My Media Center System - Dazzle and Hassle
Media Center is excellent and will dazzle you and your friends with its performance and access to media, however achieving a good setup is not without its hassle. This section is growing as I add more text and photos, but for now it is a collection of individual notes as follows:
Connecting a large LCD panel to a Media Center PC – supported resolutions beware!.
Listening to internet radio stations with Media Center
When I connected my first plasma panel to my newly built MCE PC, I imagined that this would be a fairly simple process just like connecting a computer monitor to the PC - find the native resolution of the display, set the PC output to that resolution and connect using the best (i.e. digital) connection provided. The plasma panel was a Panasonic THD42PV500 with a native resolution of 1024 x 768 and it came with an HDMI connector as well as a VGA D-style connector. I made the connection with a DVI to HDMI cable, as I thought that this was effectively a DVI digital connection. How wrong I could be. The MCE display seemed ok but as soon as I switched to the PC desktop - output at the native resolution of 1024 x 768, the display was awful. Why? Digging into the Panasonic manual showed that the only supported resolutions via the HDMI connector are 1024 x 720 and 1024 x 1080, as per the HD video ‘spec of course, but what you don’t realise is that although you can set the PC video mode to drive this, the panel video engine is then scaling this 720 or 1080 back to 768 to hit the pixels. The result is terrible when you view a simple PC desktop – which is a simple high-definition image after all – so it seemed that there must be a better solution. There was – simply connect the PC to the panel using the VGA connector. Now, the PC desktop was excellent – and so therefore was any high-definition picture too, the downside is that it’s not totally digital (a VGA connection is actually an RGB analogue connection)
The moral is clear though, if you want a good large PC display you must ensure that it has a digital connection (either HDMI or DVI) and that this connection supports the native panel resolution. For the best picture you MUST drive the panel at its native resolution, if you do not, you will be relying on the panel video engine to scale and you risk video movement artefacts and poor static definition. Always go for native resolution driving over and above connection method.
Click here to see details of my Panasonic TH42-PHD8 display connected to media center.
There is often an slightly older PC that has been replaced and could stand-in as a server for you video and audio files. Any PC can do this including the actual MCE PC itself, but it is slightly better to locate the files on a separate PC because if another person elsewhere in the house is watching a file located on the server, there is less risk to the MCE PC of being overloaded with tasks, perhaps whilst recording an important program. To implement a file server you just connect your intended PC on the house network and then go into My Computer and turn on sharing for the disk letter that contains your files. (You also need to enable file sharing on the PC too). A smart move is to NOT allow 'network users to change my files' during sharing. This will mean that your files can only be moved or deleted by logging on to the server PC and will stop client PC's from gaily leaving thumbnail files and other dross behind. Your data may actually be safer, too. Another smart move is to set all of your files to be read-only.
Sooner or later you will run out of space (probably sooner!). You can increase your server space by adding another hard disk into the server PC or as an external USB drive. This external USB solution is excellent and you can set its drive letter to share on the network in exactly the same way as for an internal drive. You should ensure that the drive is USB2.0 (most are now, so the data transfers quickly) and buy at least a 300GB drive. When you get it, format it using NTFS - this is more reliable than the FAT32 that they often come with. The drive will hold around 60 DVD's at a cost of under £2.50 each.
Now, a caution. An emerging technology is 'NAS' or 'Network Attached Storage' where the drive is connected directly to the network. It obtains its own IP address and shares itself automatically, configured by a utility that sits on another PC on the network. For now, JUST SAY NO. Maxtor have a nice looking solution for this and I eagerly purchased the 300GB version. My initial impression was excellent but gradually I realised that these devices are only as good as the software and processor that is built into them - meaning that at best it is not as flexible as a drive connected to a PC and at worst it just doesn't work well enough. The Maxtor unit shared ok but when I came to back up its data it turned out that it does not allow files to be made read only - it has its own way of denying writes. This confuses backup software no end. The file format is FAT32, not NTFS (the latter is proprietary to Microsoft so no surprises there) but this limits file sizes to 4GB and is less reliable than NTFS. The file size issue is not really a problem for now but MCE can easily create a DVR-MS recorded TV file of 4G in size if you leave it recording for 3 or 4 hours. The final nail in its coffin was the transfer speed of data. I made no objective measurements but the NAS drive was significantly slower than a USB2.0 drive connected to the server PC, I would say around half the speed. This would be an issue with two or more clients connected to it. It would also appear that there are problems with its software connecting multiple users at the moment too....... In time I expect to see these device proliferate, but for now use a USB2.0 or fire wire external drive until their internal processors and software become more reliable and quick. Ironically after what I've just written about their NAS drive, an excellent solution for an external USB2.0 / Fire wire drive is the Maxtor One-touch II 300 GB drive. This looks and works extremely well and has a big plus that it can be set to stop rotating after being idle for a time, exactly what you want for a video / audio file server disk that will only be used intermittently. Presently I have 5 of these drives to provide 1500 GB of network visibility and another 5 more 300GB 'cheap' USB drives to act as mirrors for the Maxtor's in case of problems. By the way, take note. You WILL have a problem sometime with your files. Take it from me - plan a backup strategy from day one or you will regret it. Losing 300GB of files even when they are still in DVD cases downstairs does not a happy person make. You will be even less happy if they are your treasured photos.
The photo below shows my server setup with 6 individual 300 GB drives, arranged in a master-backup pair. The backup contains a copy of the master contents, manually updated every few days using SecondCopy 2000 and is normally powered off for safety. The master is always on and each master is connected to a separate USB socket on the PC rather than via a hub to ensure maximum bandwidth when clients access files on multiple of these master drives simultaneously (with a hub, all data has to go down one USB 'pipe' instead). A 4-port USB card has been fitted to increase the PC's USB ports to cope.
When setting up a shared server like this, it is nice if you can expose all of these drives as a single share name. This has two important advantages. Firstly, client need only reference a single share name making client setup very easy, and second, any changes or expansion to the USB server drives or letters will not propagate to the clients. One way of achieving this is as follows:
Choose a sensible drive volume name for each USB drive, such as D1, D2 D3 etc.
Create a new empty folder on the server PC disk called 'shared'.
Right-click on 'My Computer' and select 'Manage', then select 'Disk Management'.
Go through each logical drive letter and select 'Change drive letter or paths', 'Mount in empty NTFS folder', creating a new empty folder under the 'shared' folder that you created previously with the same name as the disk volume (D1, D2 etc).
Use 'sharing and security' to change the properties of the 'shared' folder to allow network access, but uncheck the box 'allow network users to change my files' - this ensures that your server files are safe from unwanted deletion by clients - you just have to use the actual server PC to add new material to the server drives instead.
Finally, you can go to each client and access all server drives by using the network share '\\server\shared' that you have just created. Folders D1, D2 etc will be visible within this shared folder.
For an even cleaner name on the client, you can map a new client drive - e.g. 'S:\' on to '\\server\shared' and tell the client to use 'S:\' - this looks neat in Media Center and works fine for DVD's which then appear as My Videos, jpg's for My Pictures and mp3's for My Music.
Sometimes you move your music files around by changing your folder tree. You can 'Add Music' from within Media Center but this does not seem to clear out the references to the previous music locations. It would be useful to run 'Add Music' after you had deleted all previous music settings. To do this:
At the moment there is no direct way of 'tuning in' to an internet radio station with MCE, but you can set up some simple links that will allow you to do this. Proceed as follows.
[playlist]
numberofentries=5
File1=http://64.236.34.196:80/stream/1005
Title1=(#1
http://64.236.34.196:80/stream/1005