Media Center and Home Server Global HotSpot

Windows Home Server PP1 RC available to the public.

EnglishBloke — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 17:08:00 GMT

Microsoft have released a publically downloadable RC of PowerPack 1 for Windows Home Server.

You can grab it right now from the link at the end of this blog post.

Windows Power Pack one is stuffed full of cool features and enhancements heavily influenced by community requests and feedback.

PowerPack 1 also fixes the 'corruption bug' in Windows Home Server which affected a small set of Windows Home Server users saving to Windows Home Servers with multiple drive configurations.

This public release candidate follows the Windows Home Server teams die hard approach to taking customer feedback very seriously and the team looks forward to any and all feedback from the community regarding this release candidate.

Amongst the features included in the release are:

The ability to run Home Server Connector on x64 Vista.
Backup of the home server Shared Folders.
Remote Access improvements.
Improved Power Consumption.
Support for Chinese and Japanese Languages.

I personally have been running PP1 for a while now and I can honestly say I love it. I have had basically no issues at all. I've never experienced the corruption bug with PP1 and I run 12 drives on my WHS and save from many applications directly onto the shares. Performance has also never been better. I saw a nice CPU drop on my WHS with PP1 and haven't seen any errors in my event log for a long time :)

I think the WHS Team should be very proud of this release. It very much follows the quality of the original product. I think we've got some amazing things still to come from this team, and if the quality of PP1 is anything to go by, I think we're all going to be very happy.

Download WHS PowerPack 1 Release Candidate from Microsoft Connect

Read more details on the Windows Home Server Team Blog

Automatically backup Media Center recordings.xml each time it changes

EnglishBloke — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 07:49:00 GMT

I created an application which backs up your recordings.xml schedule file in Media Center each time it is changed.

With this tool activated, if your computer ever crashes and the file is damaged you will have a very recent backup which you can simply copy over the old one.

I posted more about it over on my blog here

Really amazing deal on Dell XPS420 Today Only $1098!

EnglishBloke — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 16:54:00 GMT

Do you want a killer Media Center PC?, I found this fantastic deal at dell today.

PROCESSOR - Core™2 Q6600 Quad-Core (8MB L2 cache,2.4GHz,1066FSB)
OPERATING SYSTEM - Windows Vista® Home Premium with Digital Cable Support
MEMORY - 4GB Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 667MHz - 4 DIMMs
HARD DRIVE - 500GB - 7200RPM, SATA 3.0Gb/s, 16MB Cache
OPTICAL DRIVE - 16X CD/DVD burner (DVD+/-RW) w/double layer write capability
MONITORS - 20 inch E207WFP Widescreen Digital Flat Panel
VIDEO CARD - ATI Radeon HD 2400 PRO 128MB
SOUND CARD - Integrated 7.1 Channel Audio
WI-FI AND MODEM - 56K PCI Data Fax Modem

Check out the best part, add a Dual ATI OCUR tuner and change the graphics card to a Radeon HD3650 and you've got yourself a kick ass Media Center box with Dual Digital tuners for : $1527!!!

Be quick though, this ends today!

Click here to get the deal! - MARCH 29TH ONLY

Win my Zune! (not to mention an XBox 360 Elite!)

EnglishBloke — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 01:50:00 GMT

theDigitalLifestyle.com is running a cool competition to win an XBox 360 Elite for the 'The Ultimate Media Center Enthusiast Setup'.

I decided to donate my Zune 2, 8 gig for this competition. This is MY actual zune, i've been using since release with a custom engraving. The grand prize is an XBox 360 Elite and other prizes will include Media Center software and my Zune.

So what are you waiting for!?, get your camera out and lets see your Media Center setup guys!

Check it out over here.

Top 5 things you didn't know you could do with your Vista Media Center PC

EnglishBloke — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 15:27:00 GMT

Here I present my top 5 things you can do using your Vista Media Center PC.

Enjoy! I hope you like this one guys!, Let me know what you think on the forums. Take it easy!

And if you like my video, make sure you rate me and digg it :)

The Media Center show interview & Media Center in the kitchen!?

EnglishBloke — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 19:39:00 GMT

Hey Guys, I've been quiet the last few weeks, I've been busy working away at a few projects and getting foundations setup to take part as a Microsoft Champion in the Media Center, Home Server community.

You can read a bit more about this on blog at thedigitallifestyle.com : MCML blog.

In relation to that I recently did an interview with Ian Dixon, from the Media Center Show Podcast and thedigitallifestyle.com. It was released yesterday and you can listen to it at the Media Center Show podcast linked above.

I also took part in a fun event with Ian a couple of weeks ago. Ian hosted the Media Center Awards Show 2007 live over uStream. I was a guest on the awards show via Skype, the show had guests and winners from the literally the 4 corners of the world! I also announced my involvement in the Champion program on this event.

I've also been working hard on my integration between WHS and Media Center that I've mentioned a few times before. (Previously known as WHS Recorded TV Manager, although it will be released under a new title TBA).

That project is so near to completion now it hurts; I've just been very busy and haven't had a chance to get it out there yet. However it's coming very soon and I think you'll like it :)

In addition I intend to release the source code to my Stage6 DivX plugin for Media Center over on my blog on thedigitallifestyle.com in the next week or so, so stay tuned for that :) - It will be used as a launch into some MCML programming articles to help you guys make your own add-ins for Vista MCE.

One other thing I've been working on is adding a Media Center system to my Kitchen. It's now complete and I'm very happy with it. Tell me what you think :)
As always please bombard me with questions if you have any and I'll do my best to help.

MCE Home Server Manager Update

EnglishBloke — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 16:38:00 GMT

It's been a busy Christmas and New Year in the Lindsay house-hold; I decided it was time I moved to an OCUR system. In addition I’ve been working hard on my MCE Home Server Manager application which allows automatic storage of your recorded shows on a Windows Home Server machine.

So I decided over Christmas that I would buy a new Media Center machine and take the plunge into an OCUR system. I eventually decided upon a Dell XPS 420 with Dual ATI Cable Card tuners. This is now setup and I have re-organized my setup substantially since the video interview with Brian Johnson (if you missed it, you can catch my original interview here: Show us your tech: Steve Lindsay edition)

I made a quick video of what I’ve done since the last video which you can see on this post.

In addition I was interviewed last week by Ian Dixon on his Media Center Show Podcast, you can catch the interview in a couple of weeks when Ian gets back from CES.

Apparently it seems someone over at ehomeUpgrade.com thought I was geeky enough to earn a Digital Home to the Max 2007 award over Christmas which was nice. All I can say guys with what is coming with Media Center and Home Server; 'you isn’t seen nothing yet'.

Finally I wanted to mention I'm about to go into beta on my MCE Home Server Manager application. So I wanted to reveal a few features in advance for you. I'll be posting here when I release so you can snag a copy for yourself. Here are some of the features.

Simple install.
Move recordings to Windows Home Server drive on scheduled intervals.
The ability to configure file types moved (i.e. commercial skip files etc).
The ability for the application to automatically cleanup files which the corresponding recordings no longer exist for (i.e. commercial skip files).
The ability to move recordings from multiple locations.
The ability to configure the watched folders in media center (thus letting you add the Windows Home Server recorded TV share).

Anyway that's all from me for now guys, I'll be back soon with more Media Center / Home Server tips and tricks.

Skipping Commercials with Media Center

EnglishBloke — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 18:44:00 GMT

You know a thing which bugged me for a long time with my Media Center is the fact that I had to watch commercials when I recorded shows.

Well... I didn't HAVE to watch them, but I still had to fast forward through them and I hated this. I went looking for a solution which would do it for me.

I looked at a lot of solutions and found most centered around actually cutting out the commercials after they had been recorded. Involving most of the time complex re-encoding of the shows.

In addition if the solution got it wrong, I had lost parts of my shows completely unless I kept the original recording around!

So I finally worked out I needed to find a solution which offered these things:

No re-encoding, this is too heavy duty per show for me. I don't want to actually re-encode video when I'm likely to delete it very shortly after watching it.
I want it to skip automatically for me through commercials.
I want the ability to NOT skip automatically through commercials.
I want to be able to turn off skipping commercials in the very obscure scenario that I actually want to watch the commercials (Super Bowl!)

Eventually I found something which does all of this (and a lot more) and I've been using it for a while now. I thought I'd share it with you guys as I imagine some people may benefit from it.

The application I'm using is called DVRMSToolbox.

A simple two minute install will get you up and working immediately. It works like this:

A windows service monitors your recordings, it uses another application (either ShowAnalyzer or ComSkip) which can work out when a commercial break starts and ends. The information on when the commercial break starts and ends is written to a file along side the actual recording of the show.

When you playback the recording this file is also being monitored,
when the service monitoring the playback see's that you are at a commercial break it tells Media Center to skip to the point that the commercial break ends.

To you the user, you simply see it skip instantly through all commericals in a show!

What is nice is the toolkit is really easy to setup, and you can be up and running in minutes and after it is setup it literally requires nothing, it just works.

While in Media Center, you can turn commerical skipping on and off while playing media by simply hitting down on your remote. You can also skip to the next or last segment of a program by hitting back and forward on the remote.

One thing I would recommend after installing DVRMSToolbox is registering ShowAnalzyer which is the default method used for detecting the commercial breaks. It is really accurate, but it costs about $20, which I think is very worth it.

However when you install DVRMSToolbox you will get a free 2 week trial of ShowAnalyzer, when the trial is over it will switch to another free piece of commercial break skip detection software called 'ComSkip' which doesn't work as well as ShowAnalyzer but does the job.

You can try both methods, for me I found ShowAnalyzer worked far better so I registered it.

You can grab DVRMSToolbox for both Windows Vista and Windows MCE 2005 here : http://babgvant.com/files/default.aspx

You can simple install instructions here : http://babgvant.com/Wiki/view.aspx/DVRMSToolbox/Install

How can I speed up my Windows Home Server file copies?

EnglishBloke — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 05:00:00 GMT

Lately I've been receiving a few emails asking me about issues with speeds when copying to and from Windows Home Server. Some of these issues can be network, some can be other things such as your Windows Home Server hardware setup. Especially if you build your home server yourself. This article discusses how you can ensure your Windows Home Server is setup optimally so you can ensure the fastest possible copying speeds.

When you install WHS, it partitions the install hard disk into a 20 Gigabyte primary OS partition and then puts the remaining space as drive D which becomes a 'Primary data partition'.

This 'Primary data partition' is where all of the actual network shares are located, so when you go to \\server\videos your really going to the D drive partition on the primary disk.

When you copy a file across to the videos share for instance, the file is copied onto the D drive partition on your primary home server drive. On the WHS there is a service called the 'Windows Home Server Drive Extender' which is monitoring the videos folder (and all other network shares) which is actually physically located on the D drive 'Primary data partition' of the WHS primary hard disk.

The 'Windows Home Server Drive Extender' looks at the configuration for the share and works out based on this configuration which actual WHS storage drive it will move the file just copied to the share too. The service looks at several thing, such as where other files for the same share are, how much space is free, and if you are using folder duplication.

Once the drive extender service chooses a final destination and moves the media to that destination (If your using duplication it also copies it to another drive for duplication), it creates what is known as a 'tombstone' file in place of the file it just moved to the destination.

The 'tombstone' file is a very small file which points to where the actual file is. This frees up the original space used on the D: drive again and the file is now located on one of the WHS storage drives.

Now this is great as you never need to worry about disk space and you simply see one huge share which can contain the combined space of all of your WHS storage drives.

The problem and the reason copies can be so slow is that if the primary hard disk is slower than the actual WHS storage drives or the drive of the PC which is copying data to it then you're going to get bottlenecked by it.

Here is an example; lets say we have the following setup:

A 1 Gigabit network connection between the source PC and the WHS machine through a 1 Gigabit switch.
The WHS has a 80 Gigabyte primary hard disk which is an ATA100 IDE 7200rpm drive with 2MB cache. It has a write seek time of 10.9ms average/read seek time of 8.9ms and Transfer rates of 420Mbits/s (max) buffer to disk and a buffer to host transfer speed 100.0MB/s.
The WHS has 3 x 500 Gigabyte SATA2 drives which you very sensibly connected to a separate SATA2 PCI card with 3 independent SATA2 channels. The drives are 10,000rpm, with 5.2ms average write seek speed/4.6ms read seek time, and a buffer to host transfer rate of 1.5Gbits/s with a sustained buffer to disk transfer rate of 84 MB/s. In addition these drives also have a 16MB cache.
A Windows Vista PC on the network which has a 250 Gigabyte 7200rpm SATA drive which has a read seek time of 8.9ms/write seek time 10.9ms, and a buffer to disk transfer speed of 748Mbits/s (max) and a buffer to host speed of 300MB/s.

The first thing worth mentioning is that the 1 Gigabit network should be able to copy in theory at about 100-200Mbits/s between the Vista PC and the Windows Home Server.

So lets say we want to copy a 60 Gigabyte file from the Vista PC to the WHS videos share. The file is being read from the Vista PC SATA disk a lot faster than it can write to the WHS ATA100 primary drive.

This is due to a large number of factors;

    The faster read speeds of the SATA drive on the Vista machine, compared to the write speeds of the destination home server ATA100 primary hard disk.

    The SATA drive being nearly twice as fast at moving the data from the disk to the drive buffer compared to the ATA100 primary drive in the WHS.

    The SATA drive being 3 times faster moving the data from the drive buffer to the host (network), than the ATA100 primary drive in the WHS can move the data from the host (network) to the drive buffer.

    In addition the buffer on the ATA100 drive in the WHS is 8 times smaller than that of the SATA drive on the Vista PC which it will take longer to get the data on disk due it not being able to buffer as much before it has to write it to the disk.

So as you can imagine already our copy is now slowed down significantly. There is no chance at this point we're going to be copying at 300MBits/s. So what can we actually expect?

With just the points we mentioned above the speed has already dropped down to about 60MBit/s.

So ok, we can expect 60MBit/s per second? thats not too bad right?

Well I'm sure if you have the above setup your not even seeing that.... So why, what else is wrong?

Well at this point, we only discussed the data getting onto the ATA100 D: drive. As mentioned before, the Windows Home Server Drive Extender service will then move it to an actual storage drive on your Windows Home Server.

You may now be starting to see the issue. Your destination drives are going to be copied to from only the WHS D: drive, nothing else will be writing to these at all.

That means due to the slower ATA100 D: 80 Gigabyte drive speed, along with the tiny 2MB cache, and the 420Mbits/s buffer to disk transfer rate is going to slow down the copy to your super fast drives 10,000rpm SATA2 drives.

Your ATA100 hard disk in this setup is your weakest link. Its slowing down both the copy across the network initially and the copy on the WHS to the storage drive after that. In addition add drive fragmentation of the storage drive/drives and your really getting into trouble.

But.... you could have even more issues, for instance, if you have Media Sharing turned on in WHS for streaming media to your 360's or Windows Media Player 11 etc, then every time you copy a new file to the WHS it is indexed immediately, which can cause some more additional slowdown.

In addition if you have duplication turned on for that particular folder it will be slower again due to having to move the file to two destination WHS storage drives.

So how much would all of the above actually effect your final copy speed?

Well I've seen in the worst case scenario of above, with the drive bottle neck, disk fragmentation on your storage drives, Media Sharing and Folder duplication turned on. The speeds can drop to as bad as between 1Mbits/s to 7Mbits/s which as you can imagine may disappoint you heavily especially if your on a 1 Gigabit network!

In the worst case scenario I'm talking about I saw copy speeds that slow it would take between 30-60 minutes to copy a 500MB file!

Now we didn't even discuss the scenario that other people may be copying to or from the WHS at the same time!

Finally I wanted to mention another issue, in the setups we talked about, the primary WHS hard disk was a 80 Gigabyte and the storage drives are 500 Gigabyte. This is bad, you want to have a primary hard disk of at least the same size as your largest storage drive if possible. This will ensure that you don't run out of space if you're copying large amounts of files or a single very large file to your home server. Remember they will end up copying to your 'Primary data partition' first!, and if it does not have the space to store the file, it really doesn't matter that you have enough space on your other drives. You need to consider this even more if you think it's likely you will be copying to the server from multiple machines at once.

So what can you do to prevent these situations?

Well... these would be my top 10 tips to ensure you don't get into this situation with Windows Home Server.

Ensure your primary hard disk on your WHS is at least the speed of the fastest disk on your network.
Ensure your primary hard disk on your WHS is at least the size of the largest hard disk in your WHS storage.
Use a disk de-fragmentation tool on your Storage drives (You need de-fragmentation tools specific to Home Server, such as Raxco Perfect Disk for Home Server or Diskeeper 2008 Home Server - Links below).
Unless you need duplication on a folder, turn it off. Duplication in intended for files you really want to ensure you don't loose. i.e. Photos, Personal documents etc.
Unless you need and use the Media Streaming feature of WHS leave it turned off.
Get a 1 Gigabit switch for your network and a 1 Gigabit network card for your WHS, attach your WHS and machines which talk to the WHS to the switch. At the very least your WHS will benefit from being connected to a 1 Gigabit switch even if your other PC's are not using 1 Gigabit network cards. This is due to your WHS being capable of sending more data to more PC's at once when using 1 Gigabit even if the other PC's themselves are only using 100megabit network cards.
Get 1 Gigabit network cards for your PC's which talk to the WHS if you can. As above at the very least get your WHS a 1 Gigabit network card. This tip is obviously contingent on you having a 1 Gigabit switch. Also ensure the cards are actually configured 1 Gigabit, otherwise it would defeat the purpose.
Don't expect to get the full 1 Gigabit speeds on your Home Server or any machine on your network. 1 Gigabit networks do not run 1 Gigabit in homes, they typically run at the fastest at around 300Mbits/s, and typically around 100-200Mbits/s. This is just how 1 Gigabit works in home environments. I included an article below which you can read which will explain some of the issues with speed on 1 Gigabit home networks.
If you are using custom plug-ins on your Windows Home Server be aware of what they are doing, you don't want to slow down the WHS as this could end up slowing down everything on the WHS including file copies.
Fully understand how Windows Home Server Drive Extender works by reading Microsoft's white paper (linked below).

So what speed can you expect if you use these tips and are setup optimally?

Well lets assume we have SATA 7200rpm drives on all machines including the primary disk on WHS. 1 Gigabit Ethernet running CAT6 all round our network on all machines. No WHS Folder Duplication or Media Sharing on our WHS destination share and all our WHS storage drives de-fragmented nicely.

In testing I found that I would get up to around 150Mbits/s which is really fast. The 60 Gigabyte file we talked about took around an hour. A 5 Gigabyte file took around 5 minutes and a 500MB file would wiz across in just 30 seconds!

Useful links:

Microsoft Home Server Drive Extender White Paper (PDF)

1 Gigabit Ethernet Need to Know article by Toms Networking

Raxco Perfect Disk for Home Server

Diskeeper 2008 for Windows Home Server

Mommy why is there a server in the house?

EnglishBloke — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 05:00:00 GMT

Not so much a Home Server tip, but a good chuckle is too be found at http://www.stayathomeserver.com - Microsoft is releasing a children's book!, this book is a comical take on why there is a new member to the family, i.e. your home server.

Apparently you'll be able to pick up a copy of the book on amazon!

The video is pretty comical too, check it out :)

Time to introduce myself

EnglishBloke — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 05:00:00 GMT

I just wanted to make a quick post to introduce myself. My name is Steve Lindsay, I'm an SDET over at Microsoft's Forefront Server Security team. I have a passion for Media Center and Home Server in my spare time.

This blog is going to be my global hotspot for Media Center and Home Server tips and tricks. Over time I'll be posting tips and tricks for Media Center and Home Server.

My intention with these tips and tricks is to target not only regular Media Center and Home Server users. But also to deliver some 'outside the box' solutions which can add really extended functionality to Media Center and Home Server for the Power Users among us.

These tips will include things like:

How to setup archived Media Center Recordings on your Home Server.

Playback of Media Center media on Home Server.
Media Center development including MCML.
How to setup Photo CallerID through Media Center.
Using Media Center Extenders.
Using Zune with your media center.

As well as these tips above and many more which i'll share with you over the coming months. I'd love to hear from you, the community on what you want and what you want to do. If I can help you get there I will.

If you missed the video on my MCE / WHS setup you can catch it over here on Brian Johnson's blog.