1. Compress recorded shows older than 30 days in WMV to save space.
2. Moved older shows (compressed or not) to a network share to save space.
3. Virtualizing Media Center under Windows Home Server

The results? Complete failure on the first two, and some success on the third but that was ultimately dependent on getting #2 working.

This one of those experiences with Media Center when I start to look at the price of a Season 3 TiVo + lifetime pass. My Media Center’s over three years old now I’ve basically been holding off till a nice (e.g. small) CableCard system becomes available, and/or I know it’ll still work with protected content after upgrading to Windows 7.

I’m happy to trade the out-of-the-box convenience of TiVo for the increased flexibility of Media Center, but at times Media Center seems to have difficulty with scenarios that are clearly popular and this gets frustrating. I love Media Center, but it does seem to have an identity problem.

Anyhow, here are my experiences;

Compress older shows to WMV

Using MCEBuddy I had the compression step working in almost no time at all. MCEBuddy is a really nice program that’s well done – simple to use and setup. I chose the WMV compression option since it would cover all of my devices (Windows Media Center, Extenders and the XBox) and set it to convert a few really old 50+ day programs.

After it’d completed I noticed that the shows were no longer visible in the “Recorded TV” section, despite being in the same location with the same filename. After much puzzling and Googling, it turns out that Media Center will only show DVR-MS in the “Recorded TV” section.

Yeah, there are meta-data aspects to consider but this limitation is a bit annoying. Being limited to using the “Video” section, whose interface is poor and needs careful categorization to be useful, makes this rapidly lose its appeal. It’s a shame because this (background WMV encoding) could be a killer feature for Media Center.

Move old shows to a network share

Accessing a network share and moving old files here is super-easy, but getting Media Center to display those shows is complex and something I just couldn’t get working.

There’s a large number of “how to” guides that cover the the numerous steps and registry and/or policy editor tweaks needed on the both machines, but for whatever reason it would just never work. I added the watched locations correctly and could see/open the files in Explorer, but to Media Center they just did not exist and would not appear in the Recorded TV section.

In the past I’ve found Media Center’s support for network-shared media is poor, and this seems to be another example. For a digital home product I have trouble understanding why this is the case, though at least this does seem to be changed in Windows 7

• I don’t think the high CPU percentages were related to disk access. One of my early concerns was disk performance which I tested with Disk Throughput Tester (Disk TT) and I didn’t notice any CPU problems
• I think it’s more likely the CPU usage is just a case of VM performance not being that good with the setup of VMware/Motherboard/CPU. I’m not familiar with the intricacies, but I know my other PC has an option for hardware virtualization in the BIOS that isn’t present on the box I was testing with.
• The reference to "somewhat successfully" running Home Server under VM was a mistake, for some reason I recalled the post I linked to making mention of connector and performance problems which isn’t the case. I would still be extremely leery of this setup though, if the Media Center drive fails then any recovery is going to be painful.
• I definitely think this setup has potential, but only if you’re willing to invest in better hardware (high-end Core 2 Duo / Quad Core) with better virtualization support. That requires a bigger box and my aim was to try and get both systems running in the you-have-to-see-it-to-appreciate-it Media Smart Server box.

At this point I’m going to explore plan B – an ultra-small Windows Media Center computer that uses Windows Home Server shares for storage.

I’m thinking of a Dell Studio Hybrid, perhaps a Mac Mini, or even a self-build machine based around an Atom processor. As it’ll be used in conjunction with external storage, tuners, and extenders, it doesn’t need to roar – just to be very very small

A few people have (somewhat) successfully virtualized Windows Home Server on their Windows Media Center box but while I admire their cunning there’s potentially a rather ugly problem. If the OS drive for WMC should ever fail you have a chicken-and-egg situation. No WMC = No WHS = No restore from backup.

I think a better scenario then is to have Windows Media Center running as a service on the Home Server box with all output being through one or more extenders. With a few constraints I couldn’t think of any reason why this wouldn’t work so I decided to give it a go

Note the following were required;

1. A VM package that supports USB devices and can be run as a service.
2. USB Tuners
3. Acceptance of being limited to extenders, and not being able to record protected digital content (for the same reasons you can’t record digital content with a custom-built box).

Virtual Machine package

I initially started with the free version of VMware Server 2.0 which worked but had two drawbacks; The most awful web based administration imaginable and a limit of two USB devices. The first I could live with since post-install I’d use Remote Desktop for admin tasks, but the second’s a deal breaker for Media Center duties with USB tuners.

When I discovered this post-install I switched to VMware Player which is free but restricts virtual machines to being run, not created or edited. As I’d already created my VM in VMware Server this wasn’t a problem.

VMware Player doesn’t run as a service but can easily be configured to do so, even featuring a “No GUI” option for this purpose. It also supports USB 2.0 devices and will automatically reconnect them upon startup.

One other important detail is your VM package must support “Bridged” networking. This is where both VM and the host share the same network connection but have different IP addresses. The alternative is NAT where your VM is on a different IP range and invisible to devices such as extenders.

USB Tuners

Because Media Center is running in a virtual machine it’s unable to access physical hardware, with the exception of hard-disks and USB devices which can be bridged from the host.

For this experiment I picked up a used Adaptec 3610 USB Analog Tuner from eBay for about $35. As well as dual-tuners it has a built in eHome IR blaster for controlling STB’s which is super-handy. If a virtual Media Center proves not to be an option I’ll likely be switching my Media Center to a smaller machine anyhow so it won’t be going to waste.

For an ATSC HD tuner I currently use a VBox PCI card, but would switch to the HD HomeRun. It’s pricey ($170+) but has dual hybrid ATSC/QAM inputs and is Ethernet based.

Acceptance

As noted there’s two obvious caveats to a VM Media Center – Firstly that all Media must be played back via an Extender, and secondly CableCard support will not be an option.

The first is ok with me. As crazy as it sounds I’d prefer NOT to have a PC next to the TV The second is the same limitation as custom building a machine – sucky but what can you do. While I’d like CableCard I can live without it. Most of the shows I watch are on local network channels and ATSC works fine here, arguably even better infact.

(On a side note: why are the only OEM PC’s that support CableCard so big, ugly, and non-Media-ish?)

The results

I ran this experiment on the Windows Home Server I built last year, which since buying a MediaSmart Server has been relegated to a development role. The specs (Athlon X2 2.0 Ghz, 2GB RAM) are higher than the stock MSS but around the spec that it can be upgraded to with hardware/bios mods.

Aside from the horrible web interface, installation under VMware server was painless.

The first thing I did was setup an extender to test that it could connect and stream the provided sample videos. There should be absolutely no difference, but for reference I went with the Xbox 360 for these tests. It was in the living room and I think it’s a better implementation.

The Extender connected first time without any problems and I could immediately select and view all of the sample media without a problem. This was my “wow” moment when I realized that this could actually all work.

Next up it was time to configure the tuners and, aside from having to switch to VMware Player, this is when I experienced my first hitch – TV setup cannot be performed via an Extender and must be done on the Media Center PC itself.

Because the virtual display drivers do not support hardware video you cannot see anything while configuring TV. This leads to a “TV Signal” screen that looks similar-but-not-quite-the-same as when there’s no signal detected.

As well as spotting this you need to use a process of elimination to determine which box maps to which tuner (luckily the Adaptec labels its external ports which makes it trivial) and whether the IR blaster is really changing channel or not.

So with everything setup it was on to some performance tests. First I watched and recorded “The Daily Show” and everything was great – CPU usage on the server was less than 30% and the picture was free of stutters, including while skipping back/forward.

After this I recorded “The Colbert Report” and started to rewatch the Daily Show. This is where things took a down-turn. The picture was generally ok but would occasionally stutter. Looking at Task Manager on the VM, CPU usage would spike from 50-100%, and on the server it would hover between 40-50%.

At this point I realized that VMware was maxing out one core on the server while the other went unused. I tried several things to get VMware to use both CPUs without any success – although VMware player is free it has no options so you’re restricted to editing config files using info gleamed on the web.

As I was already seeing problems with two simultaneous streams I was also concerned how it would handle a third show, or HD being thrown into the mix, or multiple extenders. All of these are things that are common in our house and if there’s one Mission Critical WAF item it’s TV

At this point I decided to call time on my experiment for the time being. As well as resolving the VMware problem with multiple cores I would need to purchase some USB ATSC hardware before I could satisfactorily judge performance.

My feeling is this setup is absolutely workable, and could work very well, but the spec of the host machine is likely to require more than the MediaSmart Server hardware can support.

Since my whole purpose was minimizing the footprint of both machines instead of switching back to a large form-factor server I’m more likely to purchase a dedicated machine such as a Dell Studio Hybrid or Mac Mini for Media Center purposes, then have it record to a network share. These are avenues I’ll probably explore in the new year.

It was fun tho

Fortunately it was the disk containing the OS and not the larger disk that holds all of our media. And while it did take 6-7 hours to reinstall and set everything up again, it would have been far more painful had it been my main PC or my girlfriend’s laptop. With those machines there’s also a pretty good chance we’d have lost something more important than just our TV recording schedule.

Before now my backup strategy was to keep mirrored copies of important files on seperate computers via FolderShare. This prevented us from losing our documents, photos or music, but it didn’t guard against disk failure or an accidental overwrite. I thought it best to take the Media Center failure as a warning shot from fate and move to a better backup strategy.

Enter Windows Home Server.

I received an invite to the Windows Home Server beta a few weeks ago so now seemed like the perfect time to try it out. My aim was to build a WHS machine that would run nightly backups of our three machines, and act as a centralized storage location for all of our media and some large datasets that I use for work.

Over the next week or so I’m going to write about actually setting up and configuring the machine, using it to backup our PCs (including my girlfriends Mac), and integrating the shared media with our Media Center PC.

However this first post is about choosing the best hardware configuration for Windows Home Server, something I spent considerable time researching.

The budget I set my girlfriend set was $600 all-in, which allowing for tax and shipping left $525 for actual components. This is more than I expect many prebuilt machines will retail for when Windows Home Server is released, but I was aiming for a spec quite a bit higher than the entry-level requirements.

There were a few factors to consider when building our Windows Home Server. Firstly our media library is around 200GB, 50GB of which are photos and music we’d hate to lose. The combined disk sizes of the machines we’ll be backing up is another 200GB. Our server is going to be on 24/7 so energy consumption is something to consider, and while it’s going to live in a cupboard in the office/guest-bedroom it still needs to be relatively quiet.

With all this in mind here are the parts I chose, followed by the thought process behind each.

• AMD Athlon 64 X2 3600+ “Brisbane” ($89.00)
• GIGABYTE GA-M61PM-S2 Motherboard ($69.99)
• 1GB A-DATA DDR2 800 RAM ($68.99)
• LITE-ON IDE DVD-ROM Drive ($17.99)
• Rosewill R6421-P ATX Mid-Tower Case ($15.99)
• SeaSonic 330W Power Supply ($69.99)
• 2 x Seagate Barracuda 400GB 7200RPM SATA Hard Drives ($199.98)

 Total: $521.93 before tax and storage.

AMD Athlon 64 X2 3600+ “Brisbane”

For a server power and heat are important considerations, and in my opinion AMD chips have a better price/performance/heat ratio than their Intel equivalents. After some research I decided upon an Athlon 64 X2 3600+ from the ”Brisbane” family. This is a dual-core 65nm chip with a max power rating of 65 Watts.

I did consider a chip from the ”Lima” family, which are single-core versions with a higher clock speed and lower power consumption, but the difference was less than $10 and in a server I’d prefer two slower cores than a single fast one.

GIGABYTE GA-M61PM-S2

For WHS I wanted a motherboard with integrated graphics and Gigabit LAN. It also needed to be Socket AM2 for my Athlon, and support DDR800 dual channel memory.

For once I wasn’t concerned about the number of PCI/PCI-E slots, but I did want support for at least four SATA drives. I’d be starting with two HDDs so I wanted a degree of upgradability without the need for an additional controller card.

Putting these requirements into newegg’s Power Search, the result was the GIGABYTE GA-M61PM-S2. It was the cheapest, had a lot of good comments, and I’ve never had a bad experience with a Gigabyte board so I popped it in the cart and moved on.

1GB A-DATA DDR2 800 RAM

The minimum requirement for WHS is 512MB RAM, but 1GB is a better amount if you’re going to be streaming data or using indexing. I also wanted two sticks for Dual Channel performance and the difference between 2×256 and 2×512 was only $30.

LITE-ON IDE DVD-ROM Drive

The easiest choice of all since the only reason I need a DVD-ROM is to install Windows Home Server DVD and drivers. I picked the cheapest I could find, making sure it was IDE so as to not use one of my four SATA slots.

Rosewill R6421-P ATX Mid-Tower Case

It’s ironic that I spent the most time choosing the case since it’s going to be sitting in a cupboard. I’d have loved a shuttle-sized server, but with the amount of storage I expect to use I decided upon a Mid-Tower with room for at least four internal 3.5″ drives. I ignored cases that came with a Power Supply. They can look like a great deal but the PSU’s are invariably low quality and noisy.

The Rosewill was one of the cheaper cases I saw. It looked good and had some very positive buyer feedback so I took a $15 dollar gamble which definitely paid off.

SeaSonic 330W Power Supply

At $70 the SeaSonic isn’t cheap for a 330W PSU, it is however utterly silent.

I bought the same unit when building my Media Center and was very happy with it. The first time I switched it on I actually started to check whether it was plugged in – it’s that quiet.

2 x Seagate Barracuda 400GB 7200RPM SATA Hard Drives

I decided early on that I would settle on specs for the server then spend the rest of my budget on the two biggest HDDs I could afford.

Because I wanted to use WHS’s data replication feature I needed two disks roughly equivalent in size. Two 500GB drives would have put me over budget so I went for the next size down, 400GB.

With one drive being used for data replication, 400GB may seem a little tight to store 200GB of media files and backup 200GB of data from other PCs. However, WHS employs “Single Instance Storage” for backups where identical clusters on a drive are only stored once. Not only does this massively reduce the amount of space needed to backup a machine, but additional backups require radically less space.

Potential Savings

If my budget had been lower there’s a few changes I’d have made. First to go would have been the SeaSonic power supply, for $25 you can get a great, though not silent, 350/400W PSU.

Moving to 512MB of RAM would have saved about $30, and a mid-spec Semperon a further $40. Buying a motherboard from a less well known manufacturer, or with less SATA connectors, could have saved another $30.

Moving to two 320GB or 250GB drives would have saved around $40 and $60 respectively. I could also have bought a single HDD and used any external drives I might have lying around.

Finally there’s the DVD-ROM. Since the only need for this is to install Windows Home Server I could have used the drive from my main machine temporarily to save another $18.

 Summary

It’s clear that for as little as $400 you can build a perfectly capable Windows Home Server with dual drives – and of course this can be reduced further if you have unused hardware to begin with.

Everyone’s needs are different though. While these specs are great for me your needs may be slightly different. What would you change, and why?