Archiv der Kategorie: Computer

Software

Schreibe eine Antwort

Contrary to me my friend wanted to use Windows at the base of his HTPC. Essentially this left us with two options: The open source MediaPortal or Vistas Media Center. While undisputedly having fewer features the latter promised to be simpler to set up, use and maintain.

One of the features I love about MythTV is that you can always hit the record button on the remote when watching a show and it will record the entire buffer which means you end up with a recording that contains everything since you started watching that particular channel. Even in the Windows 7 beta you still cannot do that.

The editions

Media Center only comes bundled with the Home Premium and the Ultimate edition. The price difference for the OEM version is only marginal and we might end up being lucky to have one of the features that only Vista Ultimate provides. Especially Remote Desktop and Complete PC Backup and Restore come to mind.

comparison chart
SOURCE WIKIPEDIA.ORG HOME PREMIUM ULTIMATE
Availability Retail & OEM Licensing Retail & OEM Licensing
Running application limit Unlimited Unlimited
Desktop Window Manager Yes Yes
Windows Aero Yes Yes
Windows Movie Maker Yes Yes
Windows Media Center Yes Yes
Premium games Yes Yes
Joining Windows Server domains No Yes
Remote Desktop Host No Yes
Group Policy No Yes
BitLocker No Yes
MUI Language Packs No Yes
Windows Ultimate Extras No Yes
Complete PC Backup and Restore No Yes

Because some of the codecs and add on apps are still only available in a 32bit version, we dropped 64bit support and some 500MB RAM in favour of better support. In a years time things may look different though.

Bluray support

Bluray support for Windows comes in two flavours: Cyberlinks PowerDVD Ultra and ArcSofts Total Media Theater. But only the latter offered decent Media Center integration. PowerDVD places a link in Media Center but launches an external program. Not quite what you expect from a $100.- software package. This has changed very recently with the release of PowerDVD 9 that adds a native UI for Media Center. I guess the two are on par again…

TotalMedia Theater also allows you to reencode the new lossless audio formats on the fly to be outputted via S/P DIF; nice if you don’t have the latest receiver yet.

Interestingly ArcSoft only delivered a boxed version and did not have a download version in its online shop. A bit sad if you want to immediately use what you just bought. I guess we are slaves of modern times already.

In order to create backups of the Bluray titles you own, we used Slysofts AnyDVD HD. At the time they offered AnyDVD HD with lifetime free updates. This is unfortunately no longer the case.

Music

We had the option of using two music players. Either Windows Media Player that is tightly integrated with Media Center or Apples iTunes. The latter even seemed to be nicer to use than WMP. Integration to Media Center is not so important as you generally don’t want to turn on your TV or worse yet, the projector to select a track. So we needed another solution for that anyways which came in the form of the Philips 7500 universal remote.

Using apps such as MusicBridge or MCETunes allow you to sync your iTunes Library to WMP. Get the best of both worlds.

Plugins

There’s a few must have’s in my opinion to extend the functionality of Media Center. Most of those Plugins are free.

A bunch of them are listed on these sites:

 

Webguide (free)

This is pretty much similar to mythweb, offering a nice and polished web interface to schedule you recordings and much more. You can even watch streams from your machines recordings. It installs a web server along the way.

MyMovies

Media Centers own Video „Plugin“ is not very powerful. MyMovies does what MythVideo does and much more still. Along the way it installs a SQL database server. It is free but some features require unlocking. You earn points by submitting metadata about DVDs and the like. Gather enough points and you can unlock more features.

back to overview

Hardware

Schreibe eine Antwort

CPU

Most if not all processors these days are fast enough to decode HD videos and do some sharpening if supported by a recent GPU. Running at least one virtual machine adds a bit to the envelope. Also the machine was to be able to rip and re encode Bluray titles along the way. Getting a processor that is clocked higher usually does not mean it runs hotter. Those are merely the samples that tested to be of a better quality. We did not want to overclock the system as this ofter means a higher thermal envelope.

In the end we opted for an Intel Core2Duo Wolfdale E8400 E0, Dual Core, 3.0 GHz, 6MB, FSB1333. This is certainly fast enough even for the more demanding jobs.

CPU Cooler

This is highly dependant on the case I think. As you will see below, we decided to get an OrigenAE S16V case. It almost seems that the Scythe Ninja Mini has been tailored specifically for that case. The PSU fan as well as the 80mm fans on rear suck out air from the case through the Ninja.

Scythe Ninja Mini CPU heatsink

Scythe Ninja Mini

In past projects the Ninja has proven to be very effective with low airflow setups such as this. I can say it works really well having the processor idle at about 40°C.

Mainboard

Gigabyte with its GA-E7AUM-DS2H and Asus‘ P5N7A-VM were the only Intel boards with the new Nvidia GeForce 9400 and 9300 chipsets respectively that looked promising for using in a HTPC setup with HDMI. Most other boards with HDMI had trouble with decoding Bluray material or with sound output across the HDMI cable. From what I found on the net, lots of hope was put into the new Nvidia chips for that and we were not diappointed. Gigabyte simply had a Firewire port to add to the envelope that seemed more useful than Asus‘ Display Port connector. So we opted for this board. So far it has proven rock solid and was a pleasure to work with.

Gigabyte GA E7AUM-DS2H

Gigabyte GA E7AUM-DS2H

The Nvidia chipsets do get quite hot though. Speedfan is reporting between 73°C and 74°C when idle and goes above 80 when decoding a video. By adding a fan to the side of the Ninja, temperatures dropped by about 5-7°C. It’s quite interesting to see that even a tiny bit of indirect airflow can have such a big impact.

RAM

DDR II RAM these days is dirt cheap. We went for 4GB Kingston Value RAM. Because we are using the 32bit version of Windows Vista, we only get to use about 3.4GB.

Optical Drive

The same LG GGC-H20L Bluray combo drive I have in my system is used in his. See below why the choice of the optical drive is not trivial.

PSU

Silentpcreview highlighted the Enermax Modu82+ PSUs as being one of the quietest they’ve ever had. Because the short cables are not an issue no, better yet, desirable in the OrigenAE case we went ahead with it. I can say it truly is very quiet. Even by a solid margin to the already fabulous Corsair HX520W PSU that I am using in my server. The smallest 385W version was used in the system. Anything bigger would be a waste. Nice in that particular setup is the configuration with 3 SATA connectors on the same cable. This allows us to only run one cable to the drive cage with the 3 disks.

Disks

2 Western Digital GP 1TB disks are used in the System as well as a 500GB WD GP. The latter is used for the System and temp files and whatnot while one of the 1TB drives is used for the actual media data i.e. videos, music, recordings etc. The second disk is being used to backup the contents of the first regularly. Once decent SSDs become a bit cheaper it would certainly be a neat option to run the system off one of those and have the big disks sleep when they are not in use.

The Western Digital Green Power disks were chosen for their low energy consumption as well as their low noise. I’ve had Samsung disks that were just as quiet if not even quieter than the WDs while seeking. However Samsung disks tend to vibrate a bit more than the Western Digitals. In the Antec P180 I use for my system, this is not much of an issue because the soft silicone gommets do a fantastic job of isolating vibrations. The OrigenAE case however uses harder gommets that are not as effective, hence the lower vibrations of the Western Digital models come in handy. In addition the Green Power Caviars use less power by a good margin. Even though everyone talks about green computing more important than saving electricity at this point is that less heat is produces that we need to get out of the system. If we can have 3 disks using 15 watts total vs. 30 watts, thats an additional 15 watts that we do not need to cool.

Case

We were looking for a nice looking case with space for at least 3 disks. OrigenAE S16V seemed to offer everything we needed. Support for Full ATX components, 3 disks in a cage with rubber gommets. Unfortunately they are not as soft and effective as the silicone ones on the Antec cases. An additional disk can be mounted on top of the optical drive. However that one will not be cooled very well sitting in its own juices. In the future for a fast SSD for the system this might be an option.

Origen AE S16V case silver

Origen AE S16V case silver

090528_Peach_Windows_HTPC_4 090528_Peach_Windows_HTPC_8

While a nice feature – the second version of the case the S16T that has a small 7″ touchscreen – it seemed too expensive. It would certainly be nice to have every once in a while to select music and quickly schedule a recording. The blue VFD display on the S16V is hardly usable. For one blue is a bad color for any sort of display because of the nature of blue light. It tends to scatter heavily making it hard to read. Secondly the letters are too small to be read from more than a meter away.

ichbinleise.ch recommended a case dampening set made of some sort of special heavy acustic foam and a bitumen lining for the lid. Installation is simple – all of the foam pads are pre cut and have a very strong adhesive surface. The acoustic signature improved significantly with the lining in place. Aluminum cases tend to vibrate easily unlike steel that stays quiet.

With the kit its up there with the best silent steel cases.

When we installed the Gigabyte board and the Ninja cooler, we could see that it was going to be a tight fit with the optical drive. Because of the height and depth of the Ninja there is only a gap of about 15mm between the installed optical drive and the CPU cooler, barely enough to hoock up power and SATA cables. Almost all other Bluray drives from either Sony, Pioneer or Plextor are deeper and would not even fit in that combination.

Fans

All fans are installed. That includes a 92mm fan on the side of the case as well as 2 80mm fans on the back. Include the 80mm fan on the CPU cooler and the PSU fan that makes for a system with 5 fans. Not exactly very few. The fans are models that ichbinleise.ch produces in china to its custom specs. Given their price of just over 6 swiss francs I was surprised how quiet they are and how smooth they run.

I would have opted for some Scythe or Noctua fans but these would have been much more expensive by a factor of 2 or 3 easily.

However all the fans are models with a very low rpm rating. The system is virtually inaudible even from 1 meter away. I can also report that all temperatures stay within sane levels. We will double check again in the summer once it gets up to the 30s outside.

Mission accomplished.

back to overview

Planning a Windows HTPC

Schreibe eine Antwort

When speaking of HTPCs everyone wants the same. Powerful, easy, stable and foremost quiet. My friend Peder Pfister and I set out to accomplish this for his needs. You can see below what those were.

open Windows HTPC
Prerequisites

already in place were the following components:

  • speakers: Teufel Theater 5 THX Select 5.1
  • AV receiver: Pioneer AV Receiver VSX-AX4ASi
  • projector: Sanyo PLV-Z5 1280x720p projector

Essentially we were seeking to build a HTPC that would do the following:

  • play DVD and Bluray titles
  • play video files including HD
  • play music
  • record cable PAL SDTV
  • host a Linux virtual machine for development
  • output 5.1 Dolby or DTS sound (new uncompressed formats were not needed)
  • remote control
  • play and select music without using the projector
  • quiet enough for the living room

back to overview

Backup with BackupPC

Schreibe eine Antwort

A backup only makes sense if it is done automatically and easy to use. Otherwise one usually postpones it or forgets it at all or restores are nearly impossible. For Linux in particular, there are tons of free backup solutions. Some simple tools that are powerful yet not so simple to use on their own like tar or monsters like amanda that are terrible to set up. Often it is recommended to put a small shell script in a cron job and just use tar. This works reasonably well if you don’t need to restore anything quickly. BackupPC aims to fill the gap between selfmade scripts and enterprise class solutions like amanda. It backs up virtually all OSs across the net, offering transparent compression and a web interface to manage all backups.
To back up a full linux host one need’s to exclude a number of files and directories that are created automatically at boot time.
I have  put a list in

/etc/backuppc/pc/localhost.pl
$Conf{BackupFilesExclude} = {
‚*‘ => [
‚/proc‘,
‚/dev‘,
‚/tmp‘,
‚/mnt‘,
‚/media‘,
‚/sys‘,
‚/lost+found‘,
‚/var/lib/backuppc‘,
‚/var/lib/mythtv‘,
‚/var/tmp‘,
‚/var/cache‘,
‚/var/spool‘,
‚/var/run‘,
‚/var/lock‘,
‚/var/games‘,
‚/home‘
]
};

http://kirksblog.steffensenfamily.com/
http://wiki.nerdylorrin.net/wiki/Wiki.jsp?page=BackupPC
BackupPC is not very good with bare metal restores. It appears that if your host dies, you’ll have to reinstall a minimum linux, install backuppc and – here comes the tricky part – have your old backuppc config ready to pop in, so you can roll away. Then mount the partition holding the backups unde /var/lib/backuppc and fire up backuppc. afterwards you should be able to restore your machine.
As always, test this on your box before it dies.

Linux and Bluray

Eine Antwort

I bought myself a Playstation to watch Bluray movies. But every once in a while I thought it would be nice to be able to make backups and put them in the MythVideo library just like DVDs.

Due to AACS present on Bluray discs this was a bit complicated. However I found a solution that seems reasonable for me and works very well.

The following is needed:

  • Windows XP or Vista License
  • VMware server
  • Slysoft AnyDVD HD
  • a samba share on Linux with lots of free space

The procedure is simple: Install VMware Server on your Linux host and have it access the drive – in my case /dev/scd0 directly.

screenshot of vmware server

VMWare Server optical drive selection

Windows will see the inserted disc just like a regular Windows machine. By having Windows accessing the drive directly, AnyDVD can read all sectors as its supposed to. Set up AnyDVD to rip to a samba share you’ve set up previously. That way your virtual disk is not going wild.

After the actual ripping process you can use various programs to re-encode the rip to get it down to a more manageable size. I usually set my films to end up as a 720p 4.5GB h.264 video using ripbot264. RipBot is a small Delphi program that bundles all necessary tools – quite a few – with a nice GUI.

If you use very recent releases of mencoder, mplayer, gpac, mkvtoolnix and x264 you may also use Linux directly for the encoding process which may result in a performance increase compared to using a virtual machine such as vmware.

HyRax has posted a small bash script on his blog that will do the encoding for you. You’ll need to install the required packages first:

aptitude install mencoder mplayer gpac mkvtoolnix x264

The packages in your distro may not be recent enough in which case you may wanto to compile a cvs snapshot from source.

#! /bin/bash

# =====================================================================

# Blu-ray encoding script by HyRax February 2009 http://www.serenux.com

# =====================================================================

# Make sure the user has specified what to work on.

if [ -z „$1“ ]; then

echo „\nBlu-ray movie encoding script\n—————————–“

echo „Written by HyRax February 2009\nhttp://www.serenux.com“

echo „\nUsage: $0 <m2ts file without extension>“

echo „\nExample: If your movie file is called TheDarkKnight.m2ts then\nyour usage will be: $0 TheDarkKnight\n“

exit

fi

# The crf=21 option controls encoding quality, and indirectly the final

# filesize. The higher the value, the more compression and thus smaller

# file size. Reduce the value and file size will go up. A value of 21

# should produce a file of approximately 4GB in size for a typical movie.

# Encode the video using x264, ignore the audio for now.

mencoder $1.m2ts \

-ovc x264 -x264encopts crf=21:frameref=3:bframes=3:b_pyramid:direct_pred=auto:weight_b:partitions=all:8x8dct:me=umh:mixed_refs:trellis=1:nopsnr:nossim:subq=6:level_idc=41:threads=4 \

-nosound \

-of rawvideo \

-o $1.×264

# Dump the first original audio track (should be the English track) but

# don’t re-encode it. Ignore the video.

mplayer $1.m2ts -dumpaudio -dumpfile $1.ac3

# Copy the raw x264 encoded video into an MP4 container so we can set

# the correct framerate (generally 23.976 – adjust it if MPlayer or

# MEncoder report something different)

MP4Box -add $1.×264 $1.mp4 -fps 23.976

# Finally, merge everything into a single MKV file

mkvmerge -o $1.mkv $1.mp4 –track-name 0:Eng $1.ac3

# Remove the hash in front of the next command to have the script delete

# your working files when encoding is complete.

# rm $1.m2ts $1.×264 $1.ac3

# Tell the user we’re done.

echo „All done! Your final movie file is called $1.mkv – enjoy!“

Simply copy the script to the directory containing the main m2ts file and run it with

./encodevideo.sh maintitle

leaving out the m2ts extension from maintitle.m2ts when calling the script. Videos encoded using the VC-1 codec result in errors so far. Your mileage may vary.

Keep in mind that it may not be legal in your country to employ tools to get rid of copy protection on digital media.