hometertain: A Shell repository from hiryou

Hometertain

System overview

Home entertainment center host on an odroid-x3/4

Hardware: Odroid xu3/4, OS: ubuntu minimal 18.04
Plex server housing media files
Torrent service (transmission-daemon on ubuntu); Another machine (e.g. mac) used Transmission Remote GUI to manage torrent downloads remotely (within LAN network).
Open VPN service running Private Internet Access (paid subscription)
Movies streamed on plex clients such as mobile phone, smart tv or another computer.

System Building

Install OS

Download img.xz from here. This instruction uses ubuntu 18.04 minimal (headless). Plug eMMC/SD card to adapter, then adapter -> workstation

Obtain list of current mounting devices

diskutil list

Decompress xz to img

$ xz -d /path/to/ubuntu-image.xz
# this will generate ubuntu-image.img

diskutil check again to obtain the correct path to eMMC module

diskutil list

Unmount eMMC path, and flash OS img to it

diskutil unmountdisk /dev/diskX
sudo dd of=/dev/diskX bs=1m if=/path/to/ubuntu-image.img
# waiting..

Unmount it again

diskutil unmountdisk /dev/diskX

Now you can plug it to the droid/raspberry-pi.

If this is an xu3 board, DO NOT use USB 3.0 dongle gigabit internet. It was just cumbersome trying to get this work.
Turn on the board. Default login is root/odroid.

Setup OS and software

Run as root user:

./apts-update.sh
# setup with hostname='plexie'. Change it to whatever name you want.
./setup.sh 'plexie'

After restart, login as odroid user. If cmyip doesn't work, fix it manually:

pip install --user BeautifulSoup4
pip install --user requests

Transmission Client

Transmission client is installed on a client PC to interact with torrent server. This instruction applies to mac:

ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)" < /dev/null 2> /dev/null ; brew install caskroom/cask/brew-cask 2> /dev/null
brew cask install transmission-remote-gui
# Source http://macappstore.org/transmission-remote-gui/

Connect to torrent server using IP, default port 9091, default auth odroid/odroid

Plex client & TV setup

From a client machine (workstation, mobile, etc), open browser and navigate to http://${plex-server-id}:32400/web/index.html. Proceed with normal setup to onboard this new server. When adding libraries, choose /home/odroid/plex/
All plex servers on LAN network should show up now
Now open/restart your TV, you'll see your new server

Enjoy!

The mighty no-head media station!

Developer Notes

Manually manage torrent server (transmission-daemon + VPN)

# as odroid user
torrent-server-stop
torrent-server-start

Transmission-daemon settings
- default /etc/transmission-daemon/settings.json
- running under custom user ~/.config/transmission-daemon/settings.json
To help seed (uploading to other peers) faster
- Router settings: disable QoS (traffic shaping), source
- Stop using VPN (not recommended)

If ipv4 forwarding was somehow not enabled, enable it manually

sudo nano /etc/sysctl.conf
# Uncomment this line: net.ipv4.ip_forward=1
sudo sysctl -p

Optimize both download & seeding: Setup port forwarding
TODO: Add scripts to automatically download subtitles

hiryou/hometertain