Free Range Keyboard

The Surprising Zotac ID40

If you look back at some my recent posts, you’ll see that I' had pretty good success with a DIY mini-PC build running Windows 7. This thing was running pretty close to perfect. There were a few minor quirks and two slightly more bothersome problems. Among the minor issue was the fact that it wouldn’t reliably suspend. I’d click “power” on my Harmony One remote to shut everything down and the PC would miss the the message. It wasn’t too big a deal as I could either go to the device in my remote, find the “power toggle” button and click it or just let it be and it would eventually sleep on its own after a period of inactivity. Still… a little annoying. The first more significant problem was that very occasionally (once a week at most), when it would come out of sleep, it would not activate the display correctly. It would just flash white to black over and over again. All I could do at that point would be a hard reset and once or twice, even the hard reset wouldn’t fix it. The other troubling problem was that after a couple of days of use and several sleep/wake cycles, the video would start to… well, I’m not sure how to describe it. It wasn’t stuttering exactly. Maybe “drop frames” would be the right description? I don’t know, but as minor as it may have seemed to most folks, the fact that I could reboot and alleviate the issue proved that it was definitely a real issue.

So about a week ago, I saw a couple of press releases that Openelec had released 1.0 of it’s media center product. Openelec is simply a variation of XBMC for Linux. It’s a slim (VERY slim) distribution of Linux that boots directly to XBMC. I had heard about it but hadn’t given it try. I had tried XBMC Live which was a slimed down Ubuntu build with XBMC on it, but hadn’t had much luck with it on my DIY PC. Just like XBMC Live, Openelec could run from a USB stick, so I thought, “What the heck, I’ll give it a shot.” To my surprise it worked pretty well right out of the gate. Video worked right off and with a few small tweaks I had learned when I had tried Linux on my mini-PC, audio over HDMI for the video also worked.

So for a day or two I played with it adding in the tweaks I had learned over time and learning a few more to get the remote and other things working. Yesterday, however, all of the sudden, my mini-PC starting having issues. It would be fine as long as I didn’t turn it off. Once I did, though, when I tried to turn it back on, it would start for about 8 seconds, then shut down and restart itself. Durign these cycles, it would never reach even the bios flash screen. Arrgggg!!! The first two times this happened, I unplugged the system and then left it alone for a few hours. When I came back, I was able to plug it back in and stat it successfully. The third time this occurred though, I threw my hands up, frustrated. I just want a small XBMC client that works!

I had been curious about the prebuilt tiny PCs from the likes of Zotac, Jetway, Asus, and Revo, so I headed to Frys to see what they had. If they had had an ND22 I would have picked that up, but no such luck. I knew to stay away from the AMD/ATI based machines for linux purposes. That pretty much left Atom based solutions and Openelec seem to have a particular build for ION based GPU’s so I went with an ID40-Plus. After rebate, it was about $260, which seemed like a decent deal. The ID40-Plus included a hard drive and memory (that’s the “Plus” part), so I was able to take it home, plug it in and go.

All in all, I’ve been extremely pleased with how easy it has been to get this machine working with Openelec. It’s been much easier than my first go-around with XBMC and Linux on my DIY machine. I’ll details most for the steps I took to get setup. this is mostly for my own archival purposes in case I need to do it again, but someone else might find it useful as well.

1. Download the Openelec distribution for ION based machines and install it to a USB stick. The instructions for doing this are front and center on the Openelec site.

2. (Optional) I have a Harmony one remote. Openelec works off the shelf with standard Microsoft MCE remotes and receivers. The easiest way to get the remote work is to set up the XBMC device as “Microsoft Media Center Extender”. If you do that, most things just “work” and you can tweak and customize for your “perfect” experience later. Step by step instructions for this are here. There are some other guides out there, but using “Microsoft Media Center Extender” has worked out well and allows for easier customization later. I was really surprised with how well the remote works. It’s relatively snappy and the repeat rate when holding down a direction key is pretty much spot on with my preferences.

3. Plug in the USB stick and boot the ID40 and quickly tap “Del” a few times when you see the “Zotac” splash screen so that you can enter the bios. There are some setting here to lower fan speeds and such, but frankly I didn’t find the ID40 to be particularly noisy so I didn’t mess with these. What you do need to do is go to the “boot” section of the bios and find where the boot order is set. There are a couple of these areas, but in one of them you’ll see the HD listed above the plugged in USB stick. Swap those entries that the USB stick is first.

4. Reboot to the USB stick and install Openelec. Just accept all defaults. It’s literally four clicks of the keyboard. Then pull out the USB stick and reboot.

5. You should boot directly into XBMC. One thing you’ll notice (and this will be in my list of cons a little later) is that the linux OS and XBMC boot so fast, that the network initialization falls a little behind. It takes about 18 seconds to reach the XBMC screen from boot, but another 15 seconds after that for networking to kick in. That’s still pretty fast overall, but I’d like to see some kind of indicator for network initialization because for me, with everything from the library to the video files coming from a NAS, XBMC is useless until the networking is ready.

6. (Optional) I used a shared MySQL database for the library. One of the awesome things about Openelec is that it sets up a number of samba (Windows) shares by default to allow very easy access to the system from other computers. So you can go to another computer and (assuming it’s Windows) type “\\192.168.0.57” or whatever IP is being used and access almost everything you need to configure Openelec without having to ssh in to the box. If you use this feature go to “userdata” and edit advancedsettings.xml. In my case I add the following to that file:

   <videodatabase>
        <type>mysql</type>
        <host>192.168.0.55</host>
        <port>3306</port>
        <user>xbmc</user>
        <pass>xbmc</pass>
        <name>xbmc_video</name>
    </videodatabase>

    <musicdatabase>
        <type>mysql</type>
        <host>192.168.0.55</host>
        <port>3306</port>
        <user>xbmc</user>
        <pass>xbmc</pass>
        <name>xbmc_music</name>
    </musicdatabase>
    <videolibrary>
        <hideemptyseries>true</hideemptyseries>
    </videolibrary>

Again, because this is a network resource, after rebooting (and I think even coming from sleep) there will be a slight delay before the library information is available. I don’t care too much about this for reboots, but I would sure like to improve this for coming from sleep. Even so, a 5-10 seconds delay when I fire things up isn’t all that bad.

7. (Optional) I prefer to deal with static IP’s for device like this. Openelec as a special XBMC addon which allows you to configure a few OS level things like networking. Use this addon to setup a static IP for the system.

8. Add your video sources just like you would normally. In my case, I have two:

• smb://192.168.0.55/data1/tv
• smb://192.168.0.55/data2/Movies

9. (Optional) I’ve used various means to keep the userdata/Thumbnails directory synced between my XBMC boxes. Most recently it’s been Dropbox. On my Windows DIY PC I also tried to simply share directory from machine to machine but it seemed too slow. I decided to try it again here on Linux and so far it appears to be working well enough. In my setup, I have an XBMC instance running on my NAS box. I don’t actually use that XBMC instance, but I needed an XBMC always running and connected to my shared MySQL library so that SickBeard and CouchPotato could update it when they did their thing. My NAS is a linux box. I realize this is a little bit complicated but here what I did:

On my NAS, I moved my “Thumbnails” directory to my data1 share (one of my two shares on that NAS). I then created a symbolic link from that spot back to the .xbmc/userdata/ directory. On my ID40 I created a permanent mount to that share from the NAS. To do this, go to the “Configfiles” share from Openelec or “.config” if you’re ssh’ing to the machine. Copy netmount.conf.sample to netmount.conf. Edit that file to add a mount point. In my case, I added:

cifs | //192.168.0.55/data1 | /storage/mount/data1 | username=mwelch,pass=mypass

You’ll need to make sure the /storage/mount/data1 directory exists. I then created a symbolic link from /storage/mount/data1/Thumbnails to /storage/.xbmc/userdata/Thumbnails. It’s important that this directory is both read/write for both the NAS and the client connected to it.

10. To get video sound (as opposed to menu sounds) working over HDMI, there are several paths. I ‘m a big believer in taking routes with the fewest steps for things like this as the fewer pieces involved, the less likely something is to break or get out of sync. There is a guide out there, several in fact, that talk about moving a /Configfiles/modprobe.d.sample file to /Configfiles/modprobe.d and editing it. To me this means getting some most subsystems involved that I’d rather leave out of it. The most direct (note I didn’t say best; I’m not enough of an expert to say that yet) way HDMI sound for video working is in XBMC to go to System > System > Audio Output. Set the settings as follows:

• Audio Output: HDMI
• Speaker Configuration: 5.1 or 7.1 (or whatever you have, I guess)
• Audio output device: Custom
• Custom output device: plughw:1,7
• Passthrough output device: Custom
• Custom passthrough output device: plughw:1,7

This should give you audio in all of your videos. Unfortunately, I haven’t yet figured out how to get menu sounds working. There are dozens of guides for this ( all conflicting, of course) but I haven’t spent time working on it yet. It’s very low on my priority list.

12. (Optional) I found the default video picture for my TV episodes (though oddly not for my Movies) to be a little dark. This was easily fixed by changing the ColroSpace. You do need to ssh to the machine for this one (consider putty; username is ‘root’ and password is ‘openelec’). Once there, issue the following command:

cp /etc/X11/xorg-nvidia.conf /storage/.config/xorg.conf

You can now edit that xorg.conf from the samba share. All I did was remove the ‘#’ from the line that looks like this:

#    Option         "ColorSpace" "YCbCr444"

After that, the picture brightness was at the level I expected.

11. Suspend, and resume from suspend. There’s only one thing to do here. In System > Power Settings, change the shutdown command from “Shutdown” to “Suspend”. That’s it. There’s nothing else to do here. It just works. I know, I know. I’m as surprised as you are. When I clicked power on my Harmony One (configured for MS Media Center Extender as described above) and the ID40 went to sleep, my eyebrows went up. When I then clicked my XBMC activity on the remote and the ID40 powered up along with my TV and receiver, I honestly couldn’t believe it. No bios tweaks. Nada. In Linux!!!! Seriously, I’m still stunned about this. I had waited to do this last because I felt it was going to be the most difficult things to get working and I even thought that it might be the deal killer because it wouldn’t work at all. I’m just tickled with the fact that this worked with no effort on my part. This alone make the ID40 a high recommendation.

-------------------

Overall I’m very pleased with this ID40. It’s a tiny little machine that has played everything I’ve thrown at it. It took me only a few hours to get it into a state that took me days on my other machine, even in Windows. The real kickers for me are how well the remote works (a massive pain, even in Windows), and the suspend/resume behavior working right off the bat. I’m still shocked by that latter one. The only real con so far has been the lack of menu sounds, but as I mentioned, I haven’t yet put much effort into it, and while I will try to get them working, if for whatever reason, I’m unable to do so, it won’t be a deal killer for me. The other thing I haven’t tried yet has been a resource heavy skin. My understanding is that Atom based systems struggle with heavy skins, but who knows, maybe Openelec’s extremely slim design and memory friendliness will allow for whose skins to function decently. Even if they don’t, though, Confluece or one of the lightweight skins like Simplcity (which I did try and worked fine) will be more that satisfactory for me. I guess if I want to nitpick, the front panel lights on the ID40 are pretty bright. When the unit is in use, the green light isn’t so bad, but when it’s suspended, the light alternates between bright blinding red and green and it’s a bit distracting. Not a huge deal though as there are ways to deal with that light ranging from physical disconnection to perhaps bios tweaks 9 I haven’t looked yet).

I know that for $300 one could build a much more powerful machine than this ID40, but the ease and simplicity with which I was able to get everything working to my satisfaction counts for a lot. I now kind of wish I had started here instead of the super powerful DIY solution that’s currently sitting unused on the shelf next to the ID40. Oh, and the device is actually pretty attractive as well.

Prime Suspect vs Unforgettable

These two new shows both feature strong female police detective leads so it's natural to compare them. For me though, it's no contest. "Unforgettable" is exactly the opposite; utterly forgettable. Carrie's memory gimmick is so overused in the show that it goes beyond a crutch. They use it for EVEYRTHING, to the point where she's the only character in the show who has any real face time or meaning. It's literally a universe that revolves around her. All of the other characters are massively underdeveloped and frankly, here character isn't really that interesting; certainly not enough to carry the show. In addition, the stories being told are just not that great.

Prime Suspect, on the other hand, is fantastic. You can pretty much take every criticism I made about unforgettable and the exact opposite is true for Prime Suspect. Jane is a great central character. She's a real, wholly defined person. In the first episode alone you get a wonderfully diverse picture of her strength, doubts, and vulnerability. The other characters in the show all have well defined personalities and roles and the stories are actually interesting beyond the characters themselves.

I know gimmick shows like Unforgettable sometimes find an loyal audience (Medium comes to mind), but those shows usually have something going for them other than the gimmick. I just don’t see it in Unforgettable. Prime Suspect, on the other hand, is a show I hope pulls in the ratings for a decent run. 

 

 

Fall TV 2011 (Part 2)

2 Broke Girls (revisit) – The second episode pretty much confirmed the first: a couple of funny moments, but overall mediocre.I went ahead and gave it the boot from my PVR. It’s certainly terrible, it’s just that there are only so many hours in the day to watch TV, even for me.

Person of Interest – Hmmm. Interesting. I was a little wary of this, and still am, for a couple of political reasons. I was concerned that the show would attempt to justify our society’s loss of privacy to the alter of “safety”. Unfortunately, I wasn’t too far off the mark. These people attempting to do “good” things are utilizing the most invasive big brother technology possible, albeit in an unauthorized manner. The underlying message is, of course, how much better off we’d be if we allowed such transgressions by our government or some other entity that knows what’s best for us. Utter poppycock of course, but Hollywood is the liberal center of the universe, so it’s no surprise they’d be all for this. They may yet turn it around with some sub plot about the abuse of such awesome power, but so far no hint of that. In any case, I do like the main character. A good guy, but a rather brutal one. The first episode was entertaining so I’ll definitely keep following it.

Up All Night -  I somehow missed this from my recording schedule but I managed to grab the episodes I missed and am now caught up. It has it’s charm and I really like Christina Applegate and Will Arnett in general, but I’m not sure I’m into this one enough to keep it around. I’m not much of a Maya Rudolph fan (I even had to look up here name) and she does a good job of tainting the rest of the case here. Anyway, I’ll probably give it another episode and decide from there. 

Suburgatory – This has promise, although through the first three quarters of the show, I wasn’t so sure. Perhaps I’m just being a little defensive as suburb dweller myself, but the initial portrayal of the suburbs as literally the “worst” place on earth was over the top and kind of a turn off. In the last five minutes, though, it kind of redeemed itself… but not by much. It’s weird. The two main a characters, the father and the daughter, were both great. Tessa was interesting and had a little attitude but still came off a nice person. Jeremy Sisto pull off the slightly overprotective but loving dad perfectly, while still managing not to be the “dork dad”. I’m a big fan of Cheryl Hines. I hope here character gets a little more depth as was hinted at near the end of the episode.

Prime Suspect -  I liked it. There was a great amount of character development without it getting too bogged down in the same. I liked that you got to see so many sides of the same person. The strong Detective on the job; the woman in a man’s world worried about her career; the girlfriend with her boyfriends custody issues. I hope that this level of character development wasn’t just for the first episode.

TV Shows - Rip to Rename

(aka there has to be a better way!)

I have a lot of TV Shows on DVD and Blu-Ray. Now that I have XBMC setup, I’d like to make these shows available without having to pull a disc out of the closet and pop it into a noisy drive. The basic principle of what I want to do is rip the episodes from the disc, rename them to a format that XMBC can easily work with, and then insert them into the XBMC library. One would think there would be a very straightforward and automated way to do this, but apparently that’s not so. It’s certainly possible, but there are a lot manual steps in the middle. I’m trying to eliminate as many of those manual steps as possible. It’s still a work in progress, but I’ll describe where I am so far.

1) Rip – There’s really no way to automate this step. You have to put each disc in the drive and pull the contents off. The best you can do is pull them off in a format that make the next steps a little easier. I’m not going to go into detail about ripping. There are plenty of guides on the internet for that. What I eventually end up with is something like this:

Show
--d1
----title1.mkv
----title2.mkv
----title3.mkv
--d2
----title1.mkv
----title2.mkv
----title3.mkv

 

2) Initial Rename – There are tools out there that will perform a lot of the renaming automatically. I’d love to find a tool that would allow me to simply feed it a list of manually ordered files, tell it what show and season those files are supposed to be for, and then have it just go off and do the renaming from there. So far I haven’t found a tool like that. The tools I have found require at least some meta information in the names of the files before they will work. So, to setup this initial information, I use Bulk Rename Utility (BRE). The process for this fairly easy:

1. Go to the parent “show” directory for a season of episodes in Windows Explorer (assuming Windows 7).
2. Do a search from that directory for *.mkv
   
   
3. Sort the results on the folder they were found in (i.e. D1, d2, etc.). This should get you a list of episodes in the correct order.
4. Drag the files from the Windows explorer to the main BRE window. BRE has the unfortunate tendency to reverse the order of the dragged in files. Keep an eye out for that and adjust the following instructions as necessary. I’m going to write the instructions as if BRE did reverse the files, because it almost always does so for me.
5. If you don’t know the “proper” name of your television series, go the thetvdb.com and look it up. Most are pretty obvious. For the purposes of this example, we’ll call our show “My Tv Show”.
6. In BRE box #3, type “title” in the “Replace” box and “My Tv Show 01x” in the “With” box. Change “01” to match whatever season you are renaming.
7. Make sure BRE box #5 is checked and up the “Last n” number to 2. If you select one or more of the files in the top window, you can see what the resulting rename would look like. It should be something like “My Tv Show 01x.mkv” at this point.
8. Put a check in BRE box #10. Again, assuming the files were reversed when put into BRE set the “Incre.” field to “-1” and then set the “Start” field to the number of files you have present. Set the “Mode” to be “Suffix” and the “Pad” to “2”.
9. All of this should result in a rename that looks something like “My Tv Show 01x01.mkv”. Naturally you may have to fiddle with this if there are combined episodes (Star Trek The Next Generation Episode Season 1 ep. 1 and 2 comes to mind). The good news is that you can save all of the work you just did as a BRE configuration file and in the future, you should only need to change the TV show name and the “start” point for the numbering.
10. Back in Windows explorer, perform the same search for *.mkv. You should now find the newly renamed shows. Select them all and ctrl-x them, then navigate to the parent directory of the discs and paste all of the mkv’s into one directory. You can delete the “dx” directories now, if you’d like.
11. Start up TVRenamer and lets change some setting under the “options” tab. You know, I don’t’ actually remember which options I changed from the default, so I’ll just include some screen shots of my settings for each section. The only one I do remember heavily customizing was the Naming Options section. So….
    General
     
    Detection – No changes; nothing checked
    Episode Titles – I don’t know why TVRage is selected, but it seems to work well
    
    Naming Options – I used a custom format based on the one Sick Beard uses for it’s downloads
    
    Aliases & Preserved Tags – I don’t’ use this, but it might be helpful to you.
    Subtitles – Again, I don’t’ use this as I pull the subtitles from the discs that I am ripping.
    
12. Now, that the options are set, back in “Raname” tab, in the “1st Step” area, browse to the folder where the shows episodes are.
13. If you named the files with a matchable name from TheTVDB.com site, you should now be able to go to the “2nd Step” box and click the button “Look up titles online”. It will take a minute to respond. When it does, the possible show options will be presented in the 2nd drop down box. Select the appropriate one and click “Use this name”.
14. Finally, click Rename. The episodes should be renamed and put into a “Season xx” folder.
15. At this point all you have to do is create an appropriately named show folder where you keep you media files for XBMC and put the “Season xx” folder in it. To get the appropriate fanart and images, I just open XBMC and tell it to update the library. There’s probably a better way to get that stuff, but this seems to work well enough. UPDATE: Well, I said scraping via XBMC directly was “good enough” because I would have sworn that doing so stored the thumbnails and show art with the video files themselves, but I guess I’m wrong about that. I haven’t found a “perfect tool” for this yet, but Ember Media Manager Revisited seems decent enough. Yet another manual step unfortunately.

As I said above, this is far too manual of a process, but it’s the best I have for now. I love to find a better way to do this, and I will definitely keep looking or maybe even write my own little utility for this specific purpose.

Fall TV 2011 (Part 1)

This is going to reveal my rather sad addiction to television, but I figured I’d offer up a few short impressions of the shows premiering last week. I haven’t watched everything, especially the dramas, but I’ll post about them once I have:

2 Broke Girls – Not a terrible pilot, but definitely the weakest premier out of the new slate of sitcoms I watched. Max is an interesting character. The other girl? Not so much.

How I Met Your Mother – This continues to be good. I’m not a fan of the time jumping narrative where it goes back and forth a lot between the future (where he’s talking to his kids) and the present (the main storyline timeframe). The premier was even worse because there was a third timeline; some point between the two involving Barney’s wedding. Ugggg. Just focus on the present, ok. Frankly, I’d be fine if they dropped the “talking to the kids” thing altogether. Still. it’s a funny show and if you watch it, you’re probably so invested in the characters at this point that these little things don’t end up mattering much.

Two and a half Men – I haven’t really followed this much for a few years, but I went ahead and recorded the premier. I’m glad I did. Charlie’s funeral was a riot. Seriously. No restraint was shown at all, and that’s what made it great. Ashton Kutcher’s character was entertaining, but not quite all there just yet. I assume he’ll settle into the role soon enough. I’ll probably put this one back on my regular recording schedule.

New Girl – This was pretty good, but a little schizophrenic. Zooey Deschanel was off the charts: funny, charming, cute, a little over the top but still believable. The three guy roommates were just all over the place; over the top in the not-so-believable way (a la Happy Endings) and oddly inconsistent. Still, it was fun and “Jess” was reason to enough to keep following this; at least for a while.

Raising Hope – I’m so glad this got renewed. It’s not one of those “must see” shows that you rush to watch either live or immediately after it’s recorded, but it’s always funny and the characters in it have been amazingly consistent and well defined from the start.

The Middle – This is another one just like Raising Hope. Great characters and good writing. I’m not sure how anyone could watch this and not see at least a little of their own family’s craziness in it.This season’s premier was classic.

The Big Bang Theory – Not much to say here. If you like this show, you’ll like the premiere.

Whitney – This was my favorite of the new sitcoms so far. Unlike many premieres, especially sitcoms, the pilot was polished and the characters seemed already well established; even most of the co stars. Whitney Cummins was hilarious. My only complaint, and it’s probably an odd one, is that they went a little overboard with risqué nurse’s costume. Seriously, there was NOTHING left to the imagination with that skirt. It could have been six inches longer and not affected the scene whatsoever. I understand that a lot of these adult oriented sitcoms are going to have jokes and even language that make them a little inappropriate for kids, but usually you can at least have the show running with the kids in the same house. If what we saw in the premiere is going to be the norm, then Whitney will definitely be an “after the kids are in bed” kind of show. And that’s too bad.

NCIS – I’m not nearly as enthralled with this show as a lot of other folks, but I’ve been watching it long enough that I kind of just want to see what will happen to the characters. The premier was pretty standard fare for the show. The grand conspiracies of the last few seasons are a little tired in my book, but as shows age, they all seem to fall into this pattern (of course some start with it). A new conspiracy, linked loosely with the old ones, was introduced. <Yawn>.

Nikita – This show is my guilty pleasure. I eat this up as soon as it’s recorded. I was a little disappointed to see the direction they were taking Alex’s character at the end of last season, and unfortunately the premiere continues the trend. Her and Nikita’s relationship was one the strengths of the show. I guess they’re trying to have the same thing with Michael’s character instead of Alex, but it’s not the same. We get see lovers in every show; a mentor-student bond with the trust needed in such a relationship was much more interesting.  In any case, the premier put in place the structures that will apparently be followed this season and all in all, it was pretty good, even if some of the premises were a little shaky.

That’s it. I have a ton of other shows recorded including a bunch of new dramas. I’ll put up some thoughts as I watch them.

XBMC Client Setup

I started with Linux here. It actually worked quite well. Compared to my later efforts to do the same on Windows, the initial 90% of the Linux (Ubuntu) setup required far less initial tinkering. It’s that last 10% that finally prompted me to try a different approach.

I think many, if not most folks would have been happy with the 90% success I had with the Linux setup. There was almost no tinkering with drivers or text based setup files. You just add a few repositories to the software manager and boom, XBMC is running great using hardware acceleration on Nvidia graphics drivers.

There were two factors that led me to experiment with a Windows 7 approach instead. First, there was a little bit of tearing in a few of the videos I played. Simply setting the XBMC vertical sync setting didn’t fix it. I’m 100% positive that some tinkering with some setting somewhere in either Ubuntu’s or XBMC’s settings would have solved it; however I was running XBMC on my main gaming box (Windows 7) as well for testing and I knew that there was no tearing there as long as you enabled the vsync option. If this were the only thing causing me a problem, I might have invested the time to fix it, but I was also not completely satisfied with my remote control option. I had purchased a flirc and while the setup of the flirc was every bit as easy as they advertised, I was getting laggy response in XBMC UI with it. This was probably more due to my remote control than (Hamony One) settings than with the flirc, but again, I just wasn’t sure I wanted to spend the time needed to figure out out if a Windows solution might just work out of the box.

As I would later discover, the remote control stuff would turn out to be every bit as much of a problem in Windows, but I didn’t know that at the time.

I already had a few free licenses of WIndows 7 laying around, so I decided to give it a shot. It shouldn’t be this way, but fully installing Windows is quite a bit more time consuming than Linux:

1. Install the OS – long time
2. Install the chipset and ethernet driver from the motherboard CD – short time
3. Update Windows – long time
4. Update Windows again; this update includes SP1 – very long time
5. Update Windows again (yes, really); this update includes IE 9 – long time
6. Install newest Nvidia drivers and XBMC

Ubuntu can be brought to the same state in literally 10% of the time. I know that if I had a slipsteam install disc (one that includes most of the Windows 7 updates) I could reduce this install time, but I don’t have such a disc, so I’m out of luck.

Finally with everything installed, XBMC runs like butter and plays back video beautifully straight from my NAS drives. Time to get the remote control working. I start with flirc. It works pretty well, but I can’t get it to put the machine to sleep with on button. This isn’t too big of a deal, as I could use EventGhost to fix this. The big problem is that I can’t get flirc to wake the machine from sleep. I tried a few things and left a post in an XBMC forum thread that the flirc developer frequents. If I can ever get this working, then I’ll probably give this device another shot because other than this one issue, it’s a sweet, sweet, little device that works exactly like I would want it to.

I have an old USB-UIRT from my Sage TV days. It’s a very powerful device that with enough work, can do just about anything. Or so I thought. Apparently, the best (perhaps only) way to get the USB-UIRT working with XBMC is via EventGhost, so I went through and setup the XBMC events to listen for signals from the USB-UIRT. It certainly does technically work, however again, my issue here was with lag in the XBMC UI. I tried a number of different profiles on my Harmony remote, and auto-repeat settings for EventGhost suggested by posters on the XBMC forums, but I just couldn’t get it working as I felt it should.

I spent some more time in the forums and after some reading, it seems like the simplest way to get perfect responsiveness from the UI and 100 control over sleep and wake, is to use a certified Media Center Edition IR receiver. There are a number of suggested models on the forums but everything is through eBay or surplus OEM suppliers. I decided to hit up Fry’s in the hope that they’ve have something to fit the bill.

Well….. they almost did.

The only thing they had was a “certified” SIIG MCE remote and receiver for Vista. While this wasn’t on any of the “recommended” lists in the XBMC forums, I hoped that was just because it wasn’t very common. No such luck, unfortunately. The good news is that if I plugged in the USB IR receiver, Windows 7 immediately recognized it and installed the driver with no hassles. Even better, using the supplied remote, the XBMC UI was snappy and responsive and the computer would sleep and wake with no problems whatsoever. The kicker, though, was that no matter what profile I tried in the Harmony remote, I couldn’t get the IR receiver to recognize signals from it. I tried every profile I could think of and that was suggested on the forums: MCE Keyboard, MCE Remote, and MCE SE remote. Nothing worked. I finally caved and bought one of the suggested HP MCE Remote Receivers from an ebay seller. So much for instant gratification. I’m awaiting it’s arrival, and when it does get here, I’ll report back. All in all, with the flirc, the useless SIIG remote/receiver, and the HP one, I’ve spent around $90 on remote control hardware. Bleh! What a waste.

In my next post, I’ll dig a bit into media management. This is topic that is well covered on the XBMC forums, so I won’t go into any great detail, but there are a few things I want to mention that might help the next guy.

NAS Software Setup

We (my friend Rob Matthews and I) decided to install Ubuntu desktop edition on the NAS. I lobbied for the server edition, but he overruled me (how did he do that when it was my machine?). I suppose he’s right. It doesn’t add much overhead and there’s plenty of space on the boot drive (an old first gen Intel SSD I had laying around).

 

Data Storage

So we installed Ubuntu. It came right up. There were no driver or display issues. Everything just worked. Next we plugged in the already physically installed platter hard drives. I have three 2Tb Hitachi Coolspin drives. Again, no problems. I’ve debated long and hard about how to configure these drives. I simply don’t need the speed of an expensive hardware RAID solution. Software OS RAID like mdadm is fine, but I’m a little leery about the not being able to read my drive one’s it’s out of that RAID environment. I know there are ways around that, but seeing as how I don’t actually need the throughput that such a configuration might provide, it’s hard to justify the potential drawbacks. You can tell by the fact that I’ve installed Ubuntu that I’ve already rejected NAS-as-the-system solutions like FreeNAS or Unraid. I actually like Unraid quite a bit, but I want an easy to configure and well documented server environment as well as a NAS for this machine. This leads to me to what I ended up trying: FlexRAID.

Although this was all a little fuzzy when I started out, I now understand FlexRAID consists of two major pieces. One is for data protection, and the other is for data access. The data protection part is what they refer to in the documentation as the “RAID” part. In my case, this meant setting up two of my drives as data drives and the other as a parity drive. FlaexRAID software is really quite simple in concept. The data protection piece isn’t a wrapper that you go through to access your data. It simply protects your data using one of several engines. You can still access your data just like you would if FlexRAID weren’t installed and running at all. All in all, the data protection side of FlexRAID was pretty very easy to setup. We’ll see how it works in the long run, but I see no reason why it shouldn’t perform as expected.

The other part of FlexRAID is data access. It will create what it calls “Storage Pools” and allow you to access your various data stores as one large store. I had a few problems with this. Setting it up was, again, quite easy, but as is sometimes the case on Linux, the file and directory permissions became a bugger. I never could get it working the way I wanted. fortunately, getting this working was far less important than the protection side, so I just left a message on their forums asking for advice and moved on.

 

Helper Apps

I decided to setup Sickbeard and SABnzbd as companions to my normal Dish Network PVR. I’m not going to go into a lot of detail, but these apps are used for downloading TV shows from the internet. While I have no intention of using XBMC as a my main PVR, there are a number of times when I would like to be recording three things at once but my Dish PVR only allows for two. Sickbeard and SABnzbd will allow me to supplement my normal PVR during those occasions. These apps were surprisingly easy to setup and they seem to work well.

 

Samba

Ahh Samba. My old nemesis returns. Damn you!!

Now that I’ve got that out of my system. Obviously a NAS is intended to store data that is will be used by other computers on the network, so there has to be a way for it to share that data. I love NFS. Seriously. Love it. It’s easy, fast, and super, super simple to setup between *nix systems, but most of the clients that would be reading and writing to the NAS would be Windows machines. There are some Windows NFS clients but they’re clunky and awkward at best. This all leads to Samba, the Linux software for creating and accessing SMB (i.e. Windows) data share . Sometimes is a treat. There have been times when I’ve set it up and slam, bam, thank you ma’am, I’m done and good in 10 minutes. But there are also times, and this was one of them, where it is a multi-day struggle.

My needs were simple, or so I thought. This NAS is on my local home network. Frankly, I’m the only one who’s going to be using it. I wanted it readable and writable with no password. Simple, right? Yeah.

I started with the GUI based configuration tools. I was curious as to how well these had progressed since the last time I tried them. Unfortunately, they seemed to be a pretty thin veneer over the normal Samba configuration options. That’s actually ok, but in my case, I ran into an error almost immediately. I didn’t spend much time looking into it; I just jumped directly to /etc/samba.smb.conf.

I followed the guides that should have allowed me to do what I wanted, but none worked. I could create shares, but the only way I could access them from other systems was to set them as password protected. I almost just gave up and went with this, and I would have except that Windows has the most annoying behaviors when dealing with password protected Samba shares. It constantly asks for the usernames and passwords even if you tell it save them and even when you submit the correct information, it doesn’t accept it and keeps popping up the username/password box. If you cancel the box you can access the drive because the username and password you submitted the first time was correct.

Anyway, after messing with this for two evenings in a row, I reset my smb.conf back to it’s default state and tried again with the GUI. This time I dug in a little more when I got the error. I wish I could remember it so that I could document it in case someone else hits it. The error was nonsesical. Surprise, surprise. I finally found a post on the Ubuntu forums where someone mentioned that, for whatever reason, changing “encrypt password = no” to “encrypt passwords = yes” or just commenting out that line in the smb.conf somehow cleared up the error for them. This was a crazy suggestion because the the error seemed to have absolutely NOTHING to do with this, and the poster in the forums even acknowledged the craziness of it, but sure enough, it worked! I could now share my data drives clear and clean with no password.

 

With the exception of Samba, setting up the NAS was straightforward. Despite my minor troubles with the Storage Pool feature of FlexRAID, I’m quite pleased with it as a data protection solution. It’s simple. I could, if needed, removed the drives from the NAS machine and they would be completely usable and readable anywhere else. It’s pretty much exactly what I was looking for.

I have a couple of 10/100 switches on my network, but the three machines that will be most involved in heavy reading and writing to and from this NAS are all on 1Gb lines and it shows. My buddy also has an HTPC setup (no NAS) and he uses FTP to move files from his main computer to his HTPC and I wasn’t too thrilled with the speeds; about 20Mb/s as reported by his FTP app. I’m getting about 80Mb/s with the NAS sharing my two data drives over SMB.

Next up, the (still ongoing) setup of XBMC on the client machine.

HTPC Hardware Builds

NAS

The NAS build went smoothly. The Fractal Design Arc case is very large for a mid-range tower. The drives are mounted facing left to right instead of the normal front to back. The only other case I’ve built in the past few years like this is the Antec Sonata and with that case I frequently ran into the issue of having to really bend SATA power and data cable to get them to fin in the case. There’s no such problem with the Fractal case; it’s much wider.

There’s really not much else to say about the NAS build. It was a standard ATX build in a large case. If there’s as one minor issue it’s that with a bottom-mount for the power supply, some cables had to be stretched to their limit to reach their destination.

 

XBMC

Things weren’t as easy with the XBMC box. The Apex case was quite roomy in some areas and tight in others. The first problem I ran into was with the CPU heatsink and fan. The cooling unit that came with the retail G620 CPU was pretty small, but unfortunately, not small enough. It couldn’t fit under the PSU without really tugging hard on the power supply to make room and once in place, the pressure of the PSU on top of the heatsink/fan flexed the motherboard more than I was comfortable with. To Frys we go! Luckily Frys had a decent low profile heatsink and fan ins stock. Actually, it ended up being a pretty decent unit and was almost completely silent once installed. Through a prodigious use of needle nose pliers, I was finally able to get all of the cables installed that connect the PSU and case to the motherboard.

The second problem was the case fan. Recall that I had based my build very closely on a recommendation from the XBMC forums. This recommendation called for a case fan, only I couldn’t figure out where such a fan should go. Fortunately, the forums came to the rescue again.

A couple of other notes:

• The OCZ Velocity Plus SSD drive wasn’t nearly as fast as I thought it should be. Admittedly, it’s on the lower end of the SSD range to start with, but it it still seems more sluggish than I expected. Nevertheless, it works as a decent boot drive.
• The Asus GT 430 fits… barely, but it does fit. The distance between the heatsink on the video card and the case wall is only a millimeter or two, but they aren’t actually touching.
• I needed a pair of long needle nose pliers to put in some of the cables once the motherboard was mounted in the case.

Overall both machines are about what I expected. Now it’s time to work on software.

Components Arrived Today

Most of my NAS and HTPC components arrived today. I’m only missing the NAS case. A few impressions:

• The Apex case and mini-ITX motherboard were both much bigger than I thought they would be. This is a disappointment.
• The coolers that came with the CPUs were low profile (kind of) but seemed pretty damn flimsy. I may have to get an aftermarket replacement for the G840 I’ll be putting in my HTPC client.
• The memory modules really re low profile. It’s been a while since I’ve seen shorter memory modules.
• The Apex case has something of a blemish on one of it’s shiny front panels. It’s probably not enough to make me send it back, but it definitely made me scowl when I saw it.

It will likely be the weekend before I can find the time to put these systems together. I’ll take some pictures during the build process if I run into anything interesting or especially difficult to figure out.

HTPC Hardware - Client

If you've been following along, you'll know that I'm trying XBMC as my HTPC software. The XBMC community forums has a section on dedicated to hardware for XBMC and it's quite informative.

My requirements for a client are a little odd. One one hand, I could almost get by with a very low power (both wattage and performance) setup, expect that I'd really like to use some of the fancier skins available for XBMC and those require some horsepower. I'm sure it seems odd that a skin would require more horsepower than playing back HD video, but the video playback is aided by dedicated hardware acceleration in the CPU/GPU whereas the skin animation and behavior is not.

If you don't require some of the fancier skins, then some of the prebuilt options for an XBMC client are extremely attractive. I'm all for the ultra tiny boxes, and there are quite a few options in that area. The best place to start for both retail and DIY options is a "stickied" post in the forums from a member named "eskro". The build I eventually settled on is almost identical to one of his Mini-ITX builds described here.

Case - Apex MI-100BK
I really wanted to go "small" and this was about as small as I could get without dropping to something with a "pico" power supply. I was worried that the tiny PSU's available in the smallest cases wouldn't be enough for my CPU and GPU choices. I'm not completely thrilled with this case though. It's only marginally attractive and makes compromises in the way the interior is arranged that are not necessary for a case this size. Regardless, it should meet my needs.

CPU - Intel G840
The G620 is also a viable choice but with only a $10 price difference, I couldn't see any reason not to choose the more powerful alternative. Again, I'll reiterate, if one is using their client purely to play back media, as opposed to video encoding, etc., and doesn't need to use any of the ultra fancy skins, there are less expensive and easier ways to go in terms of the CPU and motherboard. Both AMD and Intel have tiny processor/motherboard combos that are great at media playback.

Motherboard - GIGABYTE GA-H67N-USB3-B3
Again, right in lockstep with eskro's guild, I picked up the suggested motherboard. This board was quite a bit more expensive than it was listed in the guide and I seriously considered selecting a similar but less expensive option, but either the boards available to me didn't have an optical audio connector (a requirement for me) or had too many bad reviews. In the end I sucked it up and paid the premium for this board.

Memory - kingston Value Ram 4Gb (2 X 2Gb)
This is the exact same memory I'm using in the NAS. Why rock the boat. I selected it for this system for the same reasons as I did for the NAS: it's inexpensive and good quality.

HD - OCZ Vertex Plus OCZSSD2-1VTXPL60G
This was overkill for my needs. My HTPC client box won't have a spindle based hard drive in it, so I could have gone with a simple USB stick for booting, but I decided to go with a real drive intended for the purpose of normal OS usage instead of a less reliable USB stick approach. I looked at the 16, 30, and 40 Gb SSD options, and they were either using old technology or simply weren't enough less than this 60Gb drive to be worthwhile.

Case Fan - Noctua NF-P12-1300
I've been incredibly happy with Noctua case fans in my normal gaming PC builds. I've never had one fail on me and they are extremely quiet. The folks on the  XBMC forums seem to be in love with Silenx fans, but having tried several of those in the past, I have no idea why. I found them to be less polished and more noisy than Noctua. To each his own, I suppose.

GPU – Asus GTX 430
While I’m probably not going to be doing any 1080P 3D viewing any time soon, I went in this direction anyway. I’ll probably be using Linux for my client and Nvidia’s video playback acceleration seems to be the best supported and the GT430 seems to be the HTPC card of choice at the moment.

 

You can check current pricing using my shared wishlist at Newegg. The wishlist doesn’t include the GT 430, which I picked up at my local Frys on sale for $40.