Dev With Imagination

I have no idea when exactly this issue started happening, but for a while now I have been noticing that when I attempted to play media through the Plex application on my Xbox One it would default to transcoding down to a lower quality. While this was an annoyance, I could always manually set the quality back to original quality.

Finally this week I spent a bit of time to try and work out why.

The Problem

It appears that the majority of Plex clients on my network were considering the server to be a “remote” server, and so were setting bandwidth restrictions on playback. It is worth noting that there are two types of settings at play here, in the Xbox Plex application, and the bandwidth settings in the Plex Server settings which are available to Plex Pass subscribers.

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The Eclipse MicroProfile project has been evolving over the last few years, but only in the last month or so have I started taking a proper look into it.

The mission of the project is described to provide:

An open forum to optimize Enterprise Java for a microservices architecture by innovating across multiple implementations and collaborating on common areas of interest with a goal of standardization.

–microprofile.io

The collection of framework specifications which are included in this standard, when used along with JAX-RS, provides the pieces required to build applications in a modern “microservices” architecture, while leaving behind more legacy aspects (and bloat) of the Java EE specification.

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In my start of the year post, I had given up with attempting to get Pi-hole to work as a DHCP server while in a docker container and had started using “isc-dhcp-server”. The main driver to having Pi-hole performing DHCP was so that in the dashboard I could see actual hostnames as opposed to the IP addresses of the clients. Instead of persevering with trying to get DHCP working in the Pi-hole container, I took advantage of changes I was making in my home network setup.

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Since I rebuilt my server I have been seeing issues where my use of the transcode-video docker image would consistently fail to complete the encoding process with this error.

transcode-video: invalid byte sequence in US-ASCII

The linked post led me to the solution - I needed to update the Dockerfile for my version of the image to include additional commands to configure the locale. This was a pretty easy addition as I already was using my own to customise a couple of things. I do not know why the appeared, but all I really care about is that it is working again now.

FROM ntodd/video-transcoding
  
# Configure locale
RUN locale-gen en_GB.UTF-8
ENV LANG en_GB.UTF-8
ENV LANGUAGE en_GB:en
ENV LC_ALL en_GB.UTF-8

Ah, the Christmas holidays - a few weeks of rest & relaxation, not having to think about work at all.

So of course it was time to get some little ongoing projects moving!

(Warning - this feels like a long one!)

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