Media Portal Frontend on Compact flash - Tutorial/Howto

[BennieBoy]

Medaust,

CF comes in Various speeds and the fasted will do (they say) 266 speed. However, this is only reading speed as writing to these devices is a complete different story. Writing is often much slower. A 40speed will boot slower than a normal harddisk. A 266 probably faster.

If you want speed, you also can get an SSD (Solid State Disk). These are fast and quiet. But they cost.

Zappza,

Playing the x.264 is only sluggish because of the processor speed as there are no reads or writes to the CF.
And even if there where, they would be filtered out by the EWF.

I bet that a faster processor would solve that problem.
As I told, MPEG2 streams with HD content plays without problems.

Greetz,
Ben

[Zappza]

Ah, thanks a lot then.

Will try to make a USB version of XP then, and give it a shot.
I love the sound of being able to mess everything up, and reboot and be back to scratch, however...
Where do you have your databases?
Just thinking that the "Watched" feature won't work since nothing is saved, or can you specify spesific folders to be saved always?

[BennieBoy]

Zappza,

As described in the howto, MP is started from the Shared Disk.
Do not forget to set the security (also described).

So, with the EWF solution you will protect your bootdisk, not MP.
But then again, when it resides on your server it is quite easy to make a daily or weekly backup.

When you create a bootable USBstick , do not forget to replace the two sys files I described (in another Howto) with the XPe versions. When making a bootable USB-Harddisk, this is not needed.

Have Fun,
Ben

[Zappza]

Hi!

Thanks for the hickup, I had forgotten to replace those two files.
I do have to edit the files the same way as mentioned in the guide you linked to?

Now, I just have to find my USB Pen

By the way, have you upgraded to Gigabit ethernet?
If so, how was the difference? Any quicker response in MP?

[Athlon900]

Would all this work with IDE Flash Modules? They plug directly into the IDE slot instead of buying a CFtoIDE converter and a 2GB CF card...

I was just testing out the EWF setup and after I make all the changes, on my next boot I get the preboot prompt stating that something went wrong and gives me the choices to boot in safe mode or use last known configuration... blah, blah, blah... Is anyone else getting this? Did I do something totally wrong... I'm testing this on a virtual machine not a real one.

Thanks!!

[BennieBoy]

Athlon900,
I have seen those and they should work without problem.
Depending on the price, a CF Card and adapter can be a lot cheaper.

I haven't tried EWF with a virtual machine yet.
I will give it a try as soon as possible.

Zappza,
I did not yet updated to Gigabit yet.
I can try a direct link between the two PC's soon.

But I do not think it will make much difference. Because the delay is not caused by the troughput (I think).

Remark
When the PC boots into windows and MP is automatically started, it can happen that the network is still not available. For this, I wrote a small program (can be found in the main tutorial) which can be started from the "Start Menu"/"Programs"/"Startup".
It is Called WaitForNetwork and takes 3 arguments
TryForNumberOfMillisecond
HostNameOfYourShare
FullNetworkPathToMP

It will start MP the moment it finds the computer with the network share.
You should disable Automatic startup in the configuration.

You can use this small application also for starting other stuff from the network share.
Just replace the FullNetworkPathToMP to the Full Path of your Program.

Timings
I added the timing of the startup of my HTPC (little over 40Seconds fully started)

Greetz,
ben

[Zappza]

Ah, great!
Thanks a lot for your efforts!
I don't either think that the delay was caused by the throughput, if you run by cable, you already have a ping that is below 1ms, unless something is wrong.

Is there anyway of testing the CD?
VMWare or something like that, can you emulate an USB Disk/Pen?

Also, you do have to edit the files included in the XPe before including them to your CD?

[BennieBoy]

Zappza,

When making the bootable USB Stick, you just follow the instructions given here: Ngine.de - How to boot Windows XP off a USB drive

Copy the following two files to c:\windows\drivers (needed when booting from USB Stick)
(The followoing files need no editing).
usbstor.sys
usbhub.sys


And you should have a nice bootable USBStick.

I do not know if VMWare behaves exactly the same as a normal PC (in respect to the USB).
I do know it is almost transparent, so it should work.

Greetz,
Ben

[Zappza]

Yeah, I followed that guide, I just got unsure when I read your guide.

I have edited the files he mentioned in his guide, do I have to edit any extra files to make the XPe features you mention in your guide work?

Also, how should I copy the two files if I can't boot Windows? CMD line through the XP CD?

I will try with VMware when I get home =)

[BennieBoy]

I tried the USB stick I created on VM-Ware, but VMware is not capable to boot from USB-Stick