home multimedia network planning (1 Viewer)

[sixgun]

for sure im planning a wired network, maybe wifi for some cients streaming radio or music, but i dont want wifi in the bedrooms...

for all who are interested, my actual plan is to setup MP on a windows home server system and use the computers i actually have, as there is no working solution for MP using thin clients like popcorn hour and i didnt find a (stylish) client computer that meets my demands (1080p output). For instance dells hybid studio looks very nice but has a poor graphic solution and is too expensive...

Hi there,

I actually tried out windows home server back when it was a beta, I found it just didn't work for TV recording. Well, not when your recording drive is part of the drive pool. So, if you are going to use home server I would recommend you have a dedicated hard drive outside of the drive pool for your recordings and timeshift buffer.

You can always set up a scheduled job to copy your recordings to your drive pool should you feel the need to backup your recordings. I use a piece of software called SyncBack for automatically backing up my photos/music, so that might be of use to you.

My current install has a server with 6 DVB-T cards in it. It's a custom built machine with 2 gigs of RAM and an Athlon X2 3800+. I have a 500GB drive for recordings, 1TB for movies, another 500GB for other media (photos/music), a 160GB drive for backups and a 40GB drive for the OS. I use a gigabyte motherboard as I've found those to be the most reliable. All that is in a 19" rack along with a UPS and the network switches. I would definitely recommend a decent capacity UPS with all the hard drives running. Mine gives me 40 minutes of runtime in the event of power loss, it also gives a much more stable and clean power supply to the PC, which improves stability.

For the clients I have custom made PCs, each with 4 GB of RAM and a very efficient AMD CPU 4050e in one and 4850e in the other. I use the gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H board which has an on-board Radeon HD3200. Both clients run Vista x64. I am actually in the process of changing them slightly.

Currently then run Vista Ultimate, which includes Vista Media Centre. Despite my best efforts I cannot stop VMC from loading up on the green button, so I am switching to Vista Business which doesn't include media centre. I am also changing from using 2.5" SATA drives to 2.5" SATA SSD drives to reduce the noise further. (The Western Digital drive I used in one of the PCs keeps clicking due to the power saving scheme, and it cannot be changed by any utility I've found)

Take a look at my web page for details on the build.

All the tuners are on the server, so no need for any tuners in the client PCs, and as everything I need is on the motherboard I've used Hiper Media cases, which look really smart. They're not quite as small as the popcorn hour, but they're just about the smallest case I could get, short of building my own.

In terms of usage of the system, it's brilliant. Each client can schedule recordings, which are then recorded by the server. Recordings can be viewed/deleted/managed from any client. The only thing lacking is it remembering where you got to on each recording independently of which client it was watched on. But that is a minor thing and because of the flexible skipping system it's easy enough to get to where you were.

All my photos/music/movies/documentaries are all stored on the server, and I've set up each client so that it can see them. It's not much hassle to set things up and only needs to be done once. I would recommend investing in a spare keyboard+mouse for setup and maintenance.

I think that pretty much covers everything you asked.


I'd be more than happy to answer any questions you have on my setup if it helps you out with yours.


Anyway, I am off to watch a movie on my main PC (hooked up to a 42" LCD TV )

Regards.