[kookie]

OK... Hi This is my first post, after lurking for quite a bit; mainly about this topic.

What I am planning to have is an in-expensive HTPC with Blu-Ray and a big server. Big as in maybe 4-8tb.

I'll post what I'm kinda planning to use for components then..

Server:
JetWay JNC93-330W-LF Intel Atom Dual-Core 330 Intel 945GC Mini ITX Motherboard/CPU Combo
Antec 300 Case
4x1TB Caviar Green
General bad hardware for a server.

HTPC:
Basically the same but different case, and like a 250GB hdd.
Blu-Ray read drive

Now the server is going to stream to the HTPC, both will be connected with cat 6 wire. So I will need a Gigabit network card for the two builds... any recommendations?

Ok now about front end... I'm not sure how it works.. Under the My Video's bit or whatever in the front end, once you play it does it then open up something like VLC..? Could I get it so it has like a BBC iPlayer section in the front end, you click through there and then it opens up iPlayer? Same with Spotify?

Thanks in advance and sorry about this just being like a bunch of questions together possibly not making much sense

Kookie

[surfermc]

Any particular reason you have looked at the Jetway JNC93? I'm sure it would be OK for the server, but for the HTPC I don't believe the the graphics chipset is the best espacially for hi-def material. Have you looked at the mini ITX boards with the ION chipset.

What material is going to be on the server? Are you going to use this as a TV server / PVR? If so you might want a motherboard with more expansion capabilities to take TV cards.

Depending on your choice of OS have a look at MediaPortal or XBMC as your frontend. You will also need Total Media Theatre or Power DVD to playback the blu-ray disks.

[Trollslayer]

4TB? How are you planning to back up your data?

[Stephen Neal]

Yep - not sure that the 945 chipset is well suited to HTPC use for HD content - as I'm not sure it has that much in the way of DXVA acceleration for H264 and VC-1 1080p content, or decent de-interlacing for 576i and 1080i interlaced stuff. For that Ion is a good bet - as it combines the excellent 9400 nVidia graphics chipset with an Atom CPU.

If you're wedded to the Atom chipset then someting like the Zotac Mini-itx Ion motherboards (both single and dual core Atom versions are available) might be worth looking at for the HTPC (though there are issues with wake from sleep ISTR)

Alternatively look at the Acer Revo (single core - no optical drive - but £150 plus a tenner will get you a 2GB model with no OS and a 160GB HDD) or the Asrock Ionstar 330 (dual core - DVD RW drive, 160GB HDD and 2GB of RAM for around £240)

I suspect you'll be fine for your server. I run my unRAID server on an LE1640 AMD CPU with no major problems.

[Valo^]

I completely agree with Steven Neal regarding ION based kit if you want to stick with an Atom based CPU.

Regarding front end on the HTPC, I run a customised Vista Media Centre with Media Browser

For BBC iPlayer etc look at the Media Centre plugin TunerFree MCE That handles all the TV catch up services through the VMC frontend perfectly for me.

What OS are you going to run on the Media Server? I would suggest you look at Windows Home Server as it has the ability to add redundancy to important files (media collection) so if a drive fails you shouldn’t lose any of your media collection not to mention it gives you easy upgradability to add more drives later. It will also take backups of any windows based pc on your network which can be restored from in the event of any problems.

[kookie]

OK... After reading some posts I am definitley leaning over to the ION or even a low range Core Duo plus some grphx. The only reason I was looking at the Atom only was ignorance.. don't really know the market.

With MediaPortal and XBMC, I still don't understand if they play the movies, or they re direct you to a program that does? If they play them, does either support streaming?

Thanks a lot

What OS are you going to run on the Media Server? I would suggest you look at Windows Home Server as it has the ability to add redundancy to important files (media collection) so if a drive fails you shouldn’t lose any of your media collection not to mention it gives you easy upgradability to add more drives later. It will also take backups of any windows based pc on your network which can be restored from in the event of any proble

Yeah, I'm going to use WHS.

4TB? How are you planning to back up your data?

Good point, I definitley don't want to lose 1tb+ of my data in one go. Any recommendations? RAID 1?

[Theydon Bois]

RAID 1 or Mirroring would be costly - if we are talking about 1TB drives you will lose 1 drive for every 1TB you backup - 4TB will require 8TB of drives for instance.

RAID 5 can be setup across 3 or more disks, losing 1 disk as parity - meaning 4TB can be backed up across 5 x 1 TB disks.

[Stephen Neal]

Originally Posted by Valo^

I completely agree with Steven Neal regarding ION based kit if you want to stick with an Atom based CPU.

Regarding front end on the HTPC, I run a customised Vista Media Centre with Media Browser

For BBC iPlayer etc look at the Media Centre plugin TunerFree MCE That handles all the TV catch up services through the VMC frontend perfectly for me.

Are you running iPlayer on an Ion? Single core or dual core? AIUI Flash performance is an issue on these platforms as Adobe don't fully exploit hardware acceleration for Flash wrappered H264 etc. - so replay requires entirely CPU decoding at the moment.

Or does TunerFreeMCE use the iPhone/iPodTouch streams which can be accelerated? (I doubt it as it also supports 4oD and ITVPlayer doesn't it - which are Flash?)

What OS are you going to run on the Media Server? I would suggest you look at Windows Home Server as it has the ability to add redundancy to important files (media collection) so if a drive fails you shouldn’t lose any of your media collection not to mention it gives you easy upgradability to add more drives later. It will also take backups of any windows based pc on your network which can be restored from in the event of any problems.

If you want a good parity solution then unRAID is also worth a look. It is much simpler than WHS - but has a very neat drive allocation scheme.

Rather than use hardware RAID - which with striping improves performance but also reduces the "rescue-ability" of data (as the striped formats are proprietary and single files are spread across multiple discs) - or software duplication (which WHS uses - it basically stores everything twice if you want resilience) - unRAID uses a separate Parity drive but stores files in a standard contiguous manner. Parity doesn't require everything to be stored twice - it uses the data spread across all discs to protect the data on individual discs.

With RAID 5 - if you lose a single drive you have full protection. If you lose two - you lose everything. With unRAID if you lose a single drive you have full protection, but if you lose two, you only lose one (if one of the two drives was the parity drive) or two (if both drives were data) drives worth of data. All the other drives are still perfectly readable.

For me - I didn't need striping performance - but I did want maximum resilience. I know dual drive failures aren't that common - but they aren't unheard of either. unRAID can use a cache drive - which you right to without protection for protected storage to then take place in the background - to get fast write performance (otherwise writes require 2xreads and 2xwrites for every write)

[Valo^]

Originally Posted by Stephen Neal

Are you running iPlayer on an Ion? Single core or dual core? AIUI Flash performance is an issue on these platforms as Adobe don't fully exploit hardware acceleration for Flash wrappered H264 etc. - so replay requires entirely CPU decoding at the moment.

Or does TunerFreeMCE use the iPhone/iPodTouch streams which can be accelerated? (I doubt it as it also supports 4oD and ITVPlayer doesn't it - which are Flash?)

I'm not using an ION based machine so I'm not sure about the performance aspects you mention. However you do raise good points if Adobe don't exploit hardware acceleration for Flash then TunerFree MCE might not be the best solution.

[kookie]

Hey guys thanks so far got another question.

Can MediaPortal or XMBC play streamed videos?