Uses for SubSonic...suggestions appreciated

[sfranklin1717]

I'm a brand-new SubSonic user, trying it out to see how the music streaming thing works for me. I'm still a little unclear on everything that it can do, to be perfectly honest. I've played around a bit, but rather than struggling through all the various options I figured perhaps asking here would be the best way to the right answers.

A little background, first. Like most people these days, I have a fairly extensive MP3 collection sitting on a computer at home. In my case, that's currently a MacBook running iTunes, but I've used both Linux and Windows in the same capacity in the past. The iTunes library sharing lets me listen to music on my stereo (via my gaming rig or Tivo). I own an iPod Shuffle and I use while working out, and an old-school iPod classic that I use in the car when I don't like what I can get on the radio. I've also used the iPod to listen to music at work, but at the moment I'm trying out using SubSonic at work instead (server on the Mac, client on my work laptop). I occasionally travel for extensive periods (international trips, 2 weeks or more). I also listen to quite a few podcasts.

As you can see, I have a lot of use cases. Ideally, I'd like to be able to:

1) Have a single always-on machine at home, storing and serving up all my music and podcasts. That would probably need to be a new machine since I don't want the MacBook stuck in that role forever. I'd like to expand this to videos as well at some point.
2) Be able to sync the iPods with (a subset of) my library. For sure this needs to work when I'm physically at home, and it would be really nice to be able to do remotely. Since the iPods aren't Internet devices themselves, this would happen via a laptop.
3) Remote streaming access to the library from the Internet, which I'd use mostly at work or when traveling via a laptop. Maybe someday I'll get a newer mobile device that would also use this.
4) Streaming access to the library at home, via the Tivo, so I can listen on my stereo instead of computer speakers.

I'm looking for recommendations on how to put together such a setup. From what I've read on the forums here, it seems like SubSonic can do #1 and #3 very easily. The questions are really around #2 and #4. Does SubSonic (or some other easily-integrated solution) do either of those things? If I need two solutions, can they share things like playlists?

Thanks in advance for any suggestions!

[GJ51]

How much storage do you think you'll need?

[sfranklin1717]

For the music, probably 25 GB. I have 14 GB right now and I do expect growth over time. But once I start storing video also it'll go up significantly. I'm thinking 500 GB, maybe even a TB drive.

[GJ51]

Deciding how much power and storage you want is the tricky part. If you only want music for 1TB or less the answer is easy. Just get an atom powered netbox and put a large 2.5 hard drive in it.

If you want to do video however, you'll be faced with a bit more of a challenge. I use 65W quad core CPU's in Antec 300 cases with room for 6 3.5' hard drives plus room for more if I want to adapt the 5.25" bays. I have an atom based ASUS T101MT tablet that I may test with SS just for fun, but I suspect it won't do a very good job of handling video.

With an Atom based netbox you'll probably get a pwer draw under 30W with idles as low as 10W or less. With my quads I get about 65W draw at idle and they rarely go over 90W under load.

I run "Lights out" on my WHS box which puts it to sleep when no one's on the network so that helps save a bit. So only my Domain Controller running Win Server 08 R2 that is up 24/7. That's the bosx that has my demo site running WHS 2011 in a VM listed in the link below. We're still sorting out some network issues with it which is why it's only displaying local folders. Hopefully we can restore access to the rest of the libraries in the network share soon.

For best results with video preformat into mp4 or flv and bypass the transcoding in SS.

[martyscholes]

I have similar needs. PyTivo and streambaby run on the server to serve up the audio, image and video collection to the Tivo.

Subsonic serves audio and video to the smart phones.

Fsync plus some cron scripting mostly keeps the video and pictures on my phone synchronized with the server library. It is kind of cool to have guests over, shoot some video and in a couple of minutes be able to watch it on the flat screen.

If only there was a subsonic-esque image gallery...

[sfranklin1717]

Well, I took the plunge and bought a little low-power Eeebox to run SubSonic and streambaby. So far I've installed Ubuntu 11.04, hooked up an external 1 TB drive for media file storage, dropped about 200 GB worth of MP3 music and MP4 video, and let SubSonic and streambaby loose on it. Works great for both streaming music while I'm at work, and for sending video to the Tivo at home.

I've pretty much given up on the idea of trying to sync the iPods with the music library used by SubSonic. Easier just to keep syncing the iPods with my Mac, and dealing with manual transfer of new music from the Mac to the music library. I don't get new music all that often anyway.

I still would like to set up video streaming from SubSonic as well, but haven't spent much time on it yet. I'm concerned about the file format. I really want to avoid on-the-fly transcoding since my poor Eeebox is so low-powered. MP4 works great for streambaby since the Tivo likes MP4, but from reading the forum posts here it seems that SubSonic would rather see FLV. Storing all the video in two formats doesn't seem very appealing.

Also, setting up the video streaming seems to be a bit of a rough road. There's a few posts about older versions of SubSonic, but I didn't find anything for 4.4. Is there a good step-by-step anywhere for setting up the video streaming on SubSonic 4.4?

[GJ51]

MP4 works fine for video direct to JW Player. Just uncheck the transcoding for mp4 > flv in the settings\transcoding table and mp4 files will pass directly to jw.

[sfranklin1717]

Ah, that's good to know, thanks. I found the thread on setting up video over in the Tutorials forum, but it looks like it's for SubSonic 3.8 and the most recent version referenced in the thread is 4.2. Are the original 3.8 steps still valid? Or is there a better reference for setting up the video?

[GJ51]

Those threads are all obsolete. Video is now built in to Subsonic with no need to hack it. Just add a foldr for video under Settings\Music Folders and put your videos in a seperate folder.

You sholud run version 4.4, the latest stable release. If you want to see how it should behave in the browser, go to my site listed at the bottom of this post and open the videos folder to see how it works.

[sfranklin1717]

That is sweet! I'm simultaneously impressed at how easy it is, and annoyed at myself for not realizing it earlier. Streams fine to my web browser at work...will have to try mobile sometime as well.

[GJ51]

Video on a mobile device is a bit more of a challenge, especially over 3g. I preformat video for mobile to lower quality flv.