Hp Microserver & Dvblink; Media Center perfection

It all started in 2004, I managed to get hold of Windows XP Media Center edition (at the time it was OEM distribution only), and I was taken by the integration of the media features in the first version, no instead of trying to use a mouse on a CRT television connected via svideo cable to use media player in all its blury goodness, suddenly everything was large, easily viewable for a distance and easily navigable via just the keyboard arrow keys. It shows how far we’ve come that now that feels so foreign, that a huge variety of UI styles of scales pervade our lives.

Back then it was a slippery sloop of spending to tweak out the best system, I started with a noisy spare pc built from upgraded parts, using single 500gb disk, which moved to a Raid array, added a tv tuner, then a Freeview (digital) version, then a dual Freeview card.

When the obvious effects of having to turn the audio up so loud to drown out the monster pc, I created my first home server, moving the storage to a share cupboard and keeping the tv tuners and remote local. As years went on, tuner tuners came and went (mainly down to the old rubbish driver support that Blackgold used to provide), the media centre pc shrunk, low profile, large hard disks switched to laptop drives, quite fans and sound padding, but it was never really silent, no matter how much tinkering was done.

In the last year I’ve continued on the quest for an elegant but no compromise media setup, to this end I discovered the joys of the software DVBLink (via the ever resourceful Jason Coombes, aka databasejase on twitter), and figured that there was a way to use one of the most beautiful pieces of technology to pimp my system.

I already knew that I wanted to stay with Windows for the media centre, the updates to Windows 7 are superb and when I upgraded my server to Windows Home Server (v1) I found the joy of the TV Archive add-on for media centre, which as you would imagine, allows you to archive recorded programs from the local machine to the home server.

When it came time to upgrade the home server, I was looking for something small, fast, but quite. This is a tricky compromise, you can buy a powerful machine but it would need more watts and cooling. I don’t do transcoding or ripping of video so all it need to do was serve data without stuttering. Ever.

In the end I saw the HP Microserver, small yes but with a support for basic Raid arrays (which came in handy when Microsoft dropped the bomb on the excellent Drive Extender), the box also supports a DVD drive internally, something I’ve found to be much more reliable and faster than any USB model.

Interestingly it also has two PCIe slots, something I had originally had in my Acer Windows Home Server box. That box was underpowered when it came to running Windows Home Server 2011, the 64bit requirement killed the little power it had left over, where as the HP box turned out to have twice the power and performance in almost as a petite case.

The HP micro server allowed me to try the jump from local tuner in the media centre to use DVBLink to share the Terratec dual Freeview card, unfortunately it was a complete failure, not only not working but crashing the OS so hard you hard to unplug it to get it back!

The problem was the drivers weren’t probably supported under Windows Server x64, which is the underpinnings for Windows Home Server 2011. So after another shop around I found the brand new Blackgold dual low profile Freeview HD BGT3620, a superb card, great drivers and a picture you just wouldn’t believe comes in over the air.

After installing the card into one of the HP’s slots, routing all aerial half way around the house and installing the client on the Media Center we were in business, setup of DVBLink isn’t the world most straight forward, but that should improve with the next version, when it does give you is a very comprehensive set of features, the ability to manage the channel list on the server rather than each client, manage where the EPG data is coming from and group lots of tuners together into one virtual service for any network connected device (I’ve used dvblink in a garden over wifi, although the there’s not quite enough bandwidth for HD unfortunately).

The last part of my system change was to find a new Media Center pc, this time I wasn’t held back by the need for a low profile card (yes I could have used USB cards but personally I have found them unreliable and messy), so with the latest refresh I decided to get a Mac Mini (2011 edition).

Sure it’s not the fastest pc, it certainly isn’t cheap, but is it absolutely stunning piece of design. I upgraded the hard disk to a 128gb SSD, which will make any machine fly, no matter of processing power, installed Mac OS, then used bootcamp, giving Windows the lions share of the space.

This system only works thanks to the combination of DVBLink supplying the signal and TV Archiver moving the data out a couple of hours after programs are recorded. This way the Mac Mini works as a local recording cache, I don’t worry about it filling up because of the symbiotic nature of the way the Media Center and Home Server work together.

After about 9months of use I can say it’s been bullet proof. No issues, almost infinite recording capability, multiple HD stream recording without ever dropping a frame. It’s almost magic!

In the future I’m sure I will upgrade the hardware, including the amazing quad Freeview HD tuner recently announced by Blackgold, and the new DVBlink software which will support up to 8 tuners, but fundamentally I won’t be changing the way I do things, as this setup is virtually magical in use.

 

Saving hard disk space on a dedicated Media Center system

After recently realising that Media Center eats about 5gb for each tuner it thinks it has, and DVBlink v4 supplying 8 virtual tuners to each machine, I realised that I needed to find out where all my hard disk space had disappeared to. Granted I didn’t start out with that much, given my Mac Mini only has a 128gb SSD installed, this mean doing something I didn’t think I would need to in this day and age… hacking Windows settings to send it on a diet.

The first test is to find out where it’s all going, I used the free utility WinDirStat, which is useful for visualising the used space. This showed a couple of things, most of the files used are in the system and user folders, but the largest thing was basically invisible, in the form of offline folder caching which I had inadvertently switch on when routing my pictures and my video folders directly to the home server.

The offline cache had topped out at 20gb of video I didn’t need stored so I went to disable it. Unfortunately this didn’t delete the files in question, only stopped it for using the service. To delete the cache I had to use this guide to edit the registry (something not recommended for newbies as it is dangerous to the health of your computer if you get things wrong).

That saved 20gb which is a good step, next is the winsxs folder in the system folder, which holds some system files and some backup files from various installations. Luckily for Windows 7 there’s a command line that can tidy up the folder and save some space, but you should start with the standard disk clean up tool first. This saved 2gb. I then discovered that system restore points eat space, as its a media center only I don’t need to safety net, so disabled those from the ‘system’ control panel, that give you 4gb.

Finally I decided that as I have a SSD based machine, with 4gb of memory and it only runs Media Center, I can do without the system page’s feature, which matches your memory’s size with some virtual memory on the hard disk. As media center should never need that function I’m going to try disabling it and see how things work out.

I can also recommend looking at the ‘Windows Features’ panel and switching off some of the redundant services (games, gadgets and tablet pc features to name a few), I’m not sure if that saves space because I did that before really tracking what was used.

So now I’m in better shape to use DVBlink and 8 tuners, the system should be using around 20gb, live tv buffering will take another 40gb for 8 tuners which will leave 45gb for local recordings before bing pushed up to the Windows Home Server using the Tv Archive addon. The next time I come to install I’m going to try doing a clean install of Windows 7 without OSX and bootcamp and that’s the largest remaining space hog, with its 15gb partition.

It’s worth pointing out that this is only ever worth doing it if (A) you know what you’re doing, or (B) don’t really care if things go wrong. Always backup any data (or better yet just don’t keep any on there, that’s what the Home Server’s for after all) and only do something like this if you really really need the space, as Windows 7 runs wonderfully if left to it’s own devices.

(image credit, the always adorable Maru)

Windows Media Center eat my hard disk

Whilst trying out the rather excellent DVBlink 4.0 I came across a strange quirk in Windows Media Center when using lots of TV tuners: it eats hard disk space like it’s going out of fashion.

I say this as a user of a mac mini with a 128gb sad installed running Windows Media Center. Now this setup is never going to win any storage awards but as it’s linked with Windows Home Server’s excellent TV archive add-on (which moves recorded programs slowly over to the server some time after the recording is complete) the lack of storage really shouldn’t be an issue.

Apparently until now Media Center agreed, it had been using 50gb of the 105gb Windows partition, seeing as the most it would use would be about 3gb an hour for BBC Freeview HD program that still leaves plenty of space for many hour of recordings before TV archiver kicks in. This all changed when testing DVBlink v4, runs as a service supplying 8 tuners as a network service. Obviously the number of tuners I have (two) hasn’t changed, but with the upcoming Blackgold Quad Freeview HD tuner, I’m sure this will change at some point.

Unfortunately due to the way Media Center works it likes to reserve a chunk of space for live tv recordings, which seems to be different and separate to the system cache of 1gb per tuner it already has. This is where my well laid plan fell apart as the space reserved by Media Center is extraordinarily large, taking about 40gb of space (ie all of it) for 8 tuners, compared to 20gb for 4 tuners and about 10gb for 2 tuners (anecdotal evidence suggests the rate is about 5gb reserved space per tuner, which would match my findings)

The really pain is that if you’re not using all the tuners in the previous version of DVBlink you could easily just not set them up in Media Center. That doesn’t seem to be the case with DVBlink v4.0 Beta, something I hope will change otherwise I’ll have to switch back to a slower conventional hard disk to support Media Centers hunger for space.

Drowning out the sounds of disappointment from my Core 5i Mac Mini Media Center

On paper it should be been the perfect upgrade, after a year of using the old mac mini I decided to splash out on a new Core i5 based 2011 Mac mini, it’s advantages of a faster processor and better video card, that I was going to use for recording more HD streams in Media Center, it’s is disadvantages of the lack of an internal DVD didn’t bother me as it’s been years since I had last needed on.

Sadly in practice my experience with the mac mini is that Apple have over stretched the design of the previous generation’s case, by including such a powerful processor the lack of space for cooling has impacted my intended use as a Windows Media Center replacement. When pushed by recording a HD stream and playing back a HD recording the noise is distinctly noticeable over the programs audio, which is a terrible shame as I am sure the Core2duo based Mac Mini will struggle whilst recording multiple HD streams. I currently only have a the capability to record two HD channels, but even when doing this and playing an existing HD recording the old mac mini produces no noise what so ever.

If there is an answer I believe it lays with the Macbook Air, a fantastic fast laptop that produces very little noise or heat except in normal use, it does it by using a mobile version of the Core process. I don’t understand why Apple decided to jump from a laptop class processor to a desktop one in their latest Mac Mini designs, the ultra low version of the processor makes so much more sense for the Mini’s small case design.

Lets hope this is just a glitch and that the next generation will return the Mac Mini to it’s cool and quite state of mind. I for one will be keeping the old design and crossing my fingers it has the legs to keep up with todays growing HD content demands.

BlackGold BGT3650 quad tuner low profile tv card pricing announced

I was very happy to see Blackgold have updated their site to annonce the price of their Quad Freeview HD tuner I think is so ripe to upgrade to. Still a low profile single antenna input card which delivers 4 streams of HD television goodness in the UK (but given their are only 4 HD channels it can still be used for all the normal freeview services as well).

The best bit? They’re only selling it for £139 (plus VAT and delivery, which should round up to around £176.70). That’s still an absolute deal if you need 4 tuners in your media center system (or as I have done just hooked the whole think to a DVBlink server, which lets you stream to any device).

Now let me preorder it and I’ll happily hand over some cash!

via BGT3650

Mceiptv web streaming addon for Windows Media Center gets a UI preview

In a follow up to the the preview of ‘ddfczm’ latest web streaming project for media center, previously featured here, there’s now another update in the form of a UI preview video, showing off the extensible multi service addon for Windows Media Center although an early preview and still in development, the UI looks sharp and very functional. This is one I’m really looking forward to testing.

via Australian Media Center Community

« Older Entries