Re: Mini-ITX PC's a the future of HA

["Dean Roddey" <droddey@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

"Robert Green" <ROBERT_GREEN1963@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:ee6dnWlaVr94AAvZnZ2dnUVZ_omdnZ2d@xxxxxxxxxx
> Again, my point is that joining entertainment to HA/S on a single server
> seems like a very bad idea if you've got other options.  How many new
> songs
> would you ever have to load on your HA/S?  How often would you have to
> access the HA/S machine compared to the entertainment server?  That
> differential in access, as well as the difference in overall function seem
> to cry out to me for separate boxes.  That's saying something, at least
> for
> me, considering my goal is to *reduce* the number of PC's that are running
> in my house.

You are probably never going to 'do security' on the PC anyway. As a
practical matter, the core security features are likely always going to be
on some other piece of hardware in order to get it blessed by insurance
companies so that you can get your discount on your home owner's insurance
and all that. The only part of security that happens on the PC is the
interfacing to the security system, and presentation of the security status
and such on touch screens, and the ability to arm/disarm. But in order to
meet the necessary requirements, there will probably always be a dedicated
keypad of some sort for the security system that you can use as a fallback
in the worst case scenario.

So I think that this is a bit of a strawman argument.

> The data didn't just appear on the server magically, correct?  Someone had
> to have an account, user permissions to add it, someone has to have proper
> rights to access it.  People are likely to even use that server to rip DVD
> and AFAIK, there isn't any MS program certified to do that, so they're
> obviously using programs like DVDDecrypter or DVDShrink to get them there.

It doesn't appear magically, but you certainly don't have to be logged onto
the server in order to get it there. The data will be shared out via driver
shares as a practical matter, and you can use the same thing to get the data
into it. For movies it will pretty much always be on a separate RAID drive
array anyway, if not on a NAS, so you aren't going to somehow fill up the OS
partition by ripping files to the server remotely.

But, as I said, we made a network distributed system for many reasons, and
one of them is so that you can choose how to distribute the stuff how you
want. If want a medium strength machine for the overall centralized HA
server and then a manly machine beside it to act as the media server, then
it's not a problem and we support that inherently out of the box. You could
put the media server machine anywhere and it's equally accessible, such as
in the theater room or theater room closet rack.

But music is so light weight an operation for a modern machine (meaning
either playback of a few streams locally on that machine via a multi-channel
card, or streaming of that data off the disc to other players around the
house), that it's really not a practical problem. We are working with the
Zoom Player guys to create a service based multi-player program so that the
playback all happens in the background without anyone logged on, and each of
the internal players in the app an be assigned to a different audio card
output.

But you can certainly move that off to a separate machine if that's desired.

> When small touch
> screen LCD's become a commodity item, I will be sorely tempted to move to
> a
> system like yours.

You mean wireless or wired? For something like a home theater, you can hard
mount something like a 7" Lilliput touch screen between the chair arms (or
on a table beside the couch) on a swivel mount for a couple hundred bucks.
If you mean wired, then the new UMPC boxes are probably the best bet (though
currently still untested, by us at least), and they should start getting
pretty reasonable by the end of the year and into next year. Even now, at
$1000, as long as they work well, they will be quite competitive with
proprietary touch screens from folks like Crestron.

-------------------------------------
Dean Roddey
Chairman/CTO, Charmed Quark Systems
www.charmedquark.com