Aaron Ledger

[swoon]

Unless you have some very specific reasons to run 32-bit, go with 64-bit.

Like oliverredfox said, 32-bit will limit the amount of usable RAM in your system to ~3GB. In addition, let’s say you decide to upgrade to Windows 8 in the future. You most likely wouldn’t be able to upgrade without performing a clean install from scratch. There are some other reasons to run as well, but those are probably the biggest.

One reason to run 32-bit would be that you need to use a STB with something like the Hauppauge Colossus AND you want to use Firewire for sending commands to the STB. Currently, there is only a 32-bit driver available.

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Hot enough to promote to the front page!

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Now that is one hot deal!

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Wish this was for the Haier Win7 Embedded TV just to play with.

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[quote=skirge01]

[quote=Mike Garcen]

…so chances of anything corrupting or hurting it would be minimal.

[/quote]

Remember this statement when you post a blog about how you just spent the weekend rebuilding your server like someone else recently did. 

[/quote]

But Mike has already said he doesn’t care about system backups so we can assume he won’t care about having to reinstall Windows cleanly or lose the system.

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Ok, just trying to save you money and complexity. With brite-View you do get control. It has an IR relay. If you need USB as well, you could go with HDBaseT though this is a wired solution.

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Are you really going to be satisfied with Veebeam. From your review, it sounded like this device has some severe limitations.

Here’s another question for you. Do you really need 2 HTPCs? You could use a device like the brite-View Air SyncHD I reviewed to use a single HTPC for your main viewing area and your bedroom.

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For a beta, the software is actually quite nice. It even plays nice with RAW from my Canon.

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I think WHS can make management much easier, especially once you transition beyond two PCs, but for your case, it sounds like you don’t really use or want the functionality provided by WHS.

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Why do you leave your main HTPC running 24/7?

If you’re considering using Windows 7 in place of WHS, then you’re missing out on the items that make WHS unique so I assume you don’t really need WHS if this is the case. I assume you are also running Win7 Pro, Ultimate or have some other backup software that will allow backing up to share which is required if you are not using WHS.

You can go with #2/3 if that is really what you want. Just make sure it really is what you want.

Now that the Sandy Bridge Pentiums are starting to come into the market, i3 probably is overkill for WHS unless you have some requirements for the additional power and features of i3. Newegg right now has the G620 Pentium for $78 vs $125 for i3-2100.

[swoon]

Perhaps there is something in Foobar2000 or WinAmp. There are a lot of plug-ins for those programs.

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ClubDJPro might do what you want.

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You could probably accomplish this with two different players, one to play the video and one to play the audio although there would be no synchronization of audio and video, but it sounds like that isn’t a requirement.

Well, this wouldn’t be able to play music videos and then music with videos.

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[quote=RehabMan]

I’ve had a couple of these AV-GP drives in my HTPC.  The first one was a 500GB drive which seemed to work great.  I recently upgraded it to a 1TB drive and now I notice the occasional stutter.  Is it a problem with the drive or something else?  Was the 500GB drive better or did I just not notice it happening before?  I tend to suspect something else (software) on the PC is causing it…

I’m tempted to start disabling services and background tasks slowly until I don’t see it any more, but it is so rare, I’m not sure I’d ever be sure of the cause/effect (it happens maybe once for every 2 hours playback).

Most of all I wonder if it is the anti-virus software (Microsoft Security Essentials) as I sometimes see it running in the background on my laptops/desktops when I least expect it… and to tell you the truth I question the necessity of running anti-virus on a dedicated WMC machine.  I don’t run anti-virus on my WHS server either and could probably do the same on my HTPC.

Things to try… things to try…

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You can still run MSE, just disable the volume from real-time monitoring or *.wtv (assuming you are using Windows 7 Media Center).

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That sounds like a fund test!   Consider yourself reminded 

I was thinking about testing with just one of the green drives alone when I get a chance (after copying everything off so I can break the array) just to see what happens when I overwhelm one drive.

In theory, the RAID-0 array should be fast enough for what I have, though I’ve heard too many people complain about how slow Windows software RAID is.

You should try it. I did not find the EACS drives acceptable with wtv and Show Analyzer.

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