Proper Multi-PC setup?

[Camaroon]

OK, so this might be a little silly to ask, but after reading a lot of forums lately I’m beginning to think that I’ve got the HTPC setup in my house wrong.  I’ve got a desktop PC upstairs in my bedroom, an Acer Revo nettop downstairs on our main TV, a 50″ plasma, plus a NAS drive on the network for our media.  The Acer gets used probably 80-90% of the time and is the one we schedule all our recordings on.  The desktop is on a dual monitor setup with a 32″ Toshiba flatscreen as the TV we watch WMC on, and a regular Acer monitor for normal computing.  Currently I have both of these setup essentially as their own standalone HTPC as opposed to one HTPC plus an extender.  My question is, is it better to have one as an extender?  What would the benefits of this be?  One of the reasons this question popped up was because, as I mentioned before, we setup our recordings on the Acer downstairs but we want to watch those upstairs as well and sometimes we want to watch a recording while it’s still being recorded.  I’ve set up Recorded TV Manager to move the recordings to the NAS drive so the upstairs PC could access them, but they generally don’t move for a couple of hours, and especially not while they’re currently recording.  If my setup was one PC plus an extender would this help us more easily watch our recordings upstairs, or is there another way to do this that I’m missing?  Also, would I only have to setup one computer the way I want with all those settings being passed on to the extenders?

I know this is probably basic but I really didn’t give it much thought until recently and haven’t had time to research a nice comprehensive guide.  Thanks as always for any response!

[Aaron Ledger]

If your needs are strictly TV, the extender model will work better than using multiple PCs because all of the tuners, guides, recording schedules and stored content are unified on the PC. The extender simply accesses those resources. The extender can become more limiting if your sources of video content begin straying from TV to something such as ripped BDs.

[Camaroon]

Aaron, thanks a bunch for the response!

I’d say TV watching is definitely priority #1 but I do have a collection of about 5,000 songs and 200 ripped movies that I want to be able to have access to.  How is the extender set up more limiting with movie streaming?  Also, if I went with the extender set up, which one of my coomputers should be the main one and which should be the extender?

[Aaron Ledger]

Well, you can’t turn your PC into a Windows Media Center extender. The only current available extender on the market is the Xbox 360 and it has somewhat limited support with respect to container and codec support. If you can play by its rules, you can have a good experience, otherwise, it will be limiting.

There are some discontinued extenders from D-link, Linksys, HP, etc.

Ceton announced at CES that they will be bringing an extender named “Echo” to the market. You can read more about it here. Fair warning, I am employed by Ceton.

With that being said, I guess the decision you need to make is whether you want to invest in the extender architecture or keep the multi-PC architecture you have.

[Camaroon]

I’ve always heard that the 360 was the only extender but I figured any computer could be turned into one.  I have a 1st gen 360 and figured I better not give it a lot of work.

So what’s the best way to share the recorded TV?  Everything else is shared fine.  Should I just make the folder that it gets downloaded to a shared folder then point the other computer at it?

[Aaron Ledger]

All you need to do is make the Recorded TV folder shared so that your other PCs have access and then in WMC on each PC you want to see it on, add it as a library.

[Camaroon]

Did that over the weekend and it worked perfectly!  One other question about this, if the PC that the shared folder on is asleep, will trying to access the folder wake it up?  And if it does, will it go back to sleep after I’m done?

[volfan6415]

The short answer is likely no, you will need to setup wake-on-lan in order to remotely wake up the HTPC. This is another advantage of the extender is that it will send a WOL packet to insure that the host PC is on.

[Aaron Ledger]

You could potentially set up your NIC to wake up for directed traffic, but you may find your PC waking up for a lot more than when you want. WOL is more specific and the best thing to use, but it does require something to send the WOL packet. One program you could use to provide this function in an automated way on the PC is DVRMSToolbox.

While the Xbox acting as a WMC extender does send WOL packets; IIRC, some of the other manufacturers’ extenders may not have performed this function.

[volfan6415]

The other problem with directed traffic is that if the computer does manage to stay asleep long enough then the router does not direct the traffic to it anymore and thus it never recieves the mesasge to wake up.

[Author]

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