• VLC-Shares Browsing Interface

  http://www.knospi.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/vlc-shares-main.png

  VLC-Shares Browsing Interface

• VLC Streaming in action

  http://www.knospi.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/vlc-screenshot2.png

• VLC Streaming in action 2

  http://www.knospi.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/vlc-screenshot1.png

Why VLC-Shares and related work

My idea to consume media on my mobile devices is the following; I’d like to have a central point where all the media is stored. This point should be accessible from everywhere, so it needs to be on the internet. This point of media access should provide some kind of graphical user interface to browse the collection and to start the media player from it. The media should be live re-encoded so it could adapt to different connection speeds.

Ideal setup of a media server

There exist some application which let you exactly do that. But my quality requirements are pretty high. The software titles I investigated were

• Air Video
• Air PlayIt
• Emit
• VLC-Shares
• …

My personal favorite of this list is Air Video. Thats because of it’s performance, perfect configurability (not too much and not too less) and robustness. The only thing missing in this masterpiece is a linux server. So if you guys from Air Video are reading this, please consider making us happy!

I used it for a long time until i bought myself an Archos 80 g9 Turbo which comes with Android and Air Video has only a client application for iOS devices and an unofficial application for Mac OSX. I have to state at this point, that there is an Android application called Mirage Player which can communicate with Air Video Servers, but it can not (yet) request a live conversion of the video.

So i had to search for an alternative. If Air Video builds an Android version it’s very certain i might switch back to it. But in the meantime I stick to VLC-Shares. It has a very high configurability, more than one might wish. But it exactly gives me what I want, except a nice integration of a player, maybe directly in the VLC-Shares website.

On my Archos I had to install a special streaming media Player. A drawback of the VLC-Shares is that it’s not possible to jump forward, backwards or pause the video from within the player, this needs to be done in the Webinterface.

The installation of VLC-Shares can be tricky. That’s why i want to show you guys how to install it on a Linux Debian Squeeze box with NginX.

Install required packages

First we need to get some packages installed on our machine:

sudo apt-get install apache2 libapache2-mod-php5 php5 zendframework zendframework-bin vlc php5-sqlite php5-cli vlc ffmpeg

You should have NginX already installed and configured with PHP-FastCGI. If not do that now and come back later.

Download VLC-Shares

Grab a current version of VLC-Shares from their Website at VLC-Shares at Google Code. Extract it to a subdirectory of your www directory. In this tutorial I assume that the directory for all the websites resides at /www/ and you run virtual name based websites.
Extract the directory so that the path to the public/ subdirectory looks like that: /www/shares/vlc-shares/public. /www/shares/ will be the root of your VLC-Shares site. Now set the correct owner and permissions:

sudo chown -R www-data.www-data /www/shares/
sudo chmod -R 770 /www/shares/
sudo chmod -R 777 /www/shares/vlc-shares/data

Setup NginX

Now that everything is in place we can tell NginX to serve VLC-Shares. For that make a new entry in your /etc/nginx/sites-available/ directory of NginX and put the following contents to it:
(Don’t forget to adapt it for your liking and change the server name).

server {
	listen 		80;
	server_name 	shares.example.com;
	access_log 	/www/shares/access.log;
	error_log 	/www/shares/error.log;
	root /www/shares/;

	location / {
		index index.php;
	}

	if (!-e $request_filename) {
		rewrite ^(.*)$ /vlc-shares/public/index.php last;
	}

	location ~ \.php$ {
		include /etc/nginx/fastcgi_params;
		fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
		fastcgi_index index.php;
		fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
	}
}

Now enable the configuration with

cd /etc/nginx/sites-enabled
sudo ln -s ../sites-available/shares

restart your NginX

service nginx restart

and navigate to your VLC-Shares installation at

http://shares.your_hostname.tld/vlc-shares/public

and complete the installtion by filling out the settings on that webpage.

Setup Android Device

There are several streaming players for Android devices. On my Archos 80 G9 comes a very neat player. But of all the players i tried i found that Daroon Player gets the job done with VLC the best.
So download this nifty player and add your host with the adress

http://example.com:8081

to the favorites. When you start a stream in VLC Shares be sure to select HQ preset of video quality and the “Http Stream on 8081″ option, see image below.

VLC Streaming options

So get started with your first stream and enjoy. Note that you need to start the stream first in the web interface and then access it with your media player.

Hopefully I could help you guys getting your VLC-Shares to run. If you have any questions or remarks leave them in the comments below and i will give my best to help you out.

Hints

• If you have a firewall installed be sure to open the port 8081.
• I spent a long time messing around with the VLC-Shares application to get it to run. The main issue was that the public folder needs to be a subfolder of the “vlc-shares” directory on your public webfolder, that means the root of your website points into the directory where the “vlc-shares” directory lies, see here.
• After i managed to get to the installtion interface of VLC-Shares, i wasn’t able to submit the form. Everytime on submission an error occured which stated “Invalid value”. I had to work around this by setting up the application with the Apache 2 webserver, completing the Setup on the installation page, and then removing the Apache 2 webserver and enabling NginX again.
• Sometimes the VLC player crashes and no new instance can be created, a simple “sudo killall vlc” in the console fixes this.

The symbol used in the Logo and on the clockface is a Letter of the Zibu Language taken from www.languageofzibu.com.

Modeling Time: ~20 hours
Rendering Detail: Bidirectional Path Tracing, Metropolis Sampler, Mitchell Integrator, Light-Portal right in Front of the Watch, Area Light.

• Indentation of Python Blocks
• Mathutils is now called mathutils
• AngleBetweenVecs or so is not any more
• etc.

You canDownload the updated & running Version here: MouseLook.py.zip

or Copy and Paste it right into your Blender:

######################################################
#
# MouseLook.py Blender 2.54 by Yorn Callens
#
#   Adapted by ProperVandal from 2.49 source at tutorialsforblender3d.com
#
#   Changed by Knospi (www.knospi.com) to run in Blender 2.55 ( 20.Nov 2010 )
#
# Released under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
#
# If you use this code, please include this information header.
#
######################################################

import bge
import mathutils

# define main program
def main():

# set default values
    Sensitivity = 0.0005
    Invert = 1
    Capped = False

    # get controller
    controller = bge.logic.getCurrentController()

    # get the object this script is attached to
    obj = controller.owner

    # get the size of the game screen
    gameScreen = gameWindow()

    # get mouse movement
    move = mouseMove(gameScreen, controller, obj)

    # change mouse sensitivity?
    sensitivity = mouseSen(Sensitivity, obj)

    # invert mouse pitch?
    invert = mousePitch(Invert, obj)

    # upDown mouse capped?
    capped = mouseCap(Capped, move, invert, obj)

    # use mouse look
    useMouseLook(controller, capped, move, invert, sensitivity)

    # Center mouse in game window
    centerCursor(controller, gameScreen)

#####################################################

# define game window
def gameWindow():

    # get width and height of game window
    width = bge.render.getWindowWidth()
    height = bge.render.getWindowHeight()

    return (width, height)

#######################################################

# define mouse movement function
def mouseMove(gameScreen, controller, obj):

    # Get sensor named MouseLook
    mouse = controller.sensors["MouseLook"]

    # extract width and height from gameScreen
    width = gameScreen[0]
    height = gameScreen[1]

    # distance moved from screen center
    x = width/2 - mouse.position[0]
    y = height/2 - mouse.position[1]

    # initialize mouse so it doesn't jerk first time
    if 'mouseInit' in obj == False:
        obj['mouseInit'] = True
        x = 0
        y = 0

    #########   stops drifting on mac osx

    # if sensor is deactivated don't move
    if not mouse.positive:
        x = 0
        y = 0

    ######### -- mac fix contributed by Pelle Johnsen

    # return mouse movement
    return (x, y)

######################################################

# define Mouse Sensitivity
def mouseSen(sensitivity, obj):

    # check so see if property named Adjust was added
    if 'Adjust' in obj == True:

    # Don't want Negative values
        if obj['Adjust'] < 0.0:
            obj['Adjust'] = 0.0

    # adjust the sensitivity
        sensitivity = obj['Adjust'] * sensitivity

    # return sensitivity
    return sensitivity

#########################################################

# define Invert mouse pitch
def mousePitch(invert, obj):

    # check to see if property named Invert was added
    if 'Invert' in obj == True:

    # pitch to be inverted?
        if obj['Invert'] == True:
            invert = -1
        else:
           invert = 1

    # return mouse pitch
    return invert

#####################################################

# define Cap vertical mouselook
def mouseCap(capped, move, invert, obj):

    # check to see if property named Cap was added
    if 'Cap' in obj == True:    

    # import mathutils
     #   import Mathutils

    # limit cap to 0 - 180 degrees
        if obj['Cap'] > 180:
            obj['Cap'] = 180
        if obj['Cap'] < 0:
            obj['Cap'] = 0

        # get the orientation of the camera to world axis
        camOrient = obj.orientation

        # get camera Z axis vector
        camZ = [camOrient[0][2], camOrient[1][2], camOrient[2][2]]

        # create camera z axis vector
        vec1 = mathutils.Vector(camZ)

        # get camera parent
        camParent = obj.parent

        # get parent orientation to world axis
        parentOrient = camParent.orientation

        # get parent z axis vector
        parentZ = [parentOrient[0][2], parentOrient[1][2], parentOrient[2][2]]

        # create parent z axis vector
        vec2 = mathutils.Vector(parentZ)

        # find angle between two
        angle = vec1.angle(vec2)

        # get amount to limit mouselook
        capAngle = obj['Cap']

        # get mouse up down movement
        moveY = move[1] * invert

        # check capped angle against against camera z-axis and mouse y movement
        if (angle > (90 + capAngle/2) and moveY > 0) or (angle < (90 - capAngle/2) and moveY < 0) == True:

        # no movement
            capped = True

    # return capped
    return capped

###############################################

# define useMouseLook
def useMouseLook(controller, capped, move, invert, sensitivity):

    # get up/down movement
    if capped == True:
       upDown = 0
    else:
        upDown = move[1] * sensitivity * invert 

    # get left/right movement
    leftRight = move[0] * sensitivity * invert 

    # Get the actuators
    act_LeftRight = controller.actuators["LeftRight"]
    act_UpDown = controller.actuators["UpDown"] 

    # set the values
    act_LeftRight.dRot = [ 0.0, 0.0, leftRight]
    act_LeftRight.useLocalDRot = False 

    act_UpDown.dRot = [ upDown, 0.0, 0.0]
    act_UpDown.useLocalDRot = True

    # Use the actuators
    controller.activate(act_LeftRight)
    controller.activate(act_UpDown) 

#############################################

# define center mouse cursor
def centerCursor(controller, gameScreen):

    # extract width and height from gameScreen
    width = gameScreen[0]
    height = gameScreen[1]

    # Get sensor named MouseLook
    mouse = controller.sensors["MouseLook"]

    # get cursor position
    pos = mouse.position

    # if cursor needs to be centered
    if pos != [ int(width/2), int(height/2)]:

    # Center mouse in game windowp
        bge.render.setMousePosition(int(width/2), int(height/2))

    # already centered. Turn off actuators
    else:
    # Get the actuators
        act_LeftRight = controller.actuators["LeftRight"]
        act_UpDown = controller.actuators["UpDown"] 

    # turn off the actuators
        controller.deactivate(act_LeftRight)
        controller.deactivate(act_UpDown) 

##############################################

# Run program
main()######################################################
#
# MouseLook.py Blender 2.54 by Yorn Callens
#
#   Adapted by ProperVandal from 2.49 source at tutorialsforblender3d.com
#
# Changed by Knospi to run in Blender 2.55
#
# Released under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
#
# If you use this code, please include this information header.
#
######################################################

import bge
import mathutils

# define main program
def main():

# set default values
    Sensitivity = 0.0005
    Invert = 1
    Capped = False

    # get controller
    controller = bge.logic.getCurrentController()

    # get the object this script is attached to
    obj = controller.owner

    # get the size of the game screen
    gameScreen = gameWindow()

    # get mouse movement
    move = mouseMove(gameScreen, controller, obj)

    # change mouse sensitivity?
    sensitivity = mouseSen(Sensitivity, obj)

    # invert mouse pitch?
    invert = mousePitch(Invert, obj)

    # upDown mouse capped?
    capped = mouseCap(Capped, move, invert, obj)

    # use mouse look
    useMouseLook(controller, capped, move, invert, sensitivity)

    # Center mouse in game window
    centerCursor(controller, gameScreen)

#####################################################

# define game window
def gameWindow():

    # get width and height of game window
    width = bge.render.getWindowWidth()
    height = bge.render.getWindowHeight()

    return (width, height)

#######################################################

# define mouse movement function
def mouseMove(gameScreen, controller, obj):

    # Get sensor named MouseLook
    mouse = controller.sensors["MouseLook"]

    # extract width and height from gameScreen
    width = gameScreen[0]
    height = gameScreen[1]

    # distance moved from screen center
    x = width/2 - mouse.position[0]
    y = height/2 - mouse.position[1]

    # initialize mouse so it doesn't jerk first time
    if 'mouseInit' in obj == False:
        obj['mouseInit'] = True
        x = 0
        y = 0

    #########   stops drifting on mac osx

    # if sensor is deactivated don't move
    if not mouse.positive:
        x = 0
        y = 0

    ######### -- mac fix contributed by Pelle Johnsen

    # return mouse movement
    return (x, y)

######################################################

# define Mouse Sensitivity
def mouseSen(sensitivity, obj):

    # check so see if property named Adjust was added
    if 'Adjust' in obj == True:

    # Don't want Negative values
        if obj['Adjust'] < 0.0:
            obj['Adjust'] = 0.0

    # adjust the sensitivity
        sensitivity = obj['Adjust'] * sensitivity

    # return sensitivity
    return sensitivity

#########################################################

# define Invert mouse pitch
def mousePitch(invert, obj):

    # check to see if property named Invert was added
    if 'Invert' in obj == True:

    # pitch to be inverted?
        if obj['Invert'] == True:
            invert = -1
        else:
           invert = 1

    # return mouse pitch
    return invert

#####################################################

# define Cap vertical mouselook
def mouseCap(capped, move, invert, obj):

    # check to see if property named Cap was added
    if 'Cap' in obj == True:    

    # import mathutils
     #   import Mathutils

    # limit cap to 0 - 180 degrees
        if obj['Cap'] > 180:
            obj['Cap'] = 180
        if obj['Cap'] < 0:
            obj['Cap'] = 0

        # get the orientation of the camera to world axis
        camOrient = obj.orientation

        # get camera Z axis vector
        camZ = [camOrient[0][2], camOrient[1][2], camOrient[2][2]]

        # create camera z axis vector
        vec1 = mathutils.Vector(camZ)

        # get camera parent
        camParent = obj.parent

        # get parent orientation to world axis
        parentOrient = camParent.orientation

        # get parent z axis vector
        parentZ = [parentOrient[0][2], parentOrient[1][2], parentOrient[2][2]]

        # create parent z axis vector
        vec2 = mathutils.Vector(parentZ)

        # find angle between two
        angle = vec1.angle(vec2)

        # get amount to limit mouselook
        capAngle = obj['Cap']

        # get mouse up down movement
        moveY = move[1] * invert

        # check capped angle against against camera z-axis and mouse y movement
        if (angle > (90 + capAngle/2) and moveY > 0) or (angle < (90 - capAngle/2) and moveY < 0) == True:

        # no movement
            capped = True

    # return capped
    return capped

###############################################

# define useMouseLook
def useMouseLook(controller, capped, move, invert, sensitivity):

    # get up/down movement
    if capped == True:
       upDown = 0
    else:
        upDown = move[1] * sensitivity * invert 

    # get left/right movement
    leftRight = move[0] * sensitivity * invert 

    # Get the actuators
    act_LeftRight = controller.actuators["LeftRight"]
    act_UpDown = controller.actuators["UpDown"] 

    # set the values
    act_LeftRight.dRot = [ 0.0, 0.0, leftRight]
    act_LeftRight.useLocalDRot = False 

    act_UpDown.dRot = [ upDown, 0.0, 0.0]
    act_UpDown.useLocalDRot = True

    # Use the actuators
    controller.activate(act_LeftRight)
    controller.activate(act_UpDown) 

#############################################

# define center mouse cursor
def centerCursor(controller, gameScreen):

    # extract width and height from gameScreen
    width = gameScreen[0]
    height = gameScreen[1]

    # Get sensor named MouseLook
    mouse = controller.sensors["MouseLook"]

    # get cursor position
    pos = mouse.position

    # if cursor needs to be centered
    if pos != [ int(width/2), int(height/2)]:

    # Center mouse in game windowp
        bge.render.setMousePosition(int(width/2), int(height/2))

    # already centered. Turn off actuators
    else:
    # Get the actuators
        act_LeftRight = controller.actuators["LeftRight"]
        act_UpDown = controller.actuators["UpDown"] 

    # turn off the actuators
        controller.deactivate(act_LeftRight)
        controller.deactivate(act_UpDown) 

##############################################

# Run program
main()

Made with Blender, Luxrender. Thx to Macke who lends me his Server as a rendermachine.

Free to Use.

Zutaten:

• 3 Eggs
• 1,5 Becher Zucker
• 2 Becher Mehl
• 1/4 Butter
• Kleinen Löffel Backpulver
• 3 Päckchen Vanillezucker
• Sahne
• Frischkäse
• Früchte nach Belieben
• 2-3 Löffel Buttermilch

Zubereitung:

Zuerst den Teig:

1. Das weisse der Eier steif schlagen.
2. Zucker zugeben und durchmixen.
3. Eigelb und Mehl, Backpulver, Buttermilch und geschmolzene Butter zugeben und durchmixen.
4. Im Ofen bei 200º goldbraun backen

Dann die Creme:

1. Sahne etwas mixen
2. Vanillezucker und Frischkäse zugeben, durchmixen

Früchte in Scheibchen schneiden und auf den Teig legen. Creme darüberstreichen und fertig!

Guten Appetit!

Blender and Luxrender

Ihr könnt euch den Song hier Downloaden: Waschmaschinenparty.mp3

Viel Spass beim hören

Beste Grüße,
Knospi

First used Blender to export video footage as tga to voodoo, tracked motion, imported back into blender. Then inserted 3d elements and enabled softbody. Finally shadow and reflection.