within the file. The file /usr/share/file/magic specifies what magic numbers are to be tested for, what message to print if a particular magic number is found, and additional information to extract from the file.

Here is an example with a directory which contains a variety of file types. The output lists the filename along with its type.

$ file *

data:        data
directory:   directory
emptyfile:   empty
program:     ELF 64-bit LSB executable, x86-64, version 1 (SYSV), for GNU/Linux 2.6.9, dynamically linked (uses shared libs), stripped
script.sh:   Bourne-Again shell script text executable
source.c:    ASCII C program text
symlink:     symbolic link to `program'
tarball.tar: POSIX tar archive (GNU)
tarball.tbz: bzip2 compressed data, block size = 900k
tarball.tgz: gzip compressed data, from Unix
text.txt:    ASCII text

This works equally well when the file names do not have have an extension, which is a very common case with Linux.