We Got Served

This is the fourth in a series of articles detailing how one network went from dilapidated junker to media hero with the help of WMC and WHS.  For an overview of the scope and purpose of this project, I would encourage you to review Part 1.

Onward to the Living Room

When I first started this series, I explained that my ultimate goal was to provide some insight into how to use Windows Media Center and Windows Home Server together in an environment full of novice users.  So far, most of the discussion has been centered on the network infrastructure and back end.  As I indicated at the end of Part 3, my wife was less than impressed with the server.  I did manage to show off a little bit when I hooked our printer up to the server and showed my wife how we could now print from our laptops from the couch, but I have to make clear that I considered her general lack of interest to be a success.  In the weeks since I initially installed the WHS, it has happily hummed along backing up the systems on our home network and synching our files, become the container for more media than any one family should be allowed to consume, and generally gone unnoticed by the rest of family.  This was the plan.

The next step was bringing a Media Center into the living room.  I will approach this topic in two phases.  First, I will take you inside the new hardware and try to give some insight into why I selected the components that I did.  It is not a fancy system, but my purchasing decisions were guided by practical experience with WMC and HTPCs in general.  Then, I will give some suggestions on how to set up WMC to seamlessly take advantage of WHS.

The new HTPC

When planning my son’s new system, I knew right away that it would be Intel-based.  He wanted it for gaming and general purpose use and I wanted it to last many moons in that role as he matures and begins to use a computer seriously.  When planning my new WMC system for the living room, I knew right away that it would be AMD-based.  I wanted it to be as quiet and power conscious as possible while handily pushing 1080p video and 5.1 audio.  As such, my eyes turned immediately toward the one-two combo of the 45W Athlon 64 X2 4850e and the RS780 integrated chipset.

System Specs

Processor - AMD Athlon 64 X2 4850e

Dissipating a cool 45W, this little dual-core processor seems tailor-made for HTPC applications and WHS applications.  It provides more than enough horsepower for HD television, Blu-ray and HD-DVD playback, and even some mid-level gaming if you are so inclined.  Put it in the right case, and it can even be passively cooled.

Motherboard - Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H

Nvidia, Ati/AMD, and Intel have been racing to develop the perfect mainstream integrated graphics processor.  One of the key criteria for me has been the ability to play back 1080p video, something that the ATI Radeon HD3200 GPU on this board handles with ease.  My home theater receiver lacks HDMI audio requiring that I have a separate digital audio output, which can severely limit one’s motherboard choices.  Think carefully about the motherboard features you desire or need.  The more high quality choices you can find integrated into a board, the more expansion slots you can save for TV tuners, video card upgrades, or other desired upgrades.

System Memory - 4gb DDR800 RAM

The usual rule applies: the more system memory the better, especially if you want to run a 64-bit OS.

Hard Drive - 500gb Seagate 7200.11 SATA

The hard drive will be the target of my first upgrade.  From three to four feet, the system is silent, except for the chatter of the hard drive.  The fact of the matter is that a pure HTPC does not need a large desktop drive.  In my case, the WHS holds all of the media content, so the internal drive’s only real purpose is to serve as the repository for the OS and installed software, recorded television, and as the live TV buffer.  I plan to replace this drive with a petite laptop drive.  A laptop hard drive is considerably quieter than a desktop drive anyway, but encase it in the Scythe SQD2.5-1000 hard drive silencer and it will be effectively silent and will fit perfectly into the standard 3.5″ bay of your average case.  Flash based SSDs promise an even quieter future for HTPC enthusiasts, but I do not consider these devices cost-effective just yet.  Perhaps next year.

TV Tuners - ATI Theater 550 pro and AVerMedia PCI-E Combo tuner (M780R)

The tuners were left over from my original Media Center and I could not justify replacing them.  If I were buying again today, I would spring for a pair of Theater 650 Pro cards.  I have always been pleased with the image quality of the 550 Pro card and have read that the 650 Pro is perhaps even a bit better, but I know that other tuner manufacturers have their fans and that certain manufacturers fare better in different regions and with different broadcast standards, so research this choice carefully.  If you are worried about watching and recording television, your choice of tuner card will likely be of paramount importance.

Enclosure - Antec NSK 1380

I used the predecessor to this case, the Antec Aria, for my first WMC system and have subsequently used it in builds for other people.  The NSK 1380 lacks the built-in media reader of the Aria, but this is actually a bonus as the reader was a tremendous dust magnet.  This relatively petite, sound dampened case leaves plenty of room for a microATX board with a full load of expansion cards, 1-3 hard drives, a surprisingly quiet power supply, and an optical drive.  There are a number of case manufacturers out there making cases specifically for the HTPC market.  Most of these cases are designed for full-size ATX boards and are designed to blend into a stack of consumer electronic devices.  Such systems tend to be quieter than the average mid tower, but not always by much, and tend to have a good-sized footprint.  I would prefer an HTPC be as small as possible even at the cost of expandability and gaming potential, but that is obviously a personal choice. 

One advantage of many of the bigger HTPC cases is that they include a small display on the front allowing one to access media, particularly music, without charging up the WMC’s display.  I have struggled with the issue of accessing the music collection without using the main display for a while.  I have an RDP shortcut on each of the laptops to access the WMC, but this is not the most family friendly solution.  A small screen on the front of the case can be difficult to see and can pose navigation challenges even for experienced users.  I had even toyed with the idea of placing a small lcd television alongside the main display, set to clone mode to use for music playback and photo slideshows during parties.  I had high hopes that Windows SideShow would present a solution to this problem and there is still reason to be optimistic now that Microsoft has a Media Center SideShow control gadget in the works, but the hardware has been painfully slow to come to market.  My current thought is to pick up an inexpensive PDA such as the HP iPaq 111 to use as a SideShow remote, but I continue to drool over the nascent Ricavision SideShow devices.

Optical Drive - Lite-on Blu-ray drive

Got it cheap and couldn’t resist.  The idea of buying a read-only drive might seem strange to many people, but an HTPC is not a content creation machine, it is media playing machine.  If I could have gotten a burner for the same price, then bonus, but it is not necessary.

I have enjoyed playing Blu-ray discs on my Media Center, but I do not consider these players ready for the average living room just yet.  The problem lies in the software.  Most of the software available to play back Blu-ray discs does not integrate well into WMC.  Cyberlink’s PowerDVD, however maligned by enthusiasts, has been the most stable player so far, but it requires exiting from WMC to access.  I have tried adding a link to the WMC menu to automatically exit the WMC interface and launch PowerDVD, but it is kludgy and PowerDVD does not always recognize the commands of the WMC remote.  Arcsoft makes a product called TotalMedia Theater which installs a link in the WMC menu and opens a 10-foot interface that effectively makes use of the WMC remote.  TMT is not as CPU and GPU efficient as PowerDVD and I have experienced an unfortunate amount of instability transitioning back and forth between WMC and TMT.  In time, I assume that either Microsoft or one of the media playback vendors will arrive at an effective solution.  Arcsoft is close, but they are not quite there.

Deploying the HTPC

Fully assembled with Vista installed, the new system took its place in the living room.  An HTPC is essentially a headless computer.  The only point of interface is the media center software.  I get around this limitation by using Vista Ultimate and setting up an RDP connection, but you can achieve the same effect directly by keeping a keyboard and mouse handy.  Either way, I tend to think of the WMC interface as the great Wizard of Oz, a powerful public persona, but a facade.  I do not want the family to see the little man behind the curtain, but there will be tell-tale signs in the WMC library.

Library Setup

With Windows Vista, the music, video and picture collections are combined into a single giant library.  One of the first things you will want to do is add your WHS shared folders to the library.  Doing so will allow you to store all of your media on the server for access through the WMC, but each of the shared folders will show up in the videos and pictures interface with the UNC as the label.  Also, no matter how fast your network, local media will pop into view faster than media on the network.  You will have the opportunity to add the network shares as part of the initial WMC setup, but you can add new folders anytime you want.  In the WMC interface, scroll down to the Tasks control menu.  Flick right to the settings option and you can access library setup.  Alternatively, you can enter any of the collection folders and open the more info menu with a right-click or by pressing the i-more button on the WMC remote.  The library setup wizard will present you with the option of adding a folder to watch and then ask whether the folder is local or on another computer.  There is no need to map network drives to the shared folders.  Simply select the option to find the shared folders from another computer and the server’s shared folders will become selectable.

Movies

Setting up WMC for movies requires some choices be made ahead of time.  Windows Media Center has DVD playback built into the interface with the Play DVD option under the TV + Movies control menu.  If your family only watches one disc at at time, this is fine, but if you plan to rip your DVD collection as VOBs to your WHS, it would be advisable to enable the DVD library option for WMC.  DVD library shows not only the disc you inserted, but also the movies you have recorded off of television and can be pointed to VOB files stored in VIDEO_TS folders on the hard drive in the same way that you can add folders to the general media collections.  The easiest way to enable the gallery view is with a registry hack:

1. Exit Windows Media Center.  From the desktop, press the Windows Logo (Start button) and type regedit into the search box.  You need to type the entire name in order to make the program shortcut appear.

2. Navigate to the following key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionMedia CenterSettingsDvdSettings

3. In the results pane, right-click the registry key entitled ShowGallery, and then select Modify.

4. Clear the contents of the value data box and replace it with Gallery and then click OK.

5. Restart Windows Media Center.  The Play DVD option on the TV + Movies control menu will have been replaced with DVD library. 

When you insert a disc into Windows Media Center, WMC pulls metadata about the disc from AMG.  This dvdid metadata information is stored in a hidden folder in the account User folder.  If you want to take advantage of this stored metadata then I would recommend checking out the good folks over at www.dvdxml.com.  They have detailed instructions about how to apply the dvdid to your VOB folders and by registering you can access and add to their growing database of dvdids.  If you do not want to use the dvdid metadata or have home movies stored in a VOB format, it might be advantageous to add images to your movie folders to help make your movie collection more user friendly.  Simply add a JPG image of your choice to the folder that contains the VOB files and rename it to folder.jpg.  The movie’s generic placeholder icon in the DVD library will now be skinned with the image.  Keep in mind that the image will be resized to a rectangular shape similar in proportion to a DVD case.  As such, I find it best to use images similar to those one might find on Amazon or IMdB.

Unfortunately, the DVD library is restricted to movies recorded off of television, DVD discs, and DVDs ripped as VOBs in the VIDEO_TS folder format.  If you plan on building a movie collection using a mix of different WMC compatible file types, your movies can be added to your video library.  However, WMC does not offer much in the way of metadata outside of the DVD library and music library, so any movie collection you place in the video library will appear somewhat spartan.  For a mixed collection with complete metadata options, I suggest using a third-party movie management collection plug-in.  There are a variety of such plug-ins available, most of them free, open-source projects in various stages of development that I have enjoyed testing and using.  The best known, most mature, and really the best choice for an environment of novice users, is My Movies.

Television

I have saved the discussion of television for the end.  The topic of integrating WMC’s DVR functions with WHS has generated a great deal of discussion.  The allure of sharing one’s recorded television throughout the house has inspired a great deal of tinkering and testing by enthusiasts around the world.  There are ways to set up WMC to record directly to WHS and there are enthusiast projects afoot to bring Media Center to WHS, but after weeks of tinkering and testing of my own, I have come to the conclusion that the best solution for integrating WMC and WHS is to leave the heavy lifting to WMC.  I suspect that WHSv2 will bring some other solutions, but for now, the other solutions to involve WHS in the recording process tend to be temperamental or overly network intensive. 

Since my goal is to keep the network and WMC setup as stable and user-friendly as possible, I suggest leaving the recording functions to the WMC and then transferring the recordings over to the server for storage and network-wide access.

1. Start with the WHS.  Create a shared folder.  You can either add a subfolder to one of the default shared folders, or create a new shared folder, but it is best to use a folder name without spaces.  WMC tends to get cranky about updating its watched folders if you use spaces in the folder name.

2. Set the permissions on the folder to allow your Media Center machines full access to the folder.

3. Switch to your WMC machine and exit Media Center.  From the desktop, press the Windows Logo (Start button) and type regedit into the search box.  You need to type the entire name in order to make the program shortcut appear.

4. Navigate to the following key:

HKLMSOFTWAREMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionMedia CenterServiceRecording

5. In the results pane, right-click the registry key entitled WatchedFolders, and then select Modify.

6. Clear the contents of the value data box and replace it with the UNC path to the shared folder that you created on the WHS and then click OK.

7. Restart Windows Media Center.

If you are setting up a WMC machine without a TV tuner, or have not set up the tuner on your machine yet, there will not be a WatchedFolders entry.  If you do not have a WatchedFolders entry in the registry, you can add one.

1. Select Edit –> New –> String Value

2. Name the new entry in the results pane, WatchedFolders

3. Return to step 2 above.

Now, there are three ways you can go about transferring your recordings over.

• If you are a code monkey, then you can try writing a script that will move your recordings as a scheduled task.  This route would be beyond my ken.  Sorry.
• Use TV Manager.  This is a relatively new WHS add-in, but has quickly grown in popularity due to its rapid development cycle, straightforward features, tight WHS integration, and low, low price of free.  The recent 1.01 update adds new functionality to access recordings through the WHS web page.
• Use Recorded TV Manger.  This commercial WHS add-in has been around almost as long as WHS itself and has grown into a tremendously powerful television management system.  If you want complete control over how different media centers on your network access television and are interested in collecting complete seasons of television series, then this is the add-in you want.

Enjoy!

At the end of the day, I had two advantages going for me when I brought this new media center into the living room.  First, this was not my family’s first experience with Windows Media Center.  I had installed a PC in the living room before and we had been using an Xbox 360 as an extender for some time.  Second, my wife is patient.  It is this second advantage that matters most and that I will explore in more detail in my next article.