Check it out http://www.kustompcs.co.uk/acatalog/Article_CFMCE.html This is our guide to setting up a diskless Media Centre system and using network storage as a central area for media and TV Recording.
Looks good mate, might have to plug in a icy box nas 2000 into my router with a nice 750gb drive in it and set my new media pc up on that basis and eventually move over the other pcs to it.
Hmm. What are you doing about wear-levelling? Reducing page file writes is one thing, but making sure that the OS doesn't constantly re-write to the same sectors for anything else is another.
Unfortunately the only way I could find of doing this was using the enhanced write filter in XPe (embedded) operating system but this lacks the media centre functionality, so was not really of relevance in this instance. With most writes in a standard PC typically coming from such things as internet browsing (temporary files) , use just as a media centre with the page file switched off should drastically cut the number of writes made to the card.
Hmm.. It's a damned shame that there aren't any nice IFS for Windows, which do wear-levelling. The one that is constantly mentioned is JFFS2, but then others say that a journalling file system would be a really bad idea. And then there's no IFS for Windows yet. Supposedly, CompactFlash has some wear-levelling built-in to the card, which I didn't realise until now. Maybe with your current provisions you'll be fine? It's not as if the cards are particuarly expensive, given what they are. Be interesting to see how long it goes for! If it was me though, I'd have to use some flavour of Linux. Mount / as read-only, and mount /tmp and /home to NFS partitions over Gigabit.
Yeah agreed... If you use an OS such as Vista which is constantly searching the HDD (so that when you use the search function in the start menu your results appear automatically) this will be even worse? Still good article.
XP indexes the drive as well. Its not as if you cant turn it off though. I would have thought Vista would have been the obvious choice for this, as its designed to take advantage of flash memory to boot from.
As others have said, CF card's aren't expensive. Set it up like you want, then use something like Acronis to back it up. If it breaks, restore the image to a new card. Since everything's on network storage (or other hard drives or whatever) then all you need is Windows, your programs and the settings.
Would've thought that was mainly reading, but it does depend how the indexing is stored (I thought it was a relational DB, but I'm not sure.) It's optimised to boot from flash? I thought the deal with Vista and flash was to extend your system memory - as opposed to relying the main swap file?
recording remotely I'm assuming it is (or will be soon) possible to record from an HTPC in the lounge to a server or something in another room in Vista. I really want to be able to use the machine in the lounge to tell the server to record something. The reason for this is so I can use 2 sky boxes with a IR-blasters connected to the server, so I can also record programs and play them back from a further machine in the bedroom. Anyone have any ideas if its possible to tell another machine to record on its tuners?? Cheers
you want to look at MediaPortal. they have a new tv engine which is now seperate to the actual client software. so you have your tv tuners cards in a server running the tvengine.. and then numerous 'clients' that all connect to the tvserver for viewing or recording etc etc.
RDP could do this - the only problem you'll get is your remotes. You can easily control another server, with a keyboard and mouse, but having a remote station plugged into the client will depend on whether the client OS would translate the functions of the remote, to the server via RDP. Worth a try though (and it's free!)
media portal / TV server Thanks - that's exactly what I was looking for. Shame that even with Vista MS didn't build this functionality into MCE.
In my experience, if you disable superfetch and set pre-fetch to 5 as well as disabling the indexing and desktop search services you can decrease the Vista boot time, also - if you set the disk to write ahead caching you'll also benefit form a boost in boot time perfomance, however, any sudden power loss on the system will essentially absolutly shaft it, might be an idea to do it from a UPS. I've got a whole document in tweaking Vista, I got my page file down to about 300mb and had an application on Vista that evenly split all processes over both cores, I had better perfomance in Vista than I did in XP, and thats even with the horrific Nvidia 8800GTS Drivers. More info to follow shortly.
Video from NAS in Media Centre Article is very interesting, but does anyone know how to view video from a NAS in Media Centre/extender. My setup is a PC with Windows Media Centre 2005, I access his from my xbox 360 as an extender. I also have a NAS drive on the network where my video files are stored. I can't get access to this though from Media Centre, and then not the extender. I have tried adding the content to my Window Media Player library, but this didn't work either. It just doesn't show up in Media Centre. Does anyone have any ideas?
Did you try adding the NAS as a monitored folder in Windows Media Player rather than just dragging the files onto it? Only other thing would be try experimenting changing between using a network path (eg share\\folder) and mapping an actual drive letter - sometimes one or the other can work better for a particular unit. It *should* be that if it's seen in your library, the extender should be able to access it then too.
NAS content in Media Centre The content from the NAS drive appears in the media player library. Just doesn't show up on the extender, or in Media Centre. Have tried adding the folder by both browsing to and mapping, and also by using the UNC path. Seems quite odd.
Graeme, is the CF MCE still running?? Any reason for using CF rather than SD or USB Stick for example? I'm just about to build a lounge HTPC-come-Download Box and was about to plug 1 or 2 Terabyte drives in and then was reading my bookmarked MCE type posts... and saw this.... I have a nice Gigabit NAS box already!
The system shown in the article is not running on CF any longer - I think just after I completed the article a customer in the store needed a high capacity CF card there and then and we had run out of stock, so it was pulled out of that system. So it's just back to a hard disk again now. I used CF over SD / USB because the CF cards offered faster read speeds.
