Gaffer-Tape Engineering : Homebrewed Machines

Vista Media Centre and Freeview

Jason Neave — Tue, 20 May 2008 00:08:00 GMT

So, I ordered a dual tuner (http://shop.blackgold.tv/product/3550.html) and plugged it in to the aerial feed from my roof. So far I am incredibly impressed. After installing the drivers for the USB stick MC picked it up straight away and started the setup process. After tapping in my postcode and choosing which transmitter I was pointed towards it started scanning for channels. A good churn later all the usual suspects showed up.

Timeshifting rocks, rewinding TV kicks ass and series link is something I am certainly looking forward to. Currently reading up on something called the DVRMS Toolbox (http://msmvps.com/blogs/chrisl/archive/2006/08/10/107296.aspx) which includes automated comercial skipping on recorded tv shows. Definately looking forward to that!

As always an update will be forthcoming when I've had more time to play around but so far I am very impressed.

My New Toy: Windows Media Centre

Jason Neave — Fri, 16 May 2008 16:43:00 GMT

I've had an old warhorse of a machine serving my media needs for some years and now I am moving house and will be moving back to Freeview so I thought I would build a new Media Centre machine based around Vista Ultimate. To that end I've sourced and thrown together the following parts;

Silverstone ML02 Micro-ATX case
Gigabyte 780G Series Motherboard
AMD 4600 AM2+ Processor
2GB DDR2 RAM
500GB Seagate HDD
Slimline DVD-ROM

The ultimate aim of this system is to view HD content, the motherboard I am using has HDMI onboard and those onboard graphics are capable of DX10 which is nice. The HDMI port also supports HDCP which will allow me to upgrade the DVD-ROM drive to a Blu-ray drive at some point in the future, an easy choice now the format debate is over. The motherboard also supports PCI-E which I will be filling with the Blackgold 6-in-1 Tuner card, on a sinle card you get dual analogue, digital terestrial and digital sattelite and as Freesat (www.freesat.co.uk) has just been released in the UK with the promise of free HD content from the BBC, ITV, ~~Channel 4~~ and a few others this choice is a no brainer.
Update: Channel 4 HD will be BSkyB only, no news on Freesat yet though likely it will move over at some point.

So far I've only played some HD content freely available online, a few trailers for example and a program released under Creative Commons whose name eludes me but the picture quality is astounding, definetly the way forward! It has to be said, with the new interface and improved hardware spec the addition I am most happy with is the remote. Until now I have been using a wireless keyboard, somewhat unwieldy to say the least, and being able to use a remote is a blessing. It also plays ball quite happily with my Home Server.

The last thing to note is the power requirements of this new machine. The board and processor I chose are based on mobile technology, to that end they are quite efficient devices. I borrowed a power meter from a friend of mine to test the power usage and while watching HD content from the hard disc it used a mere 60 Watts. Considering that most standard lightbulbs in the UK are of a similar rating and a less entertaining to watch I would say this is a hell of a result. The tuner card should add around 9 Watts to this however I will be replacing the hard disk with a WD Green Power disk that runs at 7 Watts so that should even things out quite nicely.

More news as I play around with it more.
Jason

My Home Server Upgrade

Jason Neave — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 19:16:00 GMT

I recently decided to take the plunge and decided my home server really deserved a case rather than running on my dining room table so invested in new hardware for my Home Server. I also upgraded from the 1GHz workhorse I was using to an almighty 1.2GHz system. The difference is amazingly underwhelming, a testament to the low requirements of WHS I guess.

Jetway J7F4 Mainboard
1GB RAM
2TB Storage

Western Digital Green Power 1TB
2x Maxtor 500GB

Chenbro WHS Case
SATA PCI Card (2xSATA)

I found these at mini-itx.com (other retailers available). The impressive thing is the Jetway is fanless, runs at only 7W under full load and has dual gigabit ethernet. The Chenbro is also really easy to install the hardware considering the size of the case and pretty quiet too, the big decider is the drives you use though the Green Power discs barely vibrate while active and those too run at 7W under load. Between the mainboard and GP discs you could have a 4TB home server solution that runs at around 35W under full load. Truly astonishing considering most desktop PCs have ~500W power supplies as standard.

Bottom line if you want to go it alone and make your own WHS, I couldn't recommend the above any higher. For legal reasons the choice is yours however ;)

Jason

HomeServer Tomfoolery - Tips and Tricks

Jason Neave — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 15:21:00 GMT

So, finally got homeserver running on my ghetto setup. At the minute it consists of a VIA EPIA M10000 mainboard, 512MB RAM, two 500GB Seagate Baracuda's and a random power supply I had lying around. The case is notable by its absense, this is currently living on my dining room table.

Asides aside, it is running superbly. The borderline-obselete mainboard, it is only 1GHz afterall, is more than comforable with WHS running on it and the backup and remote access features are simply astounding.

Tips and Tricks

First things first, a few assumptions. Most home users have a single username and password combo that they use amongst thier home machines. ie "User" and "password" are the same across laptop and desktop. If you add a user to WHS with the same username/password combp you get to use something called passthrough authentication. This means that you will not have to supply credentials to WHS when connection from a machine on the same network.

Another useful tip is to set the location of your "special" folders to a share on your homeserver. For example, right click on your "My Pictures" folder in XP ("Pictures" in Vista) and select properties. One of the tabs should read "Location", set this to the following location replacing the placeholders as needed;

\\homeserver\Users\username\Pictures

If this folder doens't already exist it will ask you if you want to create it, it will then ask if you want to move the existing files to the new location. This will move all your pitcures to your personal folder within WHS under the "Pictures" folder. If you perform the same task on your other machines all of them will work against the same folder. It also automatically sets up Offline Files for this folder (Professional OS dependant, not available on Home Editions) and you will also be able to access these files by remote access.

~~This same principle can be used for your Music, Videos, Documents and Favourites folders. Probably a few others too but I haven't use for them.~~

Update: As the redirection above would result in frequent direct access to a share by programs on a client machine I have struck the text out as this is not recommended due to the data coruption bug;

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/946676

Once the bug is fixed then this method can be used once more though until then I would not recommend (nor use myself) the above.

Hope this helps, comments welcome!

Jason