More big guns

For some reason I keep stucking to serious media servers recently. This is my latest discovery -- S1 Digital Media Server

Pretty amazing tech specs:

• 3 terabyte RAID storage
• Full 1080p Video Output via HDMI, DVI, Component or VGA
• 7.1 or 5.1 Channel High Definition AudioOutput audio via S/PDIF
• Dual HDTV and SDTV Tuners (Four TV Tuners!)

Damage about U$ 7500

Some more serious sh*t

Being extremely proud about my Half Terabyte Media Server, equipped with RAID5, Gigabit ethernet and Twinky software, its hard to write about product, following.



Looking for serious media server. having exess of U$ 10 000. Dont look further, if You are living in the States.

NiveusMedia Denali Edition




With scaling of DVDs up to 1080p resolution, and a 7.1 pro audio solution that boasts a 115db Signal to Noise Ratio, the Denali not only manages your entire home's digital media collection, it does it with the finesse that has made the Denali the industry's reference point in media center excellence.


Some key facts:

• 1.5 Terabytes of Storage
• Playback DVDs at high resolution 720p/1080i/1080p
• four built in television tuners (2x NTSC & 2x ATSC)

Xbox 360 connected!

Today I connected new Xbox 360 to my Media Server via wireless adapter. I was absolutely positively surprised. Setup was quick and easy. Just enter WAP key, select server connected and bingo! I also tester wired setup, what was even easier. Just plug and play!

I have 42" Hitatchi 1080i HD plasma and my Xbox is connected to that via HD Component cable. It allows to exploit full 1080i capability of my plasma. A tad confusing is digital audio connection. You have to buy separate optical cable and it connect to the Xbox-end of the cable!

Xbox 360 functionality as media player:

- Plays music: Yes, MP3 and WMA

- Shows digital photos: Yes, at 1080i HD resolution!

- Streams video's from UPnP media server (TwonkyMedia): NO (plays only from Xbox Hard Disk)

Pro's:

- Very good graphical interface

- Super visualization during music playback

- Very good quality in photo slideshow, shows also large 10 Mpix JPG photos >3 MB size

- Very quick srolling in the lists (artists, folders, albums, etc..)

Con's

- Doesn't stream videos from 3.-rd party media server (TwonkyMedia)

- Doesn't support all sorting/grouping features of TwonkyMedia UPnP server. You have to scroll through all 300 artists + 400 composers, to find one. No useful index feature, TwonkyMedia provides.

- Messes up all artists and compusers. Xbox combines artists with composers, producing 800-artist long list, instead of true 300 artists. Not standard UPnP behaviour

Conclusion: Very powerful and aesthetical graphics and fast CPU raises Xbox to very high level among other media playesr, pitty not streaming videos.

D-Link DSM-520 from eBay

Today I ordered my second media player D-Link DSM-520. It will be my main player, connected to my home cinema and 42" plasma via component HD.

Why I chose DSM-520? The only reason was HD 1080i ability. I have 21 000 hi-resolution digiphotos in my server to share and also I have 1080 HD plasma to show them to my family and guests. Previously I used to show it in PAL, wat is onli 480 lines. So, the resolution improvement will be 2 times horizontally, what is vlearly visible!

It cost me just 205 €, so, quite cheap!

Best players, on the paper

Information about media players is so scattered. You have to work all day long in very specific forums and make elaborate web searches to get some overview about new UPnP media players.
If I had to buy few media players, then here are my choices:

TOP 5 Living-room / home cinema

For use with HD LCD or plasma. They all comply my minimum requirements:

• High Definition (HD 1080)
• Play's music, photos and videos
• Component output for HD
• HDMI output
• UPnP compliant

D-link DSM-520 http://www.dlink.com/products/?pid=438
Pixel Magic HD MediaBox http://www.pixelmagicsystems.com/products/media_players/hd_mediabox.htm
NeoDigits Helios X5000 or X3000 http://www.neodigits.com/
NetGear EVA8000 http://www.netgear.com/Products/Entertainment/DigitalMediaPlayers.aspx
Kiss DP-600 http://www.kiss-technology.com/?p=600en

Bedroom
Requirements for bedroom are:

• WiFi built in
• 1 box design, speakers included
• Easy, to use
• Built-in LCD screen
• UPnP compliant

Philips Streamium WAK3300; WAS7000; WAS700
Pinnacle SoundBridge Radio
Acoustic Energy WiFi Internet Radio

Music in the bed

Tried today to use my Dell Axim X3 as media player, to acess my vast collection off media server. Simple Twonky web client, what works fine on PC, doesn't function on my axim.

Then I tried Rudeo Control http://www.rudeo.com/ but it is so limited in trial period, that very hard to say is it good or not. In some extent it works, but then I experianced quite weird behaviour. Can't recommend.

I have to look further...

Minor upgrade

Today I upgraded my Media Server RAID setup.

Before:
One volume per server

RocketRaid 1640 controller
RAID 5 volume, bootable (Win XP + data)

After

NEW: Two volumes per server
NEW: 40 GB IDE UDMA 5 bootable HDD (Win XP + TwonkyMedia server + other software, not shared)
NEW: RocketRaid 1810A controller (hardware accelerated RAID 5 parity calculation)
RAID 5 (4 x 160 SATA 150), containing digital music, images and movies - shared

So, basically I have bootable, not shared HDD for Win XP and data-only RAID 5 volume, shared to my house.

Performance IOmeter

Write throughput
Before 10 MB/s
After 54 MB/s Improvement 5,4x

Read throughput
Before 100 MB/s
After 100 MB/s same

Real-world copy test 254Mbyte CD

Before 8,5 MB/s
After 21,2 MB/s Improvement 2,5 times

Performance HD Tune

After (55MB/s, burst 82 MB/s) and before (47,7 MB/s, burst 57 MB/s)

I'm satisfied with new RAID 5 write performance!

Dirt cheap Russian option

You have to fill up Your huge media server with music. How? One option is iTunes, billing 1 € (U$ 1,2) per track. Another option is www.gomusic.com ,they bill just U$ 0,10-0,15 per track. Ten times less, one album for one track from iTunes.

Gomusic in the nutshell:

• > 31 000 albums
• > 25 000 artists
• fast download
• U$ 0,15 per track

It is mad to make U$ prepayment to russian internet company, selling online music? For most people it is. Still, this service has been reliable and fast. I have used it over 2 years. They claim,that legally is all correct with "Federation of Authors and Rightsholders for Collective Management of Copyright in Interactive" - so it's not pirate site.

DVD economics

How much is one DVD on Your digital home media server HDD in $$$? In VOB form? Lets take 5 GB Movie (The Matrix for example).

one 250 GB HDD = U$ 80.00
one Matrix = 5 GB
one HDD can home 50 movies

So, 1 movie occupies U$ 80/50= U$ 1,60 worth of hard drive.

In reality, You tend to have RAID, so multiply it by factor 1,25 (in 4 disk configuration)

1 Movie occupies U$ 2.00 worth of RAID5 disk system :) Not cheap, heh!

Geisha is Ripped

Today I sarted ripping DVD-s into my Half Terabyte Media Server (HTMS). Filling server with DVD-s is easy. Geisha was about 5 GBytes! I have 390 GB free, it can handle about 70 DVD-s only!!!! Shame...

I used DVD Decrypter for ripping. Later found from Wikipedia article, that this program is illegal. Is it so?

My ripping hardware is dell Optiplex 620 Dual Core 3GHz Intel Pentium D, with 2GB RAM. I ripped all DVD at 10x speed. So, 100 minute movie is in Your server in 10 minutes. Satisfactory!

Bad news is that olny first VOB file played, all the rest hanged my DSM-320. Have to play with options.

Good news is that TwonkyMedia server can handle huge VOB files, Windows Media Player 11 can't, too slow.

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/

I digitized it all (almost)

One day I made quite fundamental decision. No stacks of CD-s anymore in my house! I should rip them on the hard disk and listen from more innovative systems -- like digital media receivers all over my house.

I made quite MS friendly choice to rip them into WMA format: 192 bps, 44 Khz sampling, 2 channel, 16 bit format. For some reason I believed its sound superiority over mp3 format.

Also, I moved to digital photography -- that's indeed pretty obvious. I also started to scan all my previous films and photos into my digital storage.

Today I have 8 700 tracks from 680 albums, fron 230 different artists in my Media server, about 35 GB of songs.

Key facts of Digital Music:

• 35 000 000 000 bytes of music
• 8 700 tracks
• 680 ripped or purchased online CD albums
• 230 artists

Also I have 21 000 digital photos in my Media server, allocating 23 GB of disk storage. They occupy about 15% of my half-terabyte Media server. So, there is room for growth.

I don't have videos and digitized DVD-s yet in my Media server, as I use to rent films and look digital TV.

More about my Media server hardware and software, also about media receivers in my future blogs.