If folks are willing to help PLEASE do so! MAME runs fine on these boxes and with the add-on framework coming this milestone to XBMC it's my hope that something awesome can be built to allow MAME and other emulators to run:-)
You offering full DLs or hosting as Torrents? You might save some bandwidth by hosting torrents and having a machine somewhere with full copies to seed. Hats off to you continuing to host the XBOX supported versions for those who want them but I have to admit I'm happy to see them move forward. Especially with a new milestone coming up fast, they needed to cut the legacy string. So long as someone out there is still willing to backport good updates the XBOX guys should continue to enjoy updates but the current dev team has bigger fish to fry IMO.
And XBMC is perfectly happy to do the same if you want - just don't use Library Mode. The fact that it can play MKVs, AVI, XVID, and a zillion other containers and CODECs without much care taken to choose how it's encoded rocks. PS3 and 360 are more picky for sure or require a box in the back transcoding - no thanks. XBMC is far from gaudy but hey if yuo want something akin to a commandline be my guest - I'll stick to XBMC.
I might have paid a buck or two for it tops but it works great! Like you are seeing 1080P is just fine and I'm on only a slightly better box with Linux - ASROCK 330. $199 is a damned good price, might have to be my second machine here soon:-)
Underpowered? Stream from where? I playback 1080P BD rips on a regular basis off a NAS with zero issues on a dual core ATOM. The CPU never goes above 10% - VDPAU and the NVIDIA graphics do ALL the heavy lifting. I could run a single core and do just as well. You trying to do this on Windows or something? O_o
Build a NAS and stream from the network. Even 2TB isn't going to last really long and you don't want to be ripping media on an ATOM CPU anyway - compressing would take forever. I use unRAID and the servers sit on Gig ethernet, works a charm. I have used maybe 20% of the 320Gigs on my ASROCK and that's running SVN builds with other software too...
Fork over a couple hundred bucks and move up from a single core P3 for kripes sake! Why in this world would you want to hold back development of a damned good HTPC software in order to satisfy an ever smaller number of slow proprietary machines? Would you be happier if they just dropped XBOX out of the name entirely and called it something else? These guys don't want to have to sweat the low end hardware anymore and are trying to move forward - as someone who has the newer hardware I commend them! These guys aren't just piling on all sorts of CPU intensive stuff expecting some monster CPU to run it but hamstringing them to sweat performance on a single core P3 class CPU with no memory that has to be hacked just to install and compiled by a pirated compiler is just silly.
Yes, I still have an XBOX hacked to run older XBMC and that build is like 2 years old - still runs as well now as when it was installed so who cares? There's now folks just working on the XBOX version and that's great but there's no way it's fair to ask the current team who has their sights set on bigger things to keep looking backwards to support the old. Better to drop support than support it poorly and hear the bitching when something breaks.
With that you can play 1080P video perfectly using VDPAU on Linux - I do this regularly. It draws little power, has HDMI output including 5.1 surround via the HDMI, and is TINY. I swapped out an overclocked C2D for this tiny thing and couldn't be happier.
Seriously, there's no sense in building a beast when these little ION powered rigs do it all just fine. the ASROCK is only just one of several cheap ION machines out there too but it's the one I'm most familiar with. Heck I may be buying more to play video on additional TVs here pretty soon and I think there's even a LiveCD just for it.
It doesn't finish the scan for some reason - hangs on "scanning". Might be just me, might be FireFox which is damned goofy and crashes often for me, or it may be Fluff Busting Purity (which kills the animal and Mafia postings etc. via Greasemonkey). Other than it hanging on those two things it does look to be the better tool in that it examines settings and warns vs setting them to whatever the other tool thought was most appropriate when it was written.
Who the hell zips up a file that's already compressed?! You ain't going to save much zipping MP3 and the little you do save isn't worth it over the advantage of having many smaller files. I'm not sure I've ever seen a zipped up music collection anyplace I'd care to download from.
And really, if you want onesy twosy music files head for Amazon's music store to get them. $99 is nothing for a song and the quality from them is decent.
No, still true. Had a kid's computer over here a week ago and found three files pegged as viruses - weird thing is they were using the MP3 file identifier. I'd have gone further trying to figure it all out but had no desire to risk my machine and the HDD was dying on me. Sure enough he had Lime on there - I just shook my head... Oh and all of his music files were poorly tagged, low bitrate, and really bizarre CRAP. Sadly there was also almost no p0rn to save. Lime had some of THE weirdest p0rn I've ever seen!
That card is a grand+. When and if it fails you're going to be scrambling for another years down the road - and likely paying a bunch then too. It's higher performance than needed at home but sure would drive a pile of disks! When and if things blow up it's not going to be using a standard F/S either so recovery will be "fun". RAID calcs don't require tons of CPU, not for normal home kinds of things. Doing those on the CPU in software makes sense for needs that don't require tons of performance - streaming HD video needs nowhere near the bandwidth that monster can pump out.
That cards gives you ports for sure but it carries a hefty price that's probably 10x the motherboard it sits on! The power savings would take forever to be paid back...
Nope, no hot spares. Don't want them frankly. Having media laying around that I cannot use because I need a "just in case" spare would suck. If I buy drives I want to put them to use and if I were using hot spares I'd always have to have one that was as big or bigger than any other drive - so always the most expensive. Since I've only ever had maybe 2 drives actually die in the last 4+ years in these systems and one was infant mortality I'm pretty comfortable. there might be a script to shut down on a drive failure, i'm not sure and I've not ever looked into it.
Well, you CAN lose a drive and be fine, it's losing two that would suck. However in a more traditional striped setup losing two is a disaster! Plus if you attempt data recovery on any of those bad drives you aren't likely to be using normal tools I don't think. I like that I can pull a drive out and mount it in another system with no problem too! That I can use most any size drive I want, even mix and match IDE and SATA, is pretty cool. Having to buy matched sets of drives would be no fun at all! Hot spares also no fun - I want to store data on the drives I have....
Make sure you go through the forums and ask questions etc. or hell even ping me about it. I've used it for like 4+ years now if not longer and have had good experiences. Some of the FreeBSD with ZFS posts here and FreeNAS look interesting but back when I was looking around I wasn't hearing good things - sounds like that has improved too.
Lots of options out there that make these store-bought things look pretty bad IMO.
I went a different way, unRAID, but chances are good you look for the same sorts of hardware that we do:-) Checkout this controller if you have a slot for it http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16815121009&Tpk=supermicro%20aoc-sat2-mv8 It works well with the Linux underneath unRAID and has 8 ports - way more performance than I need too. It's a $100 card but just the one slot.
I bang the drum pretty hard for unRAID but what you've said about ZFS is pretty interesting. Being able to lose two drives and survive would be nice although I'm not sure I'm willing to give up very much storage to do it. Can any of your drives spin down when the system isn't being used much? That's one thing I really like about what I'm using. Anyway, i'll check more into it but honestly it would take some doing to move me from unRAID. Nice to know there are options though!
So 8x 1.5TB drives gives you 9TB? I think you can do better:-) I get 10.5tb out of that with unRAID. You're giving up too much for parity IMO. The system I'm using puts all parity on ONE drive and uses a standard ReiserFS for the other drives. If I lose a drive I recover, if I lose two drives I lose two drives of data but not the whole set and I've retained a good bit of storage vs using multiple drives for parity. It's also not striped and a standard FS so recovery of a damaged drive is at least posisble by mortals. I lose speed compared to a striped solution but for HD video I don't need massive speed. I compress everything in x.264 too except for my SD DVD, I dump the extra languages I don't need on those.
Use the TAB key in commandline to complete paths as you go:-) Hit it twice to get a list of paths when you cannot recall what's at the end of the path you're typing. I too am no master of Linux but I'm managing to handle a couople of NAS and a HTPC running it from the commandline. I DI need to badly work on a web oriented Torrent client instead of using uTorrent but this is working for me right now.
You may be able to fit more drives than that using these http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817121405&Tpk=supermicro%20cse-m35t-1b the pic is misleading as it's turned on it's side but it fits 5 drives where 3 would normally go. Hard to tell from the pic you linked but I think you could fit at least 3 of these in your case and gain *easy* access to the drives.
I don't know what to tell you, my friend had a pretty rough experience and it happened to him multiple times. The last time it occurred he was afraid he was going to lose his data and I really did fear he would throw it out a window. I got him to move over to unRAID and now all I ever hear about his storage solution is the new cool things he's managing to do with it like have it mail him status updates when it goes on UPS power! I now know at least 6 people using the software I am and it just works for them. If you ever decide to go bigger or hit a wall with the Drobo look into it, you won't regret it. If what you have serves your needs then by all means keep at it and I hope you never run into the kinds of nightmares my friend did. Another friend has a Drobo and has reported good things save for a smoked port that took out a drive or vice versa. Drobo took care of him and I hope they continue to take care of others too...
ReiserFS was apparently chosen because it's journaling and because it handles large file sizes well? I honestly can't say if another F/S would be better but because of the way it's built Tom could probably swap in another one if he chose to. So far though mine also seem to be working well and I'm probably going on 4 years at least! I was one of the very original folks running it back when he sold USB sticks - it's gotten nothing but better and FASTER:-)
When it takes days to fix itself up after a burp I'm thinking you might not be so happy about it. This happened to my friend several times for no apparent reason and he finally dumped both of his! They cost too much and other solutions are available if you're capable of building a simple desktop PC...
100meg ethernet works just fine for me playing 1080P BD rips that I've compressed. High bitrate stuff for sure though and I can play them native as well. I only run GigE for the speed in data transfer when I upload a rip:-)
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There's currently some movement afoot to have the current XBMC support emulators just as it does video - with a scraped catalog etc.
Several threads on the XBMC forums about it but this one seems to be the most updated -> http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?t=40715
If folks are willing to help PLEASE do so! MAME runs fine on these boxes and with the add-on framework coming this milestone to XBMC it's my hope that something awesome can be built to allow MAME and other emulators to run :-)
You offering full DLs or hosting as Torrents? You might save some bandwidth by hosting torrents and having a machine somewhere with full copies to seed. Hats off to you continuing to host the XBOX supported versions for those who want them but I have to admit I'm happy to see them move forward. Especially with a new milestone coming up fast, they needed to cut the legacy string. So long as someone out there is still willing to backport good updates the XBOX guys should continue to enjoy updates but the current dev team has bigger fish to fry IMO.
And XBMC is perfectly happy to do the same if you want - just don't use Library Mode. The fact that it can play MKVs, AVI, XVID, and a zillion other containers and CODECs without much care taken to choose how it's encoded rocks. PS3 and 360 are more picky for sure or require a box in the back transcoding - no thanks. XBMC is far from gaudy but hey if yuo want something akin to a commandline be my guest - I'll stick to XBMC.
I might have paid a buck or two for it tops but it works great! Like you are seeing 1080P is just fine and I'm on only a slightly better box with Linux - ASROCK 330. $199 is a damned good price, might have to be my second machine here soon :-)
Underpowered? Stream from where? I playback 1080P BD rips on a regular basis off a NAS with zero issues on a dual core ATOM. The CPU never goes above 10% - VDPAU and the NVIDIA graphics do ALL the heavy lifting. I could run a single core and do just as well. You trying to do this on Windows or something? O_o
Build a NAS and stream from the network. Even 2TB isn't going to last really long and you don't want to be ripping media on an ATOM CPU anyway - compressing would take forever. I use unRAID and the servers sit on Gig ethernet, works a charm. I have used maybe 20% of the 320Gigs on my ASROCK and that's running SVN builds with other software too...
Fork over a couple hundred bucks and move up from a single core P3 for kripes sake! Why in this world would you want to hold back development of a damned good HTPC software in order to satisfy an ever smaller number of slow proprietary machines? Would you be happier if they just dropped XBOX out of the name entirely and called it something else? These guys don't want to have to sweat the low end hardware anymore and are trying to move forward - as someone who has the newer hardware I commend them! These guys aren't just piling on all sorts of CPU intensive stuff expecting some monster CPU to run it but hamstringing them to sweat performance on a single core P3 class CPU with no memory that has to be hacked just to install and compiled by a pirated compiler is just silly.
Yes, I still have an XBOX hacked to run older XBMC and that build is like 2 years old - still runs as well now as when it was installed so who cares? There's now folks just working on the XBOX version and that's great but there's no way it's fair to ask the current team who has their sights set on bigger things to keep looking backwards to support the old. Better to drop support than support it poorly and hear the bitching when something breaks.
Why would you do this? A complete ready to roll ASROCK 330 complete with memory and CPU can be bought for $350 or so http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16856158009&nm_mc=OTC-Froogle&cm_mmc=OTC-Froogle-_-Barebone+Systems-_-ASRock-_-56158009 Add a MCE remote with IRDA receiver or a BT dongle and a PS3 remote and it's DONE.
With that you can play 1080P video perfectly using VDPAU on Linux - I do this regularly. It draws little power, has HDMI output including 5.1 surround via the HDMI, and is TINY. I swapped out an overclocked C2D for this tiny thing and couldn't be happier.
Seriously, there's no sense in building a beast when these little ION powered rigs do it all just fine. the ASROCK is only just one of several cheap ION machines out there too but it's the one I'm most familiar with. Heck I may be buying more to play video on additional TVs here pretty soon and I think there's even a LiveCD just for it.
It doesn't finish the scan for some reason - hangs on "scanning". Might be just me, might be FireFox which is damned goofy and crashes often for me, or it may be Fluff Busting Purity (which kills the animal and Mafia postings etc. via Greasemonkey). Other than it hanging on those two things it does look to be the better tool in that it examines settings and warns vs setting them to whatever the other tool thought was most appropriate when it was written.
A very nice concept though!
Damn thanks for that - nice site! Lots of Lobsterdust on the first search - awesome!
Who the hell zips up a file that's already compressed?! You ain't going to save much zipping MP3 and the little you do save isn't worth it over the advantage of having many smaller files. I'm not sure I've ever seen a zipped up music collection anyplace I'd care to download from.
And really, if you want onesy twosy music files head for Amazon's music store to get them. $99 is nothing for a song and the quality from them is decent.
No, still true. Had a kid's computer over here a week ago and found three files pegged as viruses - weird thing is they were using the MP3 file identifier. I'd have gone further trying to figure it all out but had no desire to risk my machine and the HDD was dying on me. Sure enough he had Lime on there - I just shook my head... Oh and all of his music files were poorly tagged, low bitrate, and really bizarre CRAP. Sadly there was also almost no p0rn to save. Lime had some of THE weirdest p0rn I've ever seen!
That card is a grand+. When and if it fails you're going to be scrambling for another years down the road - and likely paying a bunch then too. It's higher performance than needed at home but sure would drive a pile of disks! When and if things blow up it's not going to be using a standard F/S either so recovery will be "fun". RAID calcs don't require tons of CPU, not for normal home kinds of things. Doing those on the CPU in software makes sense for needs that don't require tons of performance - streaming HD video needs nowhere near the bandwidth that monster can pump out.
That cards gives you ports for sure but it carries a hefty price that's probably 10x the motherboard it sits on! The power savings would take forever to be paid back...
Nope, no hot spares. Don't want them frankly. Having media laying around that I cannot use because I need a "just in case" spare would suck. If I buy drives I want to put them to use and if I were using hot spares I'd always have to have one that was as big or bigger than any other drive - so always the most expensive. Since I've only ever had maybe 2 drives actually die in the last 4+ years in these systems and one was infant mortality I'm pretty comfortable. there might be a script to shut down on a drive failure, i'm not sure and I've not ever looked into it.
Well, you CAN lose a drive and be fine, it's losing two that would suck. However in a more traditional striped setup losing two is a disaster! Plus if you attempt data recovery on any of those bad drives you aren't likely to be using normal tools I don't think. I like that I can pull a drive out and mount it in another system with no problem too! That I can use most any size drive I want, even mix and match IDE and SATA, is pretty cool. Having to buy matched sets of drives would be no fun at all! Hot spares also no fun - I want to store data on the drives I have....
Make sure you go through the forums and ask questions etc. or hell even ping me about it. I've used it for like 4+ years now if not longer and have had good experiences. Some of the FreeBSD with ZFS posts here and FreeNAS look interesting but back when I was looking around I wasn't hearing good things - sounds like that has improved too.
Lots of options out there that make these store-bought things look pretty bad IMO.
I went a different way, unRAID, but chances are good you look for the same sorts of hardware that we do :-) Checkout this controller if you have a slot for it http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16815121009&Tpk=supermicro%20aoc-sat2-mv8 It works well with the Linux underneath unRAID and has 8 ports - way more performance than I need too. It's a $100 card but just the one slot.
I bang the drum pretty hard for unRAID but what you've said about ZFS is pretty interesting. Being able to lose two drives and survive would be nice although I'm not sure I'm willing to give up very much storage to do it. Can any of your drives spin down when the system isn't being used much? That's one thing I really like about what I'm using. Anyway, i'll check more into it but honestly it would take some doing to move me from unRAID. Nice to know there are options though!
So 8x 1.5TB drives gives you 9TB? I think you can do better :-) I get 10.5tb out of that with unRAID. You're giving up too much for parity IMO. The system I'm using puts all parity on ONE drive and uses a standard ReiserFS for the other drives. If I lose a drive I recover, if I lose two drives I lose two drives of data but not the whole set and I've retained a good bit of storage vs using multiple drives for parity. It's also not striped and a standard FS so recovery of a damaged drive is at least posisble by mortals. I lose speed compared to a striped solution but for HD video I don't need massive speed. I compress everything in x.264 too except for my SD DVD, I dump the extra languages I don't need on those.
Access to all this is easy - XBMC!
Use the TAB key in commandline to complete paths as you go :-) Hit it twice to get a list of paths when you cannot recall what's at the end of the path you're typing. I too am no master of Linux but I'm managing to handle a couople of NAS and a HTPC running it from the commandline. I DI need to badly work on a web oriented Torrent client instead of using uTorrent but this is working for me right now.
You may be able to fit more drives than that using these http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817121405&Tpk=supermicro%20cse-m35t-1b the pic is misleading as it's turned on it's side but it fits 5 drives where 3 would normally go. Hard to tell from the pic you linked but I think you could fit at least 3 of these in your case and gain *easy* access to the drives.
I use two full sized CoolerMaster Stacker cases on casters but I think they've discontinued it. The Centurian looks pretty close to it though but is maybe cheaper in construction, mine sure didn't cost $70! http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811119152&Tpk=coolermaster Something like this http://images.bit-tech.net/content_images/2007/03/cm_stacker_mod_by_snakez_and_ediejo/page1-2.jpg but get the one with just the single PSU slot. I have two machines and one of them has room for two PSU - not needed. I've found that I need a pretty hefty UPS though, mine squeal like pigs on cold power-up! :D
I don't know what to tell you, my friend had a pretty rough experience and it happened to him multiple times. The last time it occurred he was afraid he was going to lose his data and I really did fear he would throw it out a window. I got him to move over to unRAID and now all I ever hear about his storage solution is the new cool things he's managing to do with it like have it mail him status updates when it goes on UPS power! I now know at least 6 people using the software I am and it just works for them. If you ever decide to go bigger or hit a wall with the Drobo look into it, you won't regret it. If what you have serves your needs then by all means keep at it and I hope you never run into the kinds of nightmares my friend did. Another friend has a Drobo and has reported good things save for a smoked port that took out a drive or vice versa. Drobo took care of him and I hope they continue to take care of others too...
4n3? You can do better! :-) http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817121405&Tpk=supermicro%20cse-m35t-1b 5n3 and it has it's own cooling fan etc.. These have worked VERY well for me and run about $100 each. NOT cheap but they have done the job well and make swapping and adding drives much easier.
ReiserFS was apparently chosen because it's journaling and because it handles large file sizes well? I honestly can't say if another F/S would be better but because of the way it's built Tom could probably swap in another one if he chose to. So far though mine also seem to be working well and I'm probably going on 4 years at least! I was one of the very original folks running it back when he sold USB sticks - it's gotten nothing but better and FASTER :-)
When it takes days to fix itself up after a burp I'm thinking you might not be so happy about it. This happened to my friend several times for no apparent reason and he finally dumped both of his! They cost too much and other solutions are available if you're capable of building a simple desktop PC...
100meg ethernet works just fine for me playing 1080P BD rips that I've compressed. High bitrate stuff for sure though and I can play them native as well. I only run GigE for the speed in data transfer when I upload a rip :-)