Craig's Musings

For many years now, I have been driven to eliminate the need for television tuners and DVD players beside my television. Everything digital, everything on demand, has been my obsession for years now.

The first step of any Digital Media Home is to eliminate the need to ever watch live TV. Ever since the 320gb Replay TV hit the market 4 or 5 years ago, the need to watch live TV went away in the Eisler house. Fast forward to 2005, and we have 3 ReplayTV's, each custom upgraded to 400gb harddrives recording all our favorite shows, and 4 basic ReplayTVs attached to our various TVs to do playback.

Recording them on upgraded ReplayTV's is all well and good, but the next problem for my Digital Media Home was to be able to store the shows and watch them anywhere, and the cool open source project DV Archive solved that. Any PC can look like a ReplayTV to other ReplayTVs, and I can copy the .MPG files that my 3 recording ReplayTVs make to the archive PC. This makes it possible it possible for me to archive my favorite shows, along with my kids favorite PBSKIDS and Noggin shows.

To make that work at reasonable scale, about 2 years ago I built a dual 2 ghz Xeon server with 1.5 terabytes of RAID 5 storage (with a hot spare so that in the event of a drive failure, a rebuild can start immediately), using an 8 port 3Ware Escalade controller and 8 250 gigabyte Maxtor IDE drives. This worked great, since an hour of medium quality video on a ReplayTV is about 1.8 gigabytes, so with 1.5 terabytes you can archive over 800 hours of shows. One small glitch is that the ReplayTV's freak out and get hideously slow after a couple hundred shows are in the index, so I had to add a couple more servers to distribute the load (plus added another 1.25 te
rabytes of storage while I was at it).

Archiving & viewing time shifted television that is part of the solution for my Digital Media Home, but still not good enough. I have been building a DVD collection ever since the first DVDs hit the market back in 1998 or so. They get scratched. They get dirty. And they are massively inconvenient to go and get from the basement when you are relaxing on the couch. So the logical next step for my Digital Media Home was to find a way to archive my DVDs that I have been buying (about 1000 over the past 6 years) so that a) my kids don't destroy them and b) that I can watch any one of them on demand without having to muck about through a giant stack, find the DVD and run upstairs. Yes, this is a pretty minor concern in light of world events the past 5 years, but still, one needs to have his priorities.

Backing up one's DVDs is a fascinating convergence of fair use and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. All I will say on that topic is that I have paid a huge amount of money since 1998 to acquire my 1000 DVDs, and I would like to be allowed to protect that investment. Assuming that one could find a way to back up one's DVDs, the next problem becomes one of storage. DVDs are 4-8 gigabytes a piece, so 1000 DVDs could take 5 terabytes or more. Luckily this is where cool new technologies like iSCSI and 400 gigabyte SATA drives step in for my Digital Media Home!

This past Christmas, I set up a Promise VTrak 15200, which is a nifty iSCSI appliance that allows you to build a low cost Storage Area Network (SAN) that works over gigabit Ethernet, instead of requiring high cost fiber channel infrastructure. Couple that with 15 low cost (relatively) high performance 400gb SATA drivers from Seagate, and bada-boom, bada-bing, 4.8 terabytes of storage. It could have been as high as 6.0 terabytes, but I burned 3 drives on redundancy - RAID 50 with a hot spare. RAID 50 is quite sporty - it is two striped RAID 5 arrays, so the performance is better than RAID 5 and you have higher redundancy as you can lose 2 drives simultaneously (albeit you can only lose one in each RAID 5 array). The throughput to the VTrak while using the gigabit network port of the server left something to be desired, so I installed a QLogic iSCSI HBA card which over doubled the throughput to about 40megabytes per second. The same server that had the 1.5 terabytes of storage is where I attached the VTrak, so it has a total of 6.3 terabytes now. My two other servers have a combined 1.25 terabytes (not counting the boot drives), which gives my Digital Media Home a total of 7.5 terabytes or so of networked storage. Damned cool. Not a petabyte yet, but check back in another 5 years.

Of course, archiving one's DVDs is different than being able to watch them from one's TV. That is the next annoying problem I am working on - one can watch one's archived DVDs from the PC, but how does one get them to be watched - unmodified - from a cheap appliance that connects to the TV. So far, Windows Media Center extenders, networked DVD players, and generic media appliances have all disappointed. But more on that for another blog, this one already seems far too geeky and far too long.

(Updated 1/23/05 @ 5:01pm)

Posted by Craig at 8:36 PM | Permalink

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Last updated June 13, 2007

I was born in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada, but after 7 years of gradual relocation across the country, grew up in Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada. I attended the University of Waterloo, and during my time as a co-op student worked for around 1 1/2 as a systems programmer hacking MVS for a large bank. I also did a year and a half long stint as a grad student in mathematical physics before deciding that it wasn't for me and getting a job with a development tools company called Watcom.

I was at Watcom for about 3 years (from 1990 to 1993) where I worked on debuggers, compilers and even a 32-bit Windows Extender (which people cared about in 1991 and is as irrelevant to technology today as Loverboy is to music). Watcom was eventually acquired by Sybase, and all the old Watcom tools code is now available under open source from OpenWatcom.org.

While at Watcom , I became friends with a Technical Evangelist named Eric Engstrom who talked me me into interviewing at Microsoft, and before I knew it, I ended up moving to Redmond, WA in June of 1993, where I worked for the Windows Marketing group as a Technical Evangelist. A little less than a year later I moved to the Windows 95 team to work on Multimedia. After working on some projects related to games & high performance multimedia, a couple of friends (Alex St. John and Eric) & I got frustrated with what was being done and started work on something that was briefly know as the Game SDK for Windows 95, but we called it DirectX by the time we shipped the first version. I was the development manager of Direct X from the inception until half way through version 5. Eric & I filed for a few patents related to DirectX along the way - and somehow Eric's name ended up first on 7 of the 12, which means I must have been drinking too much when we agreed to the order of our names. I blogged about my DirectX memories here.

The internet push for MSFT got into full gear by late 96/early 97, and I went to focus on Internet Multimedia, where we worked on inserting a lot of cool high-end 3D into Internet Explorer. After Internet Multimedia, I was the general manager of the Windows Media Platform Group from April of 1998 (it was called Netshow when I first took the job) until I left Microsoft in January of 2000.

I was the CEO of a Redmond based wireless software company, Action Engine, from January of 2000 until March of 2004. It was a great experience - raised around $35. 5 million over the 4+ years, built a ground-breaking client-server platform that was deployed by wireless operators around the globe, and drove significant revenue growth along the way. I was even a Seattle 40 under 40 winner; of course, that was back in the good old days when I was actually under 40. In September 2001, we published my favorite rant about wireless - which amazingly is still almost entirely applicable now, years later.

Right before I left Action Engine in early 2004, I did an interview with UW TV that goes through most of the above.

In June of 2004, I moved back east to Virginia and joined America Online (a subsidiary of Time Warner) where I helped kick off the company's open platform efforts before focusing on wireless once again - from early 2005 until I left AOL, I was the general manager of the AOL Wireless group. On August 8th, 2005, AOL announced the acquisition of Wildseed and the formation of AOL Wireless. There was a quite a bit of press coverage, here is a sample: Reuters USA Today The Register Seattle PI Seattle Times.

We did a lot of really fun stuff in AOL Wireless, like launching new WAP services, launching XT9, expanding the reach of mobile AIM, making it easy to migrate from the desktop to mobile, and my favorite thing, the launch at CES 2007 of our Smartscreens portable media hardware & software reference design with Haier America (more detail was provided in Haier's CTIA announcement).

I left AOL in February 2007 to rejoin Microsoft - for me, it looks like all roads lead to the world's largest software maker (even if it means moving across the country and back again). After spending a couple of months investigating different options inside Robbie Bach's Entertainment & Devices Division, I became the General Manager of the Macintosh Business Unit - one of the coolest jobs in the company.

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