Great feedback from my reader

Today I receive such letter:

Hello Jaak,
On my search for a HD mediaplayer I found your Blog. The information really helped me. I wanted to buy the Helios X3000, but as I looked further I found the Ziova ClearStream. The Helios looks better, but the ClearStream has more options. See http://www.ziova.com/cs505_specs.php
With regards, Marcel (from Holland)

I am glad, that my blog has been hepful and that I got valuable feedback.

Lets take a glance, who is the Ziova Corporation and what they have. They have only 2 main products, HD networked media players. HD only! They also have HDMI and Component cables in their product range.

They have 2 media player models, CS510 pure media player, CS505 media player with DVD.

Clearstream CS510 and CD505 highlights (listed only interesting features)

Pro's

• HDMI and Component Video HD output
• Plays MPEG2 and MPEG4 video up to 1080i
• Plays WMV9 HD video up to 1080i
• Streams UPnP
• Streams directly from MS Windows Shares (no authentication)
• Both wireless and 10/100 ethernet
• Twonky media server included
• Dolby Digital analog output included

Con's

• CS505 model had DVD player, but no upscaling
• 1080p is missing (I personally don't care)

Conclusion: Full-bred High Definition media receiver with good connectivity.

New digital media products from BIG PLAYERS

There are lot of niche players in digital home market. Also few bigger SOHO network company like D-Link and NetGear. Good news is that old slow mainstream hi-fi companies are jumping to bandwagon: Yamaha, Onkyo and Philips. So. You may find now 10/100 LAN connectors among with most usual connectors on the backplane.

Yamaha

Yamaha has good reputation in home cinema systems and receivers. New models RX-V2700 and RX-N600 has media player functionalityes, added to pure good old receiver.

RX-V2700 features

• 7-channel powerful surround sound: 980W=140W x 7 RMS; 1,295W=185W x 7 Max
• Digital ToP-ART with superior audio-grade parts and devices used throughout
• Pure Direct for higher fidelity sound reproduction
• 3 in/1 out HDMI (Ver 1.2a) for handling digital signals including Super Audio CD
• Assignable amplifiers for bi-amp connection
• 1080p compatible HDMI (3 in/1 out)
• High-definition video up-conversion
• Up-scaling (480ior 576i to 1080i/720p)
• De-interlacing (480i/576i to 480p/576p)
• Wide-range video bandwidth (100MHz -3 dB, 1080p compatible)
• Network Receiver functions
  (Internet radio, PC music files, USB portable audio players and flash drives)
• iPod compatibility via optional Yamaha YDS-10
• Compressed Music Enhancer
• Improved YPAO sound optimization with 6 system memories
• GUI on-screen display (6 languages: English, French, German, Spanish, Russian and japanese)
• Superior zone control with additional zone remote unit and zone multi-language OSD
• Upgraded CINEMA DSP with 22 DSP programs
• Dolby Digital EX and DTS 96/24 compatibility

Very interesting feature is MP3 music artifact removing: Compressed Music Enhancer

RX-N600 features

• 6.1-channel, powerful surround sound: 570W=95W x 6 RMS; 145W/Ch Max (for Europe);
• 810W=135W x 6 Max
• Digital ToP-ART and High Current Amplification
• 192kHz/24-Bit DACs for all channels
• Playback MP3/WMA/WAV music from a PC
• USB flash drive/music player compatibility
• Play Internet radio
• MusicCAST Client compatibility
• Compatible with iPod via optional Yamaha YDS-10
• Compressed Music Enhancer
• On-screen display
• 3 HDTV compatible component video inputs
• Component video up-conversion
• Digital video processing with TBC (Time Base Corrector)
• Quad-Field CINEMA DSP and 14 surround programmes
• Night Listening Enhancer (Cinema/Music) and SILENT CINEMA

Onkyo

Onkyo has also serveral new stream-able receivers. They look lika good old-school AV Receiver, but backplane reveals ethernet connection.

TX-NR801E THX™ Select 7.1-Channel A/V Home Network Receiver and

TX-NR5000E THX™ Ultra2™ 7.1-Channel A/V Home Network Receiver

Internet Features:

• 30 Internet radio random presets
• Ethernet port (Homenetwork)
• Net-Tune Protocol Function
• MP3, WAV, WMA decoding

What exactly is Net-Tune??? Is it UPnP compliant? All what I found from the marketing matherials, that You have to install Net Tune Central server software to Your PC or home media server and starrt listening MP3, WAV and WMA music and Internet radio. Most probably it is just another entry level UPnP server.

D-Link's new media receiver

Dlink announced some new features of upcoming draft 802.11n high definition media receiver DSM-750.

Evolution of DSM media players -- my interpretation:

DSM-320

Wireless 802.11g;

Screen resolution 480 lines? (not confirmed)

SCART RGB or Component + S-video

New in DSM-520 (compared to DSM-320)

HD screen resolution 1080 for MPEG 2 and MPEG4, 760 for WMA HD and 760 x 480 for photos;

Wireless 802.11b & g;

HDMI output

New in DSM-750 (compared to DSM-520)

Draft 802.11n wireless (up to 200 Mbit)

So, only remarkable upgrade is draft N wireless, what allows better video streaming over wireless network.

Media Server Software

I started experimenting with server softwares first time when I bought my first DMR (digital media receiver) from D-Link. The model was wireless media player MediaLounge DSM-320:
http://www.dlink.com/products/?sec=1&pid=318
and server software D-Link MediaServer was included in the box. Software is freely downloadable brom D-Link website. I tested MediaServer version 1.07. I don't describe througly this product. Instead, I write how I found software meeting my needs.

Media Server Evolution

As I told, I started with D-Link Media Server. In the nutshell my server software evolution is following:

D-Link Media Server -> MS Media Connect 2.0 -> MS Windows Media Player 11 Beta -> MS Windows Media Player 11 -> TwonkyMedia 4.1

D-Link Media Server - relatively slow in screen operations and music vas interrupted randomly for 0.5 - 1 sec using my old Celeron server;

MS Media Connect 2.0 - very same problems as D-Link;

MS Media Server 11 - It uses Media Connect 3.0 version, but no actual development in speed or usability. For the comment, that Vista uses Media Connect 4.0 version, but I haven't tested it yet.

Read more about Media Connect: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Media_Connect

And the Winner is

TwonkyMedia ver 4.1 is clear winner, despite its a tad complicated web-interface setup. It has several very good usability features, hanling large music collections, lika Arist Index, Album Index etc. Plus, it has excellent technology, it stresses servers CPU minimally, uses cache-s to speed up recurring queries. Result is user-friendly functionality and very good speed moving around huge collections.

Main characteristics of the MediaServer

• Easy to setup,


• support for major media formats,


• convenient navigation on large media collections,


• very short response time,


• multiple language support,


• highly customizable (including navigation structure),


• easy handling of thousands of media items,


• Internet radio,


• interfaces to 3rd party applications like iTunes, Winamp, Adobe Photoshop Album,


• search actions allow you to easily find a specific piece of content (depending on client support)


• supports a large variety of UPnP streaming clients (see our device compatibility list)


• integrated client adaptation layer to support special media player capabilities,


• available for all operating systems and embedded devices like NAS, STBs and PVRs*,


• small footprint and very small memory consumption,


• stable code base deployed in various products and tested at UPnP and DLNA plugfests

Look also: http://www.twonkyvision.de/

Half Terabyte Media Server

"Half Terabyte" media server at home -- sounds good, yeah?! True. It was just few years ago then Microsoft demonstrated 1 TB storage SQL test. It was something! Now I am honored to own 0,5 TB storage at my home. Being exact, its not 0,5 TB, but 0,45 TB, but "Half Tera" sounds much nicer.

Base of my media server is Dell Dimension 8200, equipped with 2MHz Intel P4 and 0,5GB RAM. My son used it about 3 years as gaming and internet surfing entertainment equipment. It had 1 good feature -- big tower case, lots of internal HDD bays, 4 available.

I took out powerful sound card. I replaced Nvidia gaming 3D graphics card with passive (fanless) one. I throw out HDD.

Disk configuration

I installed 4 SATA disks 'a 160 GB into RAID 5 configuration. As my old base computer had only 32 bit PCI slots, I had tu use relatively slow PCI SATA RAID controller RocketRaid 1640 from HighPoint Tech USA.

RocketRAID 1640 Highlights
http://www.highpoint-tech.com/USA/rr1640.htm#top

• PCI 32bit@33/66MHz



• 4 Channel PCI to SATA RAID Controller



• Support up to 4 SATA Hard Drives(compatible with SATA II Hard Drives)



• RAID 0, 1, 5, 10 and JBOD



• Support Windows, Winx64, Windows Vista, Linux, FreeBSD

HD Tune gives some 47,4 MB/s average data transfer speed and 16ms acess to this system. Enough for home system, but a tad less what I was expected.

Network adapter

I replaced old CNet 100 Mbit NIC with Intel PRO/1000 GT card.
http://www.intel.com/network/connectivity/products/pro1000gt_desktop_adapter.htm

It gave some 60% raw throughput speed (yes, not 10-fold). Its ment for desktop computers and stresses CPU a lot. I should try server NIC and see, is it stressing less. Currently CPU is near 90% stressed during backup copies.

I installed MS Windows XP Pro SP2 with all updates. I installed TwonkyMedia, copied all data from my old server, shared directories for local users -- and voilà! My Half Tera server was up and serving!