Re: Media Servers

[Bruno Prior <bruno@xxxxxxx>]

David,

I see things much the same way as you and Keith, and am planning to put
together a system along similar lines to yours, although I was not 
planning on streaming anything other than DAB radio. I want to take as 
much load off the server(s) as possible, and it seems simpler to me, 
with processing power in each room, to run local apps. accessing the 
data on NFS mounts.

I could be interested in collaborating on this, or at least comparing 
notes, if we have slightly different approaches.

Incidentally, it seems to me that one upside to this approach is that it
should make the much-vaunted flood wiring of every room redundant. A 
couple of Cat.5s + Coax should do per room. [...waits for wide and 
vociferous contradiction...]

One point I'd be interested to hear opinions on is noise. If the 
machines in each room are going to operate as multimedia delivery 
mechanisms, they need to be near silent. Yet a games machine for 
reasonably up-to-date 3D games needs both pretty powerful CPU and 
graphics card. All the more powerful graphics cards nowadays have fans 
built on, which immediately introduces noise. Likewise, probably the 
most powerful CPUs you can run safely without a fan are either the Via 
C3 or a Transmeta processor, neither of which are exactly high-powered.

My last attempt at putting together the most high-powered machine I 
could devise that could run near silent consisted of:

* Athlon XP 2200+ (the lowest-powered 0.13micron Athlon that I could 
find, bought to underclock and run cool)

* Zalman Flower CPU cooler (whose associated fan should be able to run 
at minimum revs if the Athlon is underclocked)

* ATI Radeon 7500 with fan removed and replaced with Zalman GPU heatsink
(the Radeon 7500 seemed from the Zalman list to be the fastest GPU that
could survive with just the heatsink and no fan)

* "Silent" PSU

* No hard disk - saves money, heat and noise

* Network card with bootROM to enable diskless operation

* Other components (e.g. DVD-ROM drive, Audigy soundcard and Hauppauge 
WinTV Nova-T digital tuner card) that have fewer implications for the 
noise levels

This was a far from successful project. In particular, I would say it 
was a mistake going with the Athlon. It may be due to the truly awful 
Epox 8K3A motherboard, but the system was hopelessly unstable if I 
underclocked the Athlon. Having to run the Athlon at full speed meant 
that I had to run the Zalman fan also at full revs, which immediately 
introduced significant amounts of noise.

The plan to do without the hard disk also failed as I got serious 
network transmission errors trying to run the network card with bootROM
on this motherboard.

I am guessing that both these problems might be soluble if I replaced 
the Athlon and motherboard with an Intel-based solution. It might be 
sufficient just to replace the motherboard, but I have had so many bad 
experiences with Via chipsets, which most Athlon boards use, that I 
would probably get rid of both if I had the time and the money to burn.

The more fundamental problem is that this is open to the accusation of 
falling between two stools. As a multimedia box, even for 
encoding/decoding video, it is probably overkill. But gamers would 
probably see it as inadequate. Is it possible to come up with a silent 
box that is suitable for multimedia, games and general computing use? 
What would people use?

Cheers,

Bruno Prior


David Anumudu wrote:
> Keith
> 
> interesting thoughts...
> 
> I am a kat5 user, and have been wrestling with the task of delivering
whole
> house audio / video / computing / gaming .
> 
> to achieve that I have come to the conclusion that svideo/rgb
distribution
> sourced out of the back of set top boxes etc is not up to the task if
you
> are a home theatre/av enthusiast.
> 
> If you want to drive plasmas, projectors, lcds (basically all of the
new
> types of display devices that have a specific native resolution) ,
then you
> need to have a pc to drive them at that custom resolution to achieve
best
> performance, with the video scaled to that resolution. Add on to that
the
> fact that many of these devices now have DVI then again a PC per
device is
> required..So, that takes care of the output, source selection etc..How
do we
> get the input?
> 
> My thoughts here are again that everything broadcast should be
captured and
> streamed on the LAN as MPEG (using capture cards for
Sky/Tivo/games
> consoles, DVBs card for non sky satellite, DVBt cards for freeview),
and
> existing personal DVD/music collections ripped on to hard disc and
simply
> shared across a network filesystem
> 
> this gives the best quality, and the greatest flexibility, allowing
any
> connected device to either pull the stream off the LAN (giving a
true
> 'matrix / kat5 switcher solution), plus each device can also do its
own
> thing locally..
> 
> it just needs the co-ordination and integration of a number of
technologies
> / applications out there which individually *almost* deliver
this..
> 
> anyone up for collaborating on this?
> 
> regards
> David

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