Dagnabbit
I figured that I would get a little more time before I got to feel like an idiot for manually upgrading all my AppleTVs to 160gb. Ah, well, almost 7 weeks of feeling good about it, that isn't bad, I suppose 
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June 1, 2007
May 22, 2005
Windows Media Center Woes
I had two of my ReplayTV 4500's fail in the past couple of months, and I can't even scare them up on eBay anymore. In a flash of insight on how to retain loyal customers, the folks at ReplayTV made the 5500 series MPEG hardware incompatible with the 4500 series MPEG hardware. So, if you have archived hundreds of shows or have a network of Replay TV's, you can't add new devices one at a time - you have to replace them all - and then you still can't play your archived shows. So given there was no upgrade path for me with ReplayTV, I was finally motivated to move to the “beta test” phase of rolling out Microsoft Windows Media Center Edition (MCE) PC's and Media Center Extenders in the Eisler Digital Media Home.
I bought 2 fairly inexpensive Dell 8400's loaded with MCE and 3 Linksys Media Center extenders. MCE is super easy to customize for controlling a settop box, and I quickly had it recording shows from my DirecTV setttop box. I wasn't too happy with the quality below best, but best looks great (albeit it takes 3-4 gigabytes for an hour). Playback from the extender was easy, but I had to uninstall and reinstall the extender software each time I added a new extender - the setup software kept saying it was already set up. In the less cool category - extender's can't play back DVDs on a harddrive, and can only be dedicated to a single Media Center PC.
I hooked the 2nd Dell up to my Samsung DLP television (via a DVI connection, so I get a sweet 1280x720 resolution). First the cool: MCE PC's can play DVDs off of a harddrive, and it even works over a network! So I pointed the 2nd Dell at my archives and bada boom, bada bing - movies on demand. Now the less cool - MCE PC's don't peer with other MCE PC's, so you can't easily navigate and play the stuff being recorded on the other media center PC. You have to get at the recorded shows through this god-awful giant boxes “My Videos” interface they give you, which shows you only the huge obscure file name and none
of the information about the show itself. There is a plugin called “Share Recorded TV” out there, but I haven't tried too hard to make it work yet. It could allegedly solve my problem getting my one Dell to talk to the other.
Things went downhill for me as I have really expanded my in home “beta test” of MCE and the extenders. It turns out networking is the bane of Windows Media Center. Not sure what those folks up in Redmond were thinking, but it is unbelievably painful to use networked storage or access networked files, and in some cases, it just doesn't work. For example, to get your media center extenders and media center PC to actually see networked storage, you have to do the following arcane steps:
I gotta say, I am baffled that MSFT could boffo networking this badly. ReplayTV has had a great UI for multiple networked devices for years, heck even the Tivo folks figured it out, but MSFT kind of forgot about that whole networking thing.
Looks like the only way I am going to be able to leverage my networked storage is to write an MCE plugin, but it has been so freakin' long since I have written code you might as well ask me to flap my arms and fly to the moon. The beta test will remain a beta test for a while… I hope no more ReplayTV's fail, or that the supply on eBay improves.
I bought 2 fairly inexpensive Dell 8400's loaded with MCE and 3 Linksys Media Center extenders. MCE is super easy to customize for controlling a settop box, and I quickly had it recording shows from my DirecTV setttop box. I wasn't too happy with the quality below best, but best looks great (albeit it takes 3-4 gigabytes for an hour). Playback from the extender was easy, but I had to uninstall and reinstall the extender software each time I added a new extender - the setup software kept saying it was already set up. In the less cool category - extender's can't play back DVDs on a harddrive, and can only be dedicated to a single Media Center PC.
I hooked the 2nd Dell up to my Samsung DLP television (via a DVI connection, so I get a sweet 1280x720 resolution). First the cool: MCE PC's can play DVDs off of a harddrive, and it even works over a network! So I pointed the 2nd Dell at my archives and bada boom, bada bing - movies on demand. Now the less cool - MCE PC's don't peer with other MCE PC's, so you can't easily navigate and play the stuff being recorded on the other media center PC. You have to get at the recorded shows through this god-awful giant boxes “My Videos” interface they give you, which shows you only the huge obscure file name and none
of the information about the show itself. There is a plugin called “Share Recorded TV” out there, but I haven't tried too hard to make it work yet. It could allegedly solve my problem getting my one Dell to talk to the other.
Things went downhill for me as I have really expanded my in home “beta test” of MCE and the extenders. It turns out networking is the bane of Windows Media Center. Not sure what those folks up in Redmond were thinking, but it is unbelievably painful to use networked storage or access networked files, and in some cases, it just doesn't work. For example, to get your media center extenders and media center PC to actually see networked storage, you have to do the following arcane steps:
- create a directory called netlogon on your media center PC
- share that directory as netlogon
- use notepad to create a file called map.bat in the netlogon directory
- add the following kind of line to map.bat:
net use w: "\\diablo\san" /user:domain\userid password (i.e., whatever credentials you need to access the network share) - go to the Control Panel, select Administrative Tools
- select Computer Management
- select Local Users and Groups
- select Users
- select the user you log onto the machine with (in my case, I have a Craig account)
- select the “Profile” tab
- enter map.bat into the edit box labeled “Logon Script:”
- repeat for every extender you have (they have accounts called MCX1, MCX2, etc)
I gotta say, I am baffled that MSFT could boffo networking this badly. ReplayTV has had a great UI for multiple networked devices for years, heck even the Tivo folks figured it out, but MSFT kind of forgot about that whole networking thing.
Looks like the only way I am going to be able to leverage my networked storage is to write an MCE plugin, but it has been so freakin' long since I have written code you might as well ask me to flap my arms and fly to the moon. The beta test will remain a beta test for a while… I hope no more ReplayTV's fail, or that the supply on eBay improves.
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January 19, 2005
My Digital Media Home
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)
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)
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