Plan for Home Entertainment, with MediaPortal, VPN, TV, PC (1 Viewer)

[BornToLive]

Hi !

After Days of searching, i found Mediaportal, and my first view, perfect! THE solution i was searching for.
I'm still in phase of planing. So i hope i can get some inputs. I will report the success (or fail) of my project, as active forum user it should be no problem.

Here the concept and the questions:



Description:
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(*) Windows-Home-Server, sharing with 2 friends (private and public area) (same music and film taste ), Raid5, 4TB, 20MBit Cable (assured)

(*) Power PC, still in planing. energy consumption and noise does not matter.
i dont want 1 gaming pc and 1 HTPC. 1 should fit all.
(Quad-Core, 4GBRAM, 3 10k SATA HDs Raid 0, graphics-card ?, TV-card ? )

(*) 55" Samsung LED TV, DLNA (but i won't need DLNA with MEdiaportal. )

(*) 24" TFT Full HD in the citchen, as "mirror" of the TV

(*) TV-signal via cable. no satellite
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pc stands in an extra-room. in the living room there is TV, amplifier, USB-HUB for wireless keyboard.
Windows Home-server in another house, connection via OpenVPN and business-cable-connection.
pc should run 7/24
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And here the questions!

1) Anyone experience with mapped network-drives via VPN? performance? (20MBit Up/Down)
2) TV-card -> i have no idea what's on the market, what fits and so on. suggestions?
3) Will my System work? lol


I would be glad about every Input, positive AND negative!

THX!
Klaus

 

[alank]

I VPN to my corp's net. It's slow. I imagine streaming over VPN may disappoint. Maybe not. Probably just have to try it out and see.

 

[BornToLive]

hi alank!

yea, thats what i expect to causing me troubles.
but thx for the input that it finally works.
you connect to corp's net via VPN and then map a networkdrive and use this drive in MP?

thx!

 

[kevinfreels]

Are you absolutely certain that is 20x20 in your home? That would be very odd. Most ISPs limit upload to a fraction of download unless you are a commercial customer. Most 20M cable modems serve out (upload) about 1-2M at best. This allows them to charge much more to companies who need to serve out a lot of data. Most ISPs also have terms of service restrictions that limit you from using too much bandwidth over a long period of time and will throttle your bandwidth if they see you doing that. Again, this is so they can charge more for commercial customers who need that capability.
I would do some serious research into your actual upload capacity. Go to speedtest.net and see what you are getting in upload capacity. Even if you happen to get 20M upload, I would count on your ISP throttling you way back is you start trying to serve out streaming video or other large amounts of data unless you are actually paying for a commercial grade service.

 

[Snedig]

Hey

As for the VPN part, that should be fairly easy to diagnose if you've got the VPN set up today, simply check if you can play the video files you want directly over the VPN via a regular video player like MPC or VLC. If this works, then MP should also stream them fine.

As for the bandwidth issues, even if your upline is slower than your downline, this shouldn't affect you terribly as long as the servers upline is sufficient; after all, you will be streaming from the server, right?

Nevertheless, 20mbit with a VPN overlaid may be cutting it close for watching HD quality video directly, but again this is something you will have to try out, there are too many factors to give a yes or no answer whether it will work beforehand

Another point I wanted to make is about controlling your MP installation - keep in mind that if the server is sitting on a desk somewhere, you will need two points of input for controlling it, one in the kitchen and one in the living room. (That is, unless you don't mind running in there to change the channel and whatnot. )

As for the PC itself, you also had a few questions I might as well have a go at

For a TV-card, anything DirectShow compatible should do the trick - I have personally tried Hauppauge PVR-150, Hauppauge HVR-1700 and Asus MyCinema 6300, all of these cards worked just fine in MP. I would recommend getting a card with a built-in MPEG2 encoder though (as all of the above have), as this will lower the CPU-drain from TV recordings significantly.

As for the rest of the components, the question is cost v. performance - for graphics card, any new nVidia or ATI card should do just fine for MP performance, and support accelerated playback of HD video (DXVA-acceleration), so the question is what price bracket you want, for a gaming machine, you want a fairly fast card obviously. Keep in mind that you will want to check out that your video board supports merging audio into the HDMI output, unless you can connect video and audio separately into your amplifier.

A great link for figuring out the right video board for your budget is here, for a somewhat serious gaming PC I would recommend at least a Radeon HD4870 or GeForce GTX260:
Best Graphics Cards For The Money: July '09 : June Review / July Updates - Review Tom's Hardware

As for the harddrives, you mention running 3 10k drives in a RAID 0. Personally, I might consider just running a single smaller 10k drive for your system, and disk-intensive games, then use a dedicated cheaper drive for TV-recordings - a 7.2k or even 5.4k drive will easily keep up with SD recordings, HD recordings should be fine also on a 7.2k drive. Having your recordings drive free from any other read/write calls should help your performance a lot more than a faster drive.


Hope some of this helps

 

[BornToLive]

hi kevin!

i am a commercial customer! but yea, im still scared it won'T work. the alternative is to buy 1 SDD-HD, and over the day, i decide which film i watch.
then download (connect via VNC) the movie to the SSD-HD and watch it.

Snedig

Great thanks for your input!

i can't try VPN at this moment as i will setup both side at same time. (bad timing, i know)

damn i forgot about the sound connection to graphics card. have to watch that.

hmm, the HD setup is still worrying me. perhaps 1 raptor with 10k rounds and 2 7,2k HDs in Raid 0 would be cheaper at same effect.

next step is Vista 64bit, running on this Hardware.
will keep you up to date with success or fail. lol

thanks again for the great input!!

 

[kevinfreels]

Oh. Well you shouldn't have trouble then. My daughter uses Hamaachi on her Acer netbook to get into our home server all the time. I've ripped most movies down into about 1.3M avi files and it's a bit choppy at times but I'm only putting out 3M. I think 6M would be sufficient for smooth operation. The way I figure it is as long as the time it would take to download the entire file is at least 25% shorter than the movie play time itself you should be OK. This is just a hypothesis on my part. I work for a commercial telco and that seems to work for most other applications as the PC on the other end creates a buffer. You'll just have to look at your file sizes and do the math. Anything you can to to reduce the file sizes will help with speed issues.

I am getting ready to do an experiment though. Amazon S3 recently started a service where you can mail in a hard drive with data to be put on their storage servers. I'm planning on sending them a portable hard drive with about 1TB of movies and music so I can back it all up. There are some APIs out there that let you set up S3 as a drive on your computer that you can drag and drop to. My plan is once that is all in place, see if I can connect to that virtual drive through media portal and if so, see if they serve out the data fast enough to stream directly. If so I'll have quite a nice solution with all my music and movies in the cloud!

 

[BornToLive]

Hi Kevin.

hmm, good thoughts. thanks. i should be able to try it next week.

sounds interesting the serivce.
i guess thats the future all big ones are going.
Google with his Andoids-OS going the same way. i'm looking forward using it then same way like the S3 service then.

what im worrying is about the data itself then.
you are sure 100% of 1TB of DVD, movies, pics and mp3's are 100% legal bought/organized?

so next step is not to buy a DVD, rip/burn or anything, it's like the way with games it's already done.
steam for example, you buy a game online, download it local and play.
and the download way is the thing which will be changed soon i guess.
you buy a DVD, lying on high available storage/stream mediacenter and watch with a software........
(more analytic data then for google&co )

 

[Snedig]

Hey again

I wanted to just interject as far as the web storage goes, even though you can mount them through an API as a drag n' drop drive on your desktop, my guess is that it's not a given that you will be able to stream the videos directly as from a local drive or network mount - this requires the API to emulate a local drive or LM network share, but a lot of the API's I've seen that do this sort of thing are based on FTP, HTTP or similar protocols, which will not allow you to stream the file out-of-the-box or possibly at all.

As for the drives, to do a small comparison, the maximum allowed bitrate for a Blu-Ray disc is 48Mbit/s which equates to about 6MB/s. HDTV broadcasts are usually around 20Mbit/s (~3MB/s), although this your results may vary in Austria. A typical 7.2k HDD has a linear write speed of give or take 70MB/s on average. A WD Raptor drive will average around 100MB/s, which tops out at around 125MB/s at the outside of the platters, and bottoms at around 75MB/s near the spindle. As you can tell, even with inherent losses, even the more modest drives shouldn't have a problem with a single HD stream, although of course the more streams you want to record, the more speed you will need. Nevertheless, a raid 0 (which in itself will increase your read/write speed) of 10k drives can probably be considered overkill unless you record a scary amount of stuff at the same time.

And, just to make a final point, looking at the local price, I could get three 1TB 7.2k drives for near the price of a single 300GB 10k drive, and if you should nevertheless find yourself having trouble with write-speed, dedicating a drive to each tuner would give you a much better result than sharing a single, faster drive for all recordings. And keep in mind, HDTV-recordings do consume a lot of space, so you will be grateful for more space - I myself found out early on that 250GB for SD recordings was a bit on the low side.

 

[BornToLive]

Update!

Yo!

Here's the update, nearly everything is working:



What i still wonder if it will work is my Remote, The Harmony 900 with all the Featues i want. And also working with the PC.
Ordered it 2day at Amazon. LEt's see

Oh, i forgot, the main part which will be installed next week is MediaPortal. LOL
But i guess thats not the problem.......
Keep you up to date next week.